Thought I'm Wrestling With: How Elusive is the Truth?

Searching for truth in a world where answers don’t repeat, but patterns do

I keep a note pad and pen next to my bed in the off chance that an idea or thought pops into my head that I don’t want to lose before I drift off to sleep. Something about that ‘twilight zone’ of consciousness that sparks insights for me that I don’t want to miss. A younger version of me would have forgone the effort and said “I’ll remember it in the morning” only to then forget it and spend the whole next day in a frenzy trying to figure out what the hell that thought was that I found insightful 12 hours prior.

Our thoughts are fleeting, capture them while you can.

“Seek knowledge that is universally accepted.”

That’s what I transcribed on the Amazon Legal Pad with my BIC blue pen while in that hypnagogia sleep state the other night.

Over two years ago I wrote the article “Take Advice with a Pound of Salt,” where I explored the often hypocritical nature of advice, as well as how there is no shortage of media influencers, marketers, or content creators convincing you they have the formula to get you where you need to go. When in reality, there is often times more than one way to skin a cat.

Social media, and now the rapid adoption of AI, has oversaturated the world of ‘knowledge’ such that one is hard pressed to not find an opposing viewpoint or alternative take on a matter at hand. As an individual who lives in the gray and doesn’t like seeing the world as black and white, there are benefits to the expansive spectrum of opinions. That said, the paradox of choice/options has systemically plagued the landscape such that the signal for sound advice/knowledge/truth has grown increasingly faint.

Shane Parrish’s headline for his newsletter is “Welcome to Brain Food, your weekly signal in a world full of noise.” His attempt at conveying this exact point that we are overstimulated with inputs and need a way to orient ourselves.

It’s obvious that the technological advances and creations of our time have systemically altered human behavior and now capture our attention for most of our wakeful hours. Content creators are creating ever more polarizing and stimulating content to monetize on our basic variable reward dopamine paths that essentially turn us into content addicts. That’s not the noise I’m talking about here.

Rather this is a more nuanced observation, that even when you cut through the clutter of just useless noise to get to strong signals, there are STILL multiple, competing perspectives on many important aspects of life.

I want to note. I’m doing my best to reframe from saying ‘advice’ in this article as the core question I’m wrestling with goes above just ‘good advice’ and is trying to hone in on truth. I view this much like the classic square to rectangle relationship. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square. Real ‘truth’ is sound advice, but not all advice is the truth.

Take for example a very common predicament of cleaning your house. This isn’t necessarily an ‘important’ aspect of life but it is directly downstream of a way of life that truly impacts the experiences you have in this world. Stay with me.

Essentially you have two options. You clean the house yourself or you hire professionals to come clean it for you. If you just like watching the world burn I guess you don’t have to clean it (you know who you are).

Let’s break it down. If you clean it yourself you’ll get the satisfaction and reward of committing to a task. You won’t have to worry about having strangers in your house. If you’re a ‘mental worker’ for your monetary job, then the physical work of the cleaning will be a much welcomed relaxation on your brain, rather than more time in front of a screen. Oh, and you get more steps in! Waist line might start shrinking.

Ok, so now let’s say you hire cleaners. This gives you 2-4 hours back in your day that can now be allocated towards family commitments, other entertainment, or even other chores. After those ‘long’ hours at work, you can reward yourself with some true relaxation and just hire cleaners so you can go ‘live your best life’.

Which approach is right?

I don’t know.

A book that I absolutely love is “Die with Zero,” by Bill Perkins where he showcases clear rationale and anecdotal evidence for why hiring the cleaning crew ultimately gives you more utility in life. His analysis of the time-money trade off is extremely compelling and substantiated, where he emphasizes that we humans think we want to manage money, when in reality the true resource we should master is time. Prioritizing a bank for of money instead of a bank for of memories and experiences is what Bill says is the greatest hoax of our modern aspirations framework. Your money won’t bring you any value when you’re six feet deep. Buy the night vision goggles. Take the trip with your kids. Give more to charity.

I’ll read a book like that by Bill Perkins, digest the message, and determine there is some real knowledge there. I’ll try applying that approach in areas of my life where I think it makes sense.

I’ll think I have a nugget of knowledge to anchor my life to moving forward! Life is good.

Only to then read a newsletter or listen to a podcast and next thing you know, I’ll come across a quote like “If you work with your mind, rest with your hands,” by theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel and that whole plan goes up in smoke.

Shit, that’s deep.

And rather contradictory to what Bill was saying.

