Day 17: Why Do We Believe the Things We Believe?

What if everything you believe about success, love, money, gender, religion, morality, even yourself, isn’t actually true? Not because you’re lying to yourself, but because you never really decided those things for yourself. What if the ideas you hold so strongly are just things you’ve absorbed from childhood, from family, from society, from Twitter, from the internet, without ever stopping to question them?

I’ve noticed that a lot of us in Nigeria, especially, have a thinking problem. Not that we don’t think at all, but we don’t question. Most of the ideas we have are not particularly ours, they’re just things we’ve heard repeatedly until they became reality. This is why when you go on Twitter, you see a bunch of grown adults arguing back and forth, repeating the same tired points they’ve heard over and over again with no single thought process behind them.

This is also why when people encounter someone who is even slightly well-read, who can string along some big words, they immediately get impressed. They don’t think enough to realize that what this person is saying is actually very basic, just well-packaged. But because they barely use their own brain, anything that requires a bit of articulation feels like deep wisdom.

It’s why scammers and fake thought leaders do well. A person can wake up, say absolute nonsense with enough confidence, and people will fall for it because they never developed the skill of analyzing information. The less you think, the easier you are to deceive. If you observed the world more, studied patterns, questioned your environment, and trained yourself to think independently, you wouldn’t be so easily impressed by the bare minimum.

If you hear something often enough, it stops feeling like an opinion and starts feeling like a fact. And once it feels like a fact, it becomes almost impossible to challenge. It’s why people will argue that a woman’s ultimate goal in life should be marriage. Not because they sat down and truly thought about what that means, but because they’ve heard it since they were kids. People will attack you for questioning religion, for challenging gender roles, for suggesting that maybe some traditional practices are harmful, because the belief is so deeply ingrained that any attempt to examine it feels like a personal attack.

And now, with social media, it’s worse.

People don’t form their own opinions anymore, they just adopt whatever sounds right at the moment. Someone tweets something with confidence, and suddenly, it’s the new truth. They agree because it’s trending, because someone with a large following said it, because the majority believes it. If enough people say “Women are the problem,” “Nobody should ever work a 9-5,” “Your 20s are for suffering,” “Soft life is the only way”—whatever it is—eventually, it becomes law.

The biggest issue with this is that if your beliefs aren’t really yours, then neither are your decisions.

How do you know that the path you’re following in life is really yours if you’ve never questioned the ideas that shaped it? How do you know you truly want something if you’ve never considered the opposite? How do you know you actually believe in a system if you’ve never been allowed to explore anything else?

I used to believe that success meant following a traditional path, get a degree, get a job in banking, law, or engineering, climb the corporate ladder, make money, retire. Anything outside that felt unserious. And then, one day, I realized I had never actually sat down to define success for myself. I had just borrowed someone else’s definition and ran with it. If I had grown up somewhere else, in a different family, under different influences, I probably wouldn’t even see things that way.

And that’s the thing, so much of what we believe is just a result of our environment. If you were born in a different part of the world, you would likely have a completely different mindset. If you were born 100 years ago, you wouldn’t believe half the things you think are “obvious” today. It’s not that your beliefs are necessarily wrong, but how many of them would hold up if you weren’t raised in the exact circumstances you were?

So I’ve been thinking, how many of my opinions are actually mine? How many of them have I examined deeply, tested against different perspectives, and concluded based on my own reasoning? And how many are just recycled thoughts I inherited?

I don’t have all the answers, but I know one thing, I don’t want to move through life on autopilot, believing things just because I was told to. I want to be able to say this is what I believe, and this is why.

So maybe that’s the challenge for all of us. Before you argue something, before you defend an idea like your life depends on it, before you make a decision that will shape your life, ask yourself:

“Did I actually think about this? Or did I just hear it enough times that I assumed it was true?”

Random Fact of the Day

Did you know that butterflies can taste with their feet?

Unlike humans, who rely on their tongues, butterflies have taste sensors on their feet that help them determine if a plant is good for laying eggs. When they land on a leaf, they “taste” it by pressing their feet down, and if it’s the right kind of plant, they’ll lay their eggs there.

So, technically, if butterflies were humans, they’d be walking into restaurants, stepping on food, and deciding if they want to eat it. 😂