Anna | BACK TO SENSES on Substack

Be willing to have your most fundamental beliefs challenged.

Better , be eager and question them yourself. For YouTuber Ordinary Things, “The real danger of modern times isn’t that we’ll fail to tell the fake world from the real one, but it’s that we’ll know the world is fake and choose to live in that one anyway because it’s comfortable.” How iron... See more

Don't mistake your reality as the only truth: When Westover was growing up, she considered her father's opinion as "the truth." After she began to attend school, she realized that there is no universal, absolute truth. Our version of the world is not the only version — it is simply one of many, many perspectives. It takes strength and cou

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“Once the mind has accepted a plausible explanation for something, it becomes a framework for all the information that is perceived after it. We’re drawn, subconsciously, to fit and contort all the subsequent knowledge we receive into our framework, whether it fits or not. Psychologists call this “cognitive rigidity”. The facts that built an origin... See more

Our personal realities are patchworks of things we’ve seen, been exposed to, and potentially come to understand, bound together by belief. Our interpretation of the information and stimuli we are given is the product of many influences. Remove any one of those influences, or add another, and one’s worldview may change drastically. Or it may not. We

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Being truthful is an individual and communal effort — it means training, not only cognitive abilities, but empathetic relational ones, and our embodied experience in the world. It also means acknowledging that we don’t always have the answer. Admitting our vulnerable ignorance in the face of overwhelming mixed messages may be a good first step.