Another wonderful example of this stories we tell ourselves. In this case, a story you're telling yourself without even being there.

I travel pretty regularly. And the reason I didn't bother paying for my bag ahead of time (which is cheaper than the fee if you get caught), is that they hardly ever bother to check people. I'd say it's only an issue around 10/20% of the time. So lots of passengers, myself included, roll the dice.

And the staff get attacked by everybody, black and white and all colours in between, because it's an annoying, transparent example of corporate greed (which is probably why they don't put themselves through the stress of checking regularly).

But there's a world of difference between being annoyed because you're sick of billion dollar corporations squeezing you for every penny they can, and being upset because you think the colour of your skin is the cause of every bad thing that happens to you.

So who knows, if I were Chinese or visibly Jewish or had a few pounds of metal sticking out of my face, maybe I'd have been treated differently. Maybe the boarding gate agent has a thing for black guys and let me through for that reason. We'll never, ever know.

My point is that given that we don't know, it's self-sabotaging to default to telling ourselves the worst possible story.