It was refreshing to see Ariely cover a broad range of aspects in his arguments, especially his philosophical reasoning. As observed, irrationality often leads people to make poor decisions. The following is an excerpt I found interesting, "Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the person he thought he was...Perhaps there is no such thing as a fully integrated human being. We may, in fact, be an agglomeration of multiple selves."

Is the amalgamation of all our irrational decisions actually formulaic and intentional? It is interesting to question whether we should even attempt to be rational? Philosophers have attempted to unravel rationality in life yet to no avail. If life does not have an inherent meaning, or at least we are not supposed to know it, then why bother being rational? After all, irrational decisions have also been successful ones; in fact, more decisions are based on gut feelings and intuition rather than precise rationality. Consider the fact that Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, a time when its sales were a mere $20 million. This comes to a payback period (PBP) in excess of hundreds of years. Despite this, certainly, Facebook made the right decision, but was it necessarily rational⁷?

If we cannot be perfectly rational, and being rational does not always lead to optimal outcomes, could an attempt at being more rational end us in making worse decisions? This idea springs out of the idea of relative positioning. Everything is relative to time, space, and place, and who knows if attempting to alter your brain's instinctive decision-making could lead you to miss out on something with a greater utility? 

As eye-opening as Ariely's claims are, I would go as far as to argue that we should not be advocating for <em>rationality</em> but rather <em>mindful irrationality</em>. If you have gotten the gist, his solutions often interfere with his theory of the market and social norms. Whether we like it or not, we are chained by the laws of social norms, and any attempt to interfere by trying to act rational may result in coming across as arrogant, condescending, and even rude, potentially harming business relations. There is such a concept called 'analysis paralysis', sometimes a state in which comparing like decisions can be challenging and, in fact, meaningless to over-analyze. So should we really be worried about trying to force ourselves to act more rational or stick to a our predefined paths and continue to make progress as nature originally intended? I leave that decision to you.