Why I Started Questioning What I Was Taught to Believe

People love to say, “You’ll know the truth when you hear it.” I don’t believe that, and life has given me plenty of evidence to the contrary. Most people do not recognize truth on contact. They recognize confidence. They recognize familiarity. They recognize ideas that already fit neatly inside what they believe. When something sounds good, feels affirming, or is repeated often enough, it gets labeled as truth. But resonance is not the same thing as accuracy.

For a long time, I believed things simply because I didn’t yet have the knowledge to question them. They were presented clearly and confidently by people who appeared credible. That did not make them true. Truth is rarely obvious at first. Often it is subtle, inconvenient, or even uncomfortable. It waits for you to have enough context to see it clearly.

Looking back at the content I once consumed, much of it felt true. It was popular. It was persuasive. It sounded complete. And yet, as I learned more, large parts of it began to fall apart, because I lacked the foundational understanding to tell what was solid from what was simply well-packaged.

That realization is a major reason I started publicly teaching myself things. I don’t have a desire to be an expert in all things; I have a desire to increase my discernment. I want enough understanding to hear something and know when it does not add up. I want to recognize teachers who are careful, honest, and willing to explain how they arrived at their conclusions.

This is the foundation of what I’m building here. Learning how to ask better questions. Learning how to spot where context is missing. Learning how to tell the difference between ideas that feel true and ideas that are rooted in facts.

In Thursday’s post, I start with one of the most misused examples of this problem: quantum physics. We’ll look at the differences between classical and quantum thinking, why context matters, and how misunderstandings lead people to draw conclusions that sound profound but collapse under scrutiny.

If you’ve ever felt confused by big ideas that everyone else seems confident about, that post is for you.