There is a real biological implication at play here too. It’s not just a pithy quote, but a reality that neuroscientist have been able to map. Studying the brain, they can show empirically how a shift from the active/stressed prefrontal cortex during cognitive mental work gets reallocated towards the sensory-motor region when an individual does a physical task. Not only that, some repetitive hand movement activities can act as a form of meditation and lower the activity in the amygdala, reducing anxiety and burnout. I’m not saying science is the answer, but it provides a point of view that should at least have a say at the dinner table.

Ok, so do I clean the house myself now?

You see the dilemma.

Is one fundamentally the better option? Or better ‘advice’? If so, how would you know?

Let’s say you ask 100 people for their advice as to which option is better. If 51 people said to choose option A and hire the movers, does that settle it?

My sense is we would all agree that majority doesn’t mean truth. For the forces of herd mentality and groupthink are ever prevalent. Just because there is overwhelming support for an idea/way doesn’t mean it’s ‘the best’. But the absence of social contagion doesn’t necessarily help to identify truth either. Meaning, we don’t always need to look in the shadows to uncover the truth. The majority may be perfectly aligned for good reason.

As I write that, I think it’s important to circle back to the original insight I spotlighted at the start of this article. “Seek knowledge that is universally accepted.” I realize now that upon wrestling with this very thought, it’s not the core of what I’m actually searching for. A more appropriate quest might be “Seek knowledge that withstands the strongest attacks?”

Essentially the question I’m asking is how do we identify ‘truth’ in the world. How do we know what is the right thing to do? What is a stance that is damn near irrefutable?

And frankly the more I write, the more ambiguous this tasks seems. For I find myself questioning if there even is a ‘truth’ to everything. As humans we like to box things into little digestible pieces to get answers. We love taking complicated problems and distilling it down to its core components to get an answer that is repeatable and predictable.

Arthur Brooks in his work highlights how the quest for clear, logical, and rule based outcomes is a very ‘left-brain’ activity. The brain doesn’t split responsibilities as neatly as “left = logic, right = emotion.” But there is a meaningful difference in how the hemispheres tend to process the world. Our right hemisphere is where we tend to process 'complex’ problems. Think relationships, purpose, identity, faith.
You don’t solve them. You navigate them.

Arthur’s work as of recently has been raising awareness for the need to treat these complex and complicated problems differently if we are to have any luck handling them reasonably. The fallacy Arthur preaches is that our modern world has become too accustomed to thinking that technology can solve every problem (left brain dominant). And if it hasn’t solved it, we must keep trying and iterating it until it does.

Technology is invaluable at giving us solutions to complicated problems, but it’s essentially a smoke and mirrors show when it comes to complex problems. We humans haven’t learned, or at least won’t accept, that technology can’t solve everything in our lives. Arthur advocates honoring the uniqueness of complex problems in the ways that we approach them.

As I reflect on the above paragraphs, I think I have arrived at another insight I didn’t have at the beginning of this article. I have been treating ‘truth’ as a ubiquitous concept that universally behaves the same way across all facets of life. But to Arthur’s credit, I’m realizing I may be trying to pack a square definition of truth into a round application of it.

It’s easy to see the ‘truth’ when it comes to complicated problems because pure logical application and deduction get’s you there. The progression of A+B to C is clear, and the first principle breakdown of components is well defined.

But so much of our lives are lived in the ‘complex’. And what maybe was the truth in yesterday’s relationship, isn’t a repeatable truth in tomorrow’s. Maybe we caveat all things complex with an asterisks that says ‘this is subjective’. The best advice is going to vary, just accept it. The truth is always elusive on these matters at hand.

Or is it?

Without consciously realizing it, this area of subjectivity was the primary driver of the search for ‘truth’ in my original statement I wrote before sleep. There are domains of life that are complex and ambiguous, yet there still seem to be stable patterns of truth about being human that show up again and again.

In another former article of mine “A Journey to Faith,” I briefly touched on the Biblical Series Jordan Peterson lectured about that opened my eyes to Christianity after years of being a stern atheist.

I am paraphrasing to some extent what he spoke about in his opening lecture but the main concept that stuck with me was he spoke of the bible as a collection of human stories, tales, and patterns on being that capture the fundamental essence of humans trying to understand what it means to be a human.

“It’s halting, partial, awkward, and contradictory, which is one of things that makes the book so complex. But I see, in that, the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and become conscious of what it means to be human.” -JP

A key point he mentioned that has stuck with me 5 years later, was his claim that ‘fictional work’ isn’t necessarily any less ‘true’ than non-fiction pieces. JP says that a great piece of fiction resonates with a wide variety of audiences precisely because we see ourselves in the story. We map our perception of reality and truth into the book/play/movie, and/or see it revealed to us as we take it in.

“People are affected by it because they see that the thing that’s represented is part of the pattern of their being.” - JP on Hamlet

It’s not that we all have the exact same takeaway from the piece of fiction, but the fact that it universally resonates with so many indicates there is this shared alignment with living in this world. And I’m wondering if there is a way to fully capture what that alignment is. And why it exists.

I started reading the bible not out of a search for confirmation that Christianity is real, but as a wanna be sociologists/anthropologist digging into the essence of being human, and circle in on more sound daily living principles.

And what I found was quite compelling.

For those who know, I started writing on this website as I was trying to understand my own mental struggles and finding ways to holistically pursue a healthy life to ensure they didn’t exacerbate. And through my journey, I’ve learned and practiced many proven therapy interventions like Acceptance and Commitment, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Exposure Therapy etc. All of which were new to me in life as I never had a reason to engage with them in my younger years.

As I read the bible, I realized these same concepts and themes of human psychology were acknowledged thousands of years ago, they just didn’t have the fancy titles modern society has given them. That is, these insights about the human condition have been preserved long before we had clinical language for them.

Religion, faith, and belief aside, the bible contains an array of human observations that have stood the test of time.

I know I rewrote the core question I’m investigating in this article to be “Seek knowledge that withstands the strongest attacks.” It might be beneficial to elaborate on how I define harshest attacks.

Essentially I’m looking for themes, patterns, and strategies that have been replicated across a broad timeline, with consistent output, amongst a variety of domains. More specifically, advice and truth that I’m seeking would address problems and conundrums for humans all over the world and all throughout time. They would produce a consistency and repeatability across many complex situations, even if not perfectly every time. They don’t have to guarantee a favorable outcome necessarily, but other options would be susceptible to more scrutiny and fallacy. And the cherry on top is that the advice/truth would be applicable within various aspects of human life - physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually.

I want to give credit where credit is due. On a podcast with James Clear and Andrew Huberman, James mentions that your thoughts are downstream of the inputs you feed it. Arthur Brooks in another one of his newsletters was talking about his approach to his area of expertise, human well-being, by stating the following: I always read both inside and outside my field. For the science of well-being, I usually triangulate every topic by looking at an issue from the angles of philosophy or theology (to define the question), biology (to understand the mechanism), and social science (to find the evidence).

He’s looking across different layers to identify universal overlap. It’s not just biology, not just sociology, and not just philosophy he uses to derive theories and insights, it’s the combination of them all that brings validity to his observations and hypotheses.

As I’ve wrestled with these questions of advice and truth, I’ve been going back through notes I’ve taken on a plethora of content over the last few years.

The fact that so many great minds across various disciplines and throughout human history have identified common characteristics of human behavior and incentives makes me believe there are stable patterns of truths about humanity that exist as well.

Whether it be Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy writing about recurring truths of guilt, pride, redemption, and suffering in a manner that replicates ideas in the bible, even though they both had outspoken pushback to Christianity. Or Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, who identified aspects of our psychology that reframe reality that almost completely align with modern day therapy approaches.

Scripture, philosophy, biology, and lived experience all seem to converge on a similar set of truths about being human.

The constant search for meaning and truth that we seek is clearly a complex issue, but I believe the fact that we keep rediscovering and acknowledging our patterns of being, means the complexity isn’t structureless. That is, we can’t hang our hat on the notion that life is inherently ambiguous and the truth is always susceptible to variability.

But that also doesn’t mean the answers we seek are clear. Rather it’s a reminder that the collective consciousness of homo sapiens has made great strides at providing insights into our very own being, and we must not assume we are somehow superior to our forefathers. That modernity has no additional leverage on revealing the truth.

Having awareness of whether the issue your facing is a complicated or a complex one can help you triage the approach you take to finding sound truth/advice. And then if you do conclude that it’s of a complex lineage, pressure test the advice/answers against other great thinkers and worldly observations to see if there is broader alignment to reality and other domains of life.

As the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

I believe the truths we seek are the ones we often overlook because they aren’t flashy. They aren’t sexy. They aren’t what we want them to be.

We assume that with a complex problem the answer has to be equally complex. But that might not always be the case.

So I’ll leave you with this.

Is truth elusive?

Is truth sacred?

Is it innate?

Is it something we find by searching? Or do we stumble upon it?

Is it an approach? A framework from which to address complexity?

I know I’m still wrestling.

Cheers to the truth.