Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently. That they’ve arrived at their beliefs through logic, self-honesty, and some kind of epistemic discipline. But here’s the problem - that belief itself is suspiciously comforting. So how can you tell it’s true?
What if your worldview just happens to align neatly with your temperament, your social environment, or whatever gives you emotional relief? What if your reasoning is just post-hoc justification for instincts you already wanted to follow? That’s what scares me - not being wrong, but being convinced I’m right for reasons that are more about mood than method.
It reminds me of how people think they’d intervene in a violent situation - noble in theory, but until it happens, it’s all just talk. So I’m asking: what’s your actual evidence that you think the way you think you do? Not in terms of the content of your beliefs, but the process behind them. What makes you confident you’re reasoning - not just rationalizing?
Come back at it in a different mood, time, setting, etc. and run it against multiple people who you know won’t just coddle you about it if you’re really concerned.
Part of human psychology is coping with the world around us, not just learning about it. Our individual natures, moods and pasts will always color our experiences and that’s not necessarily a bad thing; the sooner you accept it’s okay to be human, the more authentically you can work with the quirks that come with it.
I do know personally I can be prone to overthinking and getting fuzzier in my logic when I’m tired, hungry, or overwhelmed. I also know it’s fixable.
On the flip side, I also have a history of trusting/getting anxious about bigger picture things based on precedent rather than imagined ideas (new things don’t bother me, but having to face certain known patterns stresses me to a very bad point).
I factor both of these things in when I get to an almost-crisis point. But at the end of the day, the human perspective is like a prism in water: multifaceted, fluid, and dependent on environment but also sometimes beautiful. :)