So you’ve realised that you’re wrong.

A helpful guide to living with the reality that you’re not perfect.

Being wrong is kind of like dying, which is probably why we do our best to avoid acknowledging it. But while much has been written about how to deal with death, far too little attention has been given to the far more traumatic topic of being wrong. I hope to correct that oversight here which I will do, of course, without being wrong at any point.

Being wrong threatens the integrity of that which we depend on for every single aspect of our lives. No, not our minds, our egos. The discovery that we can be wrong, forces us to seriously consider the possibility that we may not be perfect. Yet as we’re raised in environments where it’s increasingly difficult to fail, or at least to be held personally responsible for our failures, we are hopelessly underprepared for this possibility.

We, therefore, do the only logical thing we can; we get really good at identifying when other people are wrong. We get like, disturbingly good at it.

Developing one’s talents in the field of wrongness identification isn’t strictly necessary, because finding wrongness is staggeringly easy if we define it as anything that runs counter to our beliefs. However, the better we get at dismissing views other than our own, the…