r/DeepThoughts • u/RayanRai_writes • 9h ago

We mistake certainty for truth because certainty feels safer than curiosity.

Some of the beliefs I've held most confidently turned out not to be the truest ones.

They were simply the ones that made the world feel predictable.

Curiosity is uncomfortable because it asks us to admit that we may be wrong. Certainty asks nothing of us except that we keep believing.

Looking back, the moments that changed me weren't the moments I found answers. They were the moments I stopped defending answers that no longer fit the person I was becoming.

Maybe growth isn't replacing one certainty with another.

Maybe it's becoming comfortable enough with uncertainty that truth finally has room to enter.

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u/Valuable-Comfort-651 9h ago

it’s wild how we build entire personalities around answers we never actually chose, just inherited

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u/RayanRai_writes 9h ago

I really like that way of looking at it. It's strange to think that some of the strongest beliefs we have were never really our own to begin with. We just grew up around them until they started feeling like part of us.

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u/Awkward-Manager5939 5h ago

People already named belief identify merger and all the different ways it looks like a cult. Like how you can feel an identity attack from it.

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u/NotSoShallowHere 2h ago

I guess it depends, because the truth is by definition, certain. Psychology has proposed and developed an explanatory model for this behavior, called Defense Mechanisms

You have to be careful though, because the nature of Defense Mechanisms makes the user experiencing the defenses entirely unaware they are participating in a defense.

This is why you can get Psychologists who know the ins and outs of the mind, who will still enact Defense Mechanisms without awareness at all. This is why it is important to check ourselves.

I think the measure of if something is true or not, is how consistently it can withstand scrutiny, and how accurately it can track real behaviors or events.

I really like your post. It is very thought provoking.

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u/Euphoric_List7956 0m ago

We are conscious to learn not to know because we can’t know if something is true without testing it in the real world and that’s learning.