Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [142]
If changing our minds about certain overarching beliefs—beliefs about faith, family, politics, and so forth—can significantly upset our sense of self, so can changing our minds about our own minds. In fact, this is the most obvious way the experience of being wrong can affect our identity: we can conclude that we were mistaken about who we thought we were. After all, our sense of self, like our sense of everything else in the world, is comprised of a bunch of beliefs—and, like all beliefs, these can be in error. All of us have held ideas about ourselves that have either collapsed abruptly or fallen by the wayside over time. We thought we didn’t want kids, we thought we’d grow up to be a doctor, we thought we couldn’t be happy living in L.A., we thought we’d never succumb to depression or develop an addiction or begin an affair. For all of us, our own private history—like the history of science, like the history of humankind—is littered with discarded theories.
To get a sense of how easily we can be wrong about ourselves, consider the phenomenon of buyer’s remorse. In essence, buyer’s remorse is our failure to accurately predict our own needs, desires, beliefs, and emotions—not thirty years hence about, say, the most contested political issue of our time, but three days hence about, say, orange suede cowboy boots. We generally reserve the term “buyer’s remorse” for literal acts of consumption, but its basic trajectory—crave something; acquire it; regret it—applies far more broadly. We can have gastrointestinal buyer’s remorse (as when that lactose-intolerant friend decides to order a milkshake); libidinal buyer’s remorse (as in the morning after an ill-advised one-night stand); romantic buyer’s remorse (wherein you surgically remove the “Amy + Patrick” tattoo from your shoulder); and ideological buyer’s remorse (about what you buy into, rather than what you buy).
If we only experienced buyer’s remorse about impulsive decisions, it would not bear very deeply on wrongness. The issue at hand wouldn’t be fallibility so much as impetuousness—a failure to check in with ourselves before taking action. In reality, though, we are just as likely (if not more so) to regret choices that we deliberated over at great length. The problem in buyer’s remorse, then, isn’t that we don’t ask ourselves the right questions about what we’ll want in the future. The problem is that we don’t know ourselves well enough, or remain static for long enough, to consistently come up with the right answer.
This problem isn’t limited to the future—to our aptitude (or lack thereof) for forecasting our emotions and convictions. As we’ve seen, we don’t always accurately recall what we felt or believed in the past either. What’s more, sometimes we can’t even accurately survey our internal landscape in the present. That’s why blind Hannah could be wrong about whether she could see, and why a bunch of shoppers could be wrong about why they liked a particular pair of pantyhose. Whether we are reflecting on our past, contemplating our present, or predicting our future, our understanding of our self can turn out to be in error.
Like wrongness itself, this idea that we can misunderstand ourselves arouses deeply conflicting feelings. Though we all accept in the abstract that we don’t know ourselves perfectly, we reliably resist the suggestion that we are wrong right now about some specific aspect of our self-understanding. And with reason. I have argued that error springs from a gap between our mental representation of something and the thing itself. But what happens when that