Here’s my list of difficult truths that are part of being human.
We can:
A. Lie to ourselves about them,
B. Avoid thinking about them, or
C. Try to accept the parts we can’t change and change what we can.
If you’re in camps A or B, don’t read this post!
Here are Thirteen Difficult Truths:
1. Irrationality – we humans are not rational, despite the fact that most of us want to believe we are. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by nearly-invisible social forces and numerous cognitive biases.
But I believe we can learn to become significantly more rational and that there are important personal and societal benefits from doing so. This is a major part of why I created Clearer Thinking.
2. Wrongness – we’re wrong about some of our deeply-held beliefs. We don’t know which (being right and being wrong usually both feel like being right). We want to believe that our tribe is right, the enemy tribe dangerously wrong, and the other tribes irrelevant. The truth is much more complex and interesting.
We can be right more often by seeking out the strongest contradictory perspectives, by creating feedback loops with respect to our ideas, and by learning to play devil’s advocate to our own views.
Try, for instance, the “Belief Challenger.”
3. Challenges – we each will experience big losses, stressors, and setbacks. Some of these could send us into a negative spiral.
This will suck, but we can build up mental health skills that help.
Try, for example, our apps https://www.uplift.app (for depression) and https://www.mindease.io (for anxiety).
4. Aging – as we grow older, we will lose physical strength, attractiveness, and perhaps also cognitive abilities.
However, by exercising regularly and eating healthy food, we can likely slow our decline. We can create hobbies and sources of joy that we can benefit from at all ages.
5. Bereavement – we will lose many of the people we love. Friendships will fray, relationships will end, and the people we love will die.
But we can focus on finding lifelong friends, exert effort to detect and repair fraying, make new friends proactively, and squeeze in all the love we can. We can also encourage our loved ones to engage in healthy habits to extend their lives.
See, for instance, “Daily Ritual: A Habit-Creation Tool.”
6. Mortality – one day, we’ll be gone.
However, by taking great care of your body, you can likely give yourself more years. By being as grateful as you can to exist each day, you may be happier during those years. By funding more rigorous life extension research, we can one day give more years to many.
See, for instance, “Longevity FAQ“.
7. Extinction – one-day, humanity will go extinct.
However, the actions we take over the coming decades/centuries could determine whether humanity lasts only a little more time or a VASTLY longer time. Our wisdom must grow faster than the power of our technology. Support and fund “existential risk” work.
See, for instance, “The case for reducing existential risks“.
8. Randomness – we’re at the mercy of a tremendous amount of luck. Some are born sick orphans in squalor, some healthy, into loving families, in wealthy countries.
We didn’t choose, but we can make the world better for others and give more people good luck.
See, for instance, “Leaving Your Mark on the World.”
9. Rejection – some people won’t like us. And whatever we do or create, some people will think it sucks.
But we can surround ourselves with people who really like and value us, who support us even if they sometimes don’t like our behavior or think our projects are pretty dumb. They help us be better.
10. We will mess up and fail many times.
But by accepting (to the best of our ability) that we (and everyone else too) will fail many times, it frees us to try harder things and to have self-compassion when we do fail. If we learn what we can from each failure, we create a silver lining (“sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.”)
See, for instance, “Learning From Mistakes.”
11. Uncertainty – there are deep, important mysteries we will never know the answer to and major unknowns we can’t resolve. Major philosophical and personal questions of the utmost importance will go unsolved.
But we don’t need certainty to be happy. We can live with the big unknowns, even while striving as a species – and as individuals – to understand the world as best we can. We can also, at least, learn to be less of a mystery to ourselves.
See, for instance, “Life-Changing Questions.”
12. Disappointment – we won’t get all the things we want. At some point, we’ll badly want to get a certain job, achieve a certain goal, or be with a certain person, and we’ll never get it.
But we can learn to better accept reality for what it is. And even though we can’t have all that we want, we will get some of what we want, and we can get over the things we wanted and didn’t get.
See, for instance, our article on resetting your psychological baseline.
13. Animality – we are creatures who can reason, speak, understand physics, invent ideas, write stories, think abstractly, transform the world, etc., and yet we are also animals at the same time. We aspire to be something more than animals, and yet we have animal bodies, drives, constraints, reactions, and impulses.
But we can learn to work with, rather than against, our animal nature. When our inner mouse is afraid of something we know is not dangerous, we can learn to soothe it. When our inner dog badly wants something that we know is not in our long-term interest, we can make a compromise by giving ourselves something else we desire that is not so out of alignment with our goals. When our inner bee wants to copy others in doing something that violates our values, we can find other ways to fit in without compromising our integrity, or we can find a new colony that suits us better.
Importantly, since these are difficult truths for all of us, we can face them together, seeking to help one another.
For me, reflecting on the difficult truths that we all face gives new meaning to the idea that we should “be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”
It’s tough being a human. But thankfully, we are not alone. Let’s make the best of this together.
This piece was first written on March 5, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 28, 2022.
1. It is rational to be irrarional because when we experience something it always can be opposed by something else, so the logic of it and the opposite of it exist simultraneously. Hamlet should have said:”To be AND not to be, THIS is the answer!”
2.This applies particularly to economics where supply and demand are both active at once. Another example is the two opposing Georgist axioms: “Mankind seek to satisfy his desires with the least exertion; yet mankind’s aim for satisfying these desires is unlimited.”