There is a strange contradiction I’ve noticed in myself.
I believe people should be willing to question their beliefs.
I also notice how incredibly difficult it is when those beliefs are my own.
It’s easy to admire open-mindedness in the abstract. It’s much harder when the belief under examination is one I’ve defended, built decisions around, or quietly woven into my identity.
I’ve never met someone who says, “I hope I spend my life believing things that aren’t true.”
Most of us genuinely want to understand reality.
We praise curiosity. We celebrate people who change their minds when new evidence appears. We tell ourselves that if the facts changed, we’d change too.
At least, that’s what we believe about ourselves.
The interesting part is that nearly everyone thinks this way.
If you ask people whether others should question their assumptions, most would enthusiastically agree. We wish more people would think critically, seek evidence, and remain open to changing their minds.
We just tend to picture someone else while saying it.
I wonder if that’s because we rarely experience our own beliefs as beliefs.
They simply feel like reality.
When I look at an opinion I strongly hold, it doesn’t arrive in my mind wearing a label that says, “This is just one possible interpretation.”
It feels obvious.
Self-evident.
Almost inevitable.
Psychologists call one reason for this confirmation bias. Once we lean toward a conclusion, our minds naturally become better at noticing information that supports it than information that challenges it. We aren’t usually trying to fool ourselves. Our attention simply becomes selective without our realizing it.
Even more fascinating is something called the illusion of invulnerability. It is the tendency to believe that biases affect other people more than they affect us. We can often spot flawed reasoning from across the room while remaining surprisingly confident that our own thinking is mostly objective.
That combination is remarkably persuasive.
If I’m naturally drawn toward evidence that supports what I already believe, and I’m also inclined to think I’m less biased than everyone else, then I can become increasingly certain without becoming increasingly accurate.
Philosophers sometimes describe the antidote as epistemic humility: the willingness to question not only what I believe, but how I came to believe it. Over time, I’ve come to think of this as Epistemic Humilitarianism, a philosophy built on the idea that because we are all susceptible to bias, incomplete information, and social influence, we should continually examine the origins, assumptions, evidence, and limitations of our own beliefs with curiosity, openness, and a willingness to revise them in pursuit of truth.
Certainty and truth are not the same thing.
That realization has become strangely comforting.
It reminds me that confidence is not proof.
Agreement is not proof.
Even consistency over many years is not proof.
They may all point toward truth, but none of them guarantee it.
I think that’s why challenging our own beliefs feels so different from challenging someone else’s.
We’re not just examining an idea.
We’re examining a piece of ourselves.
Sometimes that piece is connected to our family. Sometimes it’s connected to our community, our profession, our politics, or the people we love most. Letting go of an idea can feel, at least for a moment, like letting go of part of our identity.
No wonder we resist.
But maybe that’s exactly where growth begins.
