Most people are afraid to turn around when they’ve made a choice they’ve determined to be wrong. If they turn the wrong way down a road — confidently declaring it to be the way to go — they persist with the error long after it’s obvious.
We humans hate admitting we’re wrong.
We trap ourselves with our desire to be consistent, even if we don’t consciously know what we’re doing. Most of us are terrified of being seen as contradictory, so we’re afraid to reverse course and say, “I know I said X, but I was wrong and I’ve realized Y is the truth.”
Most people keep themselves locked into X long after they’ve realized Y is true, because they’re too weak to admit to having been wrong and forthrightly turn around. This is what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant in a widely misunderstood passage in his 1841 essay on “Self-Reliance.”
Dead man’s watch always there to remind me of my own mortality
If online attack confirms your biases too nicely, it just might be a fake
A muse is a crutch for an artist, but some need a crutch to walk
Reading people is a survival skill which all children need to learn
Childhood programming makes it hard to believe I’m ‘good enough’
Are we destined to become our parents? Or can we be different?
We can’t defeat existing system; we must build better one instead
Lives change in moments of truth when we stop lying to ourselves
We can’t control timing of death, just what we do as we’re waiting