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By Root 913 0

of Times Square, and, lost or not, sooner or later he’ll look up in awe. Likewise, most of us eventually manage to look up from the despair of wrongness and feel something of a child’s wonder at the vastness and mystery of the world. Eventually, too, we get our act together and go explore that big new space—the one outside us, but also the one within us. In fact, perhaps the chief thing we learn from being wrong is how much growing up we still have to do. “The time after my boyfriend and I broke up was incredibly dark, black, bleak,” Anita Wilson recalled. “But ultimately it was also this kind of fantastic experience of searching and learning. Before then, I was always immersed in someone else’s identity. Now, I really feel like me. It sounds like such a cliché, but I really did have to go to this terrifying place of losing myself in order to truly find myself.”

This is the thing about fully experiencing wrongness. It strips us of all our theories, including our theories about ourselves. This isn’t fun while it’s happening—it leaves us feeling flayed, laid bare to the bone and the world—but it does make possible that rarest of occurrences: real change. As we’ll see toward the end of this book, if we could somehow observe the moment of error every time it happens—slow it down and expand it when we normally condense it to mere instants, speed it up and compress it when we attenuate it to years or decades—change is what we would see at its core every time. This helps explain our dislike of error, since most of us are at least somewhat averse to change. And it also explains why the place of pure wrongness is so hard, so heated, so full of emotional drama. It is, in essence, a psychological construction site, all pits and wrecking balls and cranes: the place where we destroy and rebuild ourselves, where all the ground gives way, and all the ladders start.

So we can suffer inside the experience of error, or hurdle over it, or dilute it with time. One way or another, though, the outcome is the same: we move from belief to disbelief. Given what we’ve seen so far about how much we dislike being wrong and how many forces conspire to make us feel right, it’s something of a miracle that we ever manage to make this transition. And yet, with reasonable frequency, we do make it: somehow, something manages to nudge us out of our sublime confidence that we are right and into the realization that we were wrong. One of the fundamental challenges of wrongology is to figure out what that something is, and how it works—and why, very often, it doesn’t.

We know one thing for sure: mere exposure to the idea that we are in error is seldom sufficient to budge us. As we saw earlier, we receive information that we are wrong fairly frequently—and, almost as frequently, we cheerily disregard it. Recently, for example, while spending some time in Oregon, my home away from home, I took a break from work to go for a bike ride. My destination was a certain alpine lake, and, along the way, I chatted briefly with a somewhat crotchety older man who had been fly-fishing in a nearby river. He asked where I was headed, and when I answered, he told me that I was on the wrong road. I thanked him pleasantly and continued on my way. I figured he thought I should be on the main thoroughfare, which would have gotten me to my destination faster, while I was opting for a more scenic and roundabout route. I also suspected him of trying to steer me, a young female cyclist, toward an easier option, since the road I had chosen was steep and challenging.

Eight miles later, when I rounded a corner and dead-ended into barbed wire and private property, I realized the guy had simply told me the facts. I had taken a wrong turn, and the road I was on wasn’t going to get me anywhere near a lake. I could have saved myself sixteen miles of fairly arduous alpine cycling if I had bothered to have a longer conversation with him, or to take him a bit more seriously. And quite possibly I would have done so—if, say, he had been a little friendlier, or a fellow cyclist, or someone I