Challenging Cognitive Biases

To say that we only see what we want to see is not a mistake, but a human condition. We walk through the world not as impartial observers, but as sculptors of reality, carving existence with the chisel of our own beliefs.

It is not a whim or a factory defect, but an intrinsic bias: we seek that which confirms what we already believe and avoid what challenges our convictions. It is a form of mental economy, a shortcut of thought. Accepting the familiar and the coherent demands little from us. But facing the contradictory—ah, that is exhausting, it requires energy, it forces us to confront the possibility that we might be wrong.

Between what has just happened around you and what you remember happening, there is more space for everything that disturbed you than for reality itself.

Such bias, however, need not be a cage. If we see it not as a wall but as a starting point, we can use it to grow. It is like the stabilisers on a child’s bicycle: they provide security in the learning process, but must eventually be removed for the true experience of cycling to take place.

The key lies in our willingness to be wrong, to make space for the unexpected, to allow new ideas to pass through us without fear of dismantling what we already know. This openness begins with awareness of our bias and expands with an attitude of curiosity: rather than proving we are right, we should seek to experience the new, to ask questions without the rush for definitive answers.

And perhaps, in the vast mosaic of reality, we may come to see not only what we want to see, but what we never knew existed.

Comments

The Progressive Misreading of Silence

At 5, I entered rooms like a murmur. I was already listening for something behind the noise — something older than voices, softer than footsteps. “He’s such a well-behaved boy,” they said, smiling with relief. But what they mistook for virtue was only quiet intuition. I was not good. I was attuned. At 11, I had mastered the art of presence without weight. I could sit by the window for hours, watching the wind pass through the trees like thought through the body. “He’s quiet,” they would say — gently, but with a trace of discomfort. They couldn’t name the feeling of someone watching without need. At 17, I was called “mature.” But maturity is not a virtue — it is a scar. I had already seen the shape of endings before others saw beginnings. Friends came to me like tide to stone, hoping to be held. I held them, yes — but not always with words. Sometimes silence is the only honest offering. At 24, my stillness no longer charmed. The world asked for brightness, momentum, performa...

On Loyalty and the Quiet Companionship of Pippen

I have a cosmopolitan friend who, by the mercy of chance — that discreet and impartial arbiter of destinies — was born in Serbia. Industrious beyond measure, he treats work not merely as obligation but as a quiet philosophy, a means of aligning oneself with the silent order of things. And he is a companion of a rare kind: steadfast, discerning, and, above all, loyal. His name is Pippen. We first crossed paths in the now-vanished days of Google+ — that fleeting agora where, for a moment, the world’s geeks entertained the gentle delusion that they might, in time, inherit the Earth. It was an age of bright aspiration, tinged with naïveté, yet marked by a peculiar fellowship that transcended all borders and conventions. Among Pippen’s many virtues, loyalty stands pre-eminent. Not the clamorous, performative loyalty so fashionable in this restless age, but the quieter, unwavering kind — the loyalty of one who stays. It is revealed not in grand gestures but in small, consistent a...

The Fallacy of Self‑Sufficiency

Some people will tell you — quite loudly, usually — that they are enough. They need no one, thank you very much. Entirely self‑made. A closed circuit. I, too, fancied myself an island at one time. A small, sturdy principality of one. I paid my own bills. Made my own tea. I even spoke aloud to myself in the supermarket queue, which was meant to prove something. But late at night, when all the heroic independence had been done for the day, there it was — a sort of homesickness without a forwarding address. You know the feeling. You’re supposedly sovereign, but you still wish someone would knock. Self‑sufficiency is a word that weighs a bit too much. It sounds like an insurance policy or a piece of camping equipment. It promises freedom, but only the kind you can fit in a box. Like eating an entire birthday cake alone — which, I confess, I’ve done. Because the truth (and it arrives, as truths tend to, when you’ve just burned your toast) is that we are made of others. We are es...

The Hyggelig Journey

Search This Blog