The cost test has a hole I'd want closed first. Some people's comfortable story is that everything was their fault, because then they were in control the whole time and it can't happen again. That belief costs them an apology and still flatters them. Blame landing on you doesn't prove it's the uncomfortable one.
A lie that flatters you never gets a background check
Thought
Thought
The cost test has a hole I'd want closed first. Some people's comfortable story is that everything was their fault, because then they were in control the whole time and it can't happen again. That belief costs them an apology and still flatters them. Blam
Post content
Notice how every ex eventually becomes a narcissist. Not difficult, not a bad match, not someone you also treated badly on a few Tuesdays. A narcissist. It is a great word because it does all the work for you. The relationship failed because of their disorder, which means it was not really about anything you did, and now you get to be the survivor instead of one half of a thing that did not work. Some of those people probably were narcissists. But the word did not get popular because the condition suddenly tripled in the population. It got popular because of how it feels to reach for.
That is the pattern I want to point at. We almost never check the ideas that flatter us. The ones that threaten us we examine for hours. The comfortable ones we wave straight through without asking for ID.
Here is the distinction people skip. There is believing something, and there is wanting it to be true. From the inside these feel identical. Both give you the same calm certainty, the same sense that only a difficult person would argue the point. But one of them is tracking what actually happened and the other is tracking what is convenient for you, and you cannot tell them apart by how sure you feel. The confidence is the same either way. That is the whole problem.
At the small scale it runs through an ordinary day. The coworker who got promoted over you did not work harder, he played politics. The guy who cut you off in traffic is an idiot, but the time you cut someone off you were just in a hurry. You are not bad with money, everything is expensive now. Your kid is not behind, he is bored because he is gifted. You are not rude, you are just brutally honest. Any one of these can be true in a given case. What gives the set away is that they all land the blame somewhere other than you, and you believed each one without a second of resistance.
The same thing happens to whole societies, and there it lasts longer, because no one on the inside has a reason to check. For most of modern history it was plain common sense that women's minds were not built for serious or competitive work. Not cruelty, just biology, everyone agreed, and it was wonderfully convenient for the men who already held every serious and competitive job. Most people are still sure that everyone before Columbus thought the world was flat, when educated people had known it was a sphere since the ancient Greeks. That story was largely invented in the 1800s, and it survives because we enjoy believing our ancestors were fools and we are the clever ones. Neither was a fringe idea. Both were the educated, everybody-knows position of their day, and both flattered the people holding them.
So the practical rule is uncomfortable. The more an idea benefits you to believe, the HIGHER the bar it should clear, not the lower. The warm feeling of "obviously" is what a convenient falsehood feels like from the inside, and real truths feel like that sometimes too, so the feeling tells you nothing on its own. You have to check by hand, exactly where you least want to.
This is not a license to believe nothing. Cynicism is its own lazy comfort, a way to feel sharp without doing any work, and plenty of flattering things are simply true. You probably are good at something. The test is small and a little brutal. Ask what believing this costs you. If the answer is nothing, if it asks no apology and lands no blame on you or your side, that is the moment to slow down.
The pieces after this one are case studies in the same mistake. A myth that promised everyone hidden genius. A folk belief that the unlucky must have deserved it. A doctor ruined for an insulting truth. A country's flattering memory of itself. A horoscope that seemed to know you. Each one won for the same reason. It was easier to want than the truth was to face.
Thoughts
-
Cut someone off this morning and had my excuse ready before the light changed. Odd reading the intro after the horoscope one.
-
The cost test has a hole I'd want closed first. Some people's comfortable story is that everything was their fault, because then they were in control the whole time and it can't happen again. That belief costs them an apology and still flatters them. Blame landing on you doesn't prove it's the uncomfortable one.
Related posts
-
You were never using only ten percent of your brain
The claim that we use only ten percent of our brain has never had a shred of evidence behind it. It spread anyway, because it promises you are secretly a genius running on idle.
-
CHAPTER 3: "KNOW YOUR WORTH"
Typically, it's much easier to call out characteristics of others rather than our own characteristics, and though a sad reality, this issue is mostly disregarded and left in the dark. Our lives are…
-
Experimental post
Isn't it funny that how the world always preaches about happiness and trying to achieve it. Yet, people who live happy lives are usually looked down upon as someone who's ungrateful about life…
Public
0 conversations
2 thoughts
78 upvotes
0 downvotes
1 series
There is believing something and there is wanting it to be true. They feel identical from the inside, and the only difference is that one is tracking reality and the other is tracking your convenience.