“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.”

—Marcel Proust

Knowing: Discerning Fact from Fiction in a Counterintuitive World

            I grew up believing that the truth was easy. It was supposed to be beautiful, and moving, and graceful, like a poem. “ ‘Beauty is truth, and truth beauty,’ that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” the poet John Keats told us. And he should know—he spent his life surrounded by death and disease. He was only eleven when his mother died a painful death from tuberculosis. His brother died of the same disease when Keats was in his early twenties. And he himself succumbed to it when he was merely twenty-five. That level of suffering is supposed to give you wisdom and depth, so we should be able to believe him when he says that truth is beautiful.

            But here’s my problem. The truths I have found in my life haven’t been beautiful. They’re dirty and difficult and wrapped in pain and disgust. They’re not the things of poetry, they’re the things of horror films. Wolves scratching at the door. Vampires sucking the very life from your veins. Zombies awakened from the dead with their only thought being to wrap their cold hands around your neck to squeeze the air from your body. Okay, maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but truth has not been all rainbows and unicorns either, the way I originally thought it should be.

            The truth isn’t pretty. It isn’t easy. Knowing it takes time and energy. You have to dig and dig, and wander through dark caves with seemingly endless tunnels. You climb mountains of information and swim oceans of unknowing. You fall and you get scratched. You bleed. You cry. You have to continue through pain and hunger, animosity and uncertainty. You have to have commitment and resilience, good humor and patience. The truth is not easy.

            But it is worth the journey.

            When you can finally get to that place where you know, where you know that you know, and you can use what you know to make your life better—that’s when the knowing begins. And that is what life is about.

            What can we really know for sure? Let’s find out.

            This book is a result of my journey through psychology. It has taken me to math and science, economics and philosophy as well, and even through literature and history, art and humor. I grab at good ideas wherever I find them, and all I have to offer you is a glimpse of the journey I’ve gone through. I hope you enjoy the ride and learn a little something along the way.

            Through Knowing, I want to show many of the ways we get it all wrong. It’s easy to get it wrong, let me assure you, even when you know where the pitfalls are. We all make faulty assumptions, or believe in superstitions, or let our moods color our thoughts. We all let our attention wander, let ourselves be guided by those who are not necessarily wiser but louder, fall prey to misjudgments. Then there are the moments that come out the blue to change everything, from personal triumphs to acts of international terror. There are the instances that one piece of information changes the way we see everything. There are the times when life seems to bend for us, opening up paths where before we had only seen jungles.

            Our minds are wondrous things. They way they work, the way they structure reality for us, the way they categorize information so that we can use it—it’s nothing short of miraculous. But there are also times our minds let us down. They get overloaded with information, they get distracted by something shiny, they get stuck in a pattern of generalizations and personalizations, making the world seem like it’s out to get us. So we start to make decisions based on the wrong ideas or make quick picks to avoid pain, casually forgetting things like logic or discernment or probability.

            Or some other times, it’s other people who let us down. They give us the wrong information, or just not enough information to help, and expect us to know what to do. They use their influence to persuade us to do something easy, they encourage us to ride along with what everyone else is doing, they feed off our generosity in order to guilt us in to doing something we don’t necessarily believe in. They lie to us, using pretty statistical information to cover their tracks. They take over our minds, leaving us feeling powerless against their flawed and self-serving magical thinking.

            Sometimes, we let ourselves down. We simply stop paying attention to the voices we’d rather not hear. We let ourselves get caught up in someone else’s bandwagon. We let pain or anger take over and cloud our judgment. We make instant decisions without considering all the information and call it intuition. We get lazy and sick and tired, and we don’t have the time or energy to wade through all the information to find the piece that will help us right now. We find just enough information to tell us that we are right without looking for the data that will show us we are not. We take the easy way out.

            And what’s wrong with taking the easy way out? We are human. We have lives to lead, families to care for, jobs to do, dishes to wash, lawns to mow, checkbooks to balance. It is not easy being human, having to be so responsible all the time. How can we possibly do all the things we need to do and stay maximally informed too? Who has that kind of time? No one, of course. But there are times when a little extra knowledge of how we think can make a huge difference in knowing what to decide, and that can help give us an edge in life. That is something we can all use.

            We can never know everything. We never have all the information we need to make a perfect decision. We just have to do the best with what we can. The trick is to find that balance, to know as much as we can and to let go of the rest. John Keats knew this. He may have painted too pretty a picture of truth, but he also knew that the world was larger than what he could know. He came up with a phrase to describe that: negative capability. In a letter to his brothers, Keats defined negative capability as, “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Again, it’s about balance.

            The journey to knowing is not easy. But it is worth it. The best chance we have at becoming who we want to be, at living the lives we want to have, is to live each day gathering the most useful information we can. Maybe that way, we can live our way into the answers we so desperately want.