Why You Can’t Trust Yourself

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Mark Manson

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Over the years, I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, in questioning all of your most cherished beliefs and dreams, on practicing skepticism, and doubting everything, most importantly yourself. Throughout these posts, I’ve hinted at the fact that our brains are fundamentally unreliable, that we really have no clue what we’re talking about, even when we think we do, and so on.

But I’ve never given concrete examples or explanations. Well, here they are. Eight reasons you can’t trust yourself, as demonstrated by psychology.

1. You Are Biased and Selfish Without Realizing It

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2. You Don’t Have A Clue about What Makes You Happy (or Miserable)

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows us that we suck at remembering how something made us feel in the past and guessing how something will make us feel in the future.

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3. You Are Easily Manipulated Into Making Bad Decisions

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4. You Generally Only Use Logic and Reason To Support Your Preexisting Beliefs

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5. Your Emotions Change Your Perceptions Way More Than You Realize

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6. Your Memory Sucks

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7. ‘You’ Aren’t Who You think You Are

Consider the following for a moment: The way you express and portray yourself on, say, Facebook probably isn’t exactly the same as the way you express and portray yourself when you’re “offline.” The way you act around your grandma is probably pretty different from the way you act around your friends. You have a “work self” and a “home self” and a “family self” and an “I’m all alone self” and many other “selves” that you use to navigate and survive a complex social world.

But which one of these is the “true” you?

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8. Your Physical Experience of the World Isn’t Even That Real

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