A short transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation between Ramit Sethi and Matt. They discuss Matt's avoidance of confronting financial problems and an emotionally fraught statement about suicide if his partner Asha died. Ramit frames Matt's justification as an example of the psychological concept "dissonance reduction," drawing an analogy to how smokers rationalize smoking despite health risks.
Are you saying we're going to enjoy life together and we don't really care what happens with our finances?
I think we actively chose to just ignore what was happening with our finances. Yeah.
What did you use to tell yourself back then?
Honestly, at that point, I told myself, well, I'm in this. If something happens to Asha, I probably don't want to hang out anyway. I'm going to go ahead and cash out.
This is wild to hear. Matt is saying that if Asha died, he would probably commit suicide. I want to talk about this from an emotional perspective. I think that we can all understand this type of feeling. It's distaste, it's uncomfortable. But I completely understand why Matt is saying. Matt's comments remind me of a classic concept called dissonance reduction. When you ask smokers how they justify smoking, knowing it's bad for your health, knowing it causes cancer, and of course they don't want cancer, how would you expect people to reply? These people have two competing concepts in their head. I'm a good person who wants to live, but I'm smoking cancer causing cigarettes. They say, well, I'm going to die anyway.
