His white shirt was sleeveless, and he wore it unbuttoned, so that the smooth white skin of his throat flowed uninterrupted over the marble contours of his chest, his perfect musculature no longer merely hinted at behind concealing clothes. He was too perfect, I realized with a piercing stab of despair. There was no way this godlike creature could be meant for me. He stared at me, bewildered by my tortured expression. "Do you want to go home?" he said quietly, a different pain than mine saturating his voice. "No." I walked forward till I was close beside him, anxious not to waste one second of whatever time I might have with him. "What's wrong?" he asked, his voice gentle. "I'm not a good hiker," I answered dully. "You'll have to be very patient." "I can be patient -- if I make a great effort." He smiled, holding my glance, trying to lift me out of my sudden, unexplained dejection. I tried to smile back, but the smile was unconvincing. He scrutinized my face.
Sometimes the behavior that unrolls will not be appropriate for the situation, because not even the best stereotypes and trigger features work every time. We will accept their imperfections since there is really no other choice. Without these fea- tures we would stand frozen-cataloging, appraising, and calibrating-as the time for action sped by and away. From all indications, we will be relying on these stereotypes to an even greater extent in the future. As the stimuli saturating our lives continue to grow more intricate and variable, we will have to depend increas- ingly on our shortcuts to handle them al1.4 Psychologists have recently uncovered a number of mental shortcuts that we employ in making our everyday judgments (Kahneman, Slovic, ~ Tversky, 1982; Todd ~ Gigerenzer, 2007). Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive = good rule, allowing for simplified think-
found myself at a certain passage in the j o u r n e y of m y life, hiking alone in the forest near Big Sur, California. I was in a dark wood, all right, and lost. I was cold, hun gry, shivering, exhausted, a n d panicked by the thought of night closing in. It had been a rainy winter, with storm after storm saturating the hillsides after years of drought. I felt pounded by heavy weather in my own life, and had come north to the sacred country of Big Sur to find some things I had lost: solitude, peace of mind, clarity. I felt I had failed in important areas of jobs and relationships and was confused about which way to move next. I had some decisions to make about my direction and knew instinctively that a plunge into the wilderness could give me
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