Our lives are full of notions and facts and teachings about all things in the world. From physics formulas to life wisdