your reality vs my reality
most of us are just wrong
I used to think everyone knew everything I knew and thought the way I thought. I’d say “you didn’t know that?” to people in high school which apparently made people think I was an a-hole. I was oblivious. I was stoic, and pretty logical. So much so, my classmates accused me of being a robot! I thought everyone everyone thought the same way I did.
This speaks to how much our truth is based on our experiences. When I got to college, I was shocked people were shocked to see black people. Even though I was connected to the internet and in the back of my mind I knew that there had to be other people out there with different experiences, I was still shocked. I didn’t acknowledge it until it was right in front of my face. And that’s how it is for most people.
If you’re privileged enough, you can continue to pretend something isn’t real for as long as you want. What? Racism isn’t a thing. We got rid of that decades ago. Let me pull out my never ending list of stark evidence. Read this if you’re still not convinced.
The same brain the allows us to process raw materials and create massive structures that never existed like skyscrapers and highways, allows us to trick ourselves into believing things that just aren’t true. We’ve institutionalized fictional characters for what reason exactly? Probably just a distraction.
My point is, there are tons of examples of cognitive dissonance we focus on, from abusive relationships to Trump claiming the stock market going up and to the right was his doing.
The distance between you and another person creates a space that’s filled by imagination. Based on what you’ve seen on TV or what your parents told you.
Truth is most people aren’t logical. But you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t pay very close attention. One big idea of Inner Monolog, in the vein of higher quality thinking is understanding how people actually think and make decisions. That information is not directly available to us. You have to reverse engineer what people say. When you start doing this, you realize that most people are full of crap.
People make decisions based on what they feel. Your identity is more important than your opinion on any individual subject. You’ll vote with the democrats or republicans even if the candidate’s views are a little off.
It gets more complicated. Is reality even real? We don’t see the world as it truly is as we can only take in the world via our five senses and visible light is only a subset of the light spectrum.
The reality we have to deal with is the sum total of the realities of everyone else and to understand that reality we have to understand how others interpret reality.
Your reality has an effect on our collective reality. This is why we must understand the world from first principles, building our house on a stone foundation. We have to be honest with ourselves and seek the truth, not comforting lies.
“Faced with a choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof.”
- J.K. Galbraith
“Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence.”
-James Clear
James Clear wrote eloquently about why facts don’t change our minds. Keep this thought pattern going.
one-liners that didn’t flow with this sequence
I have some thoughts on people who believe that transgender is the only form of trans that’s valid.
We outsource our reasoning to talking heads and pundits. So when they feed you bull crap, you just believe it.
Many of us aren’t able to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs whether because the cards you were dealt in life or bad thought patterns. People succumb to their primitive desires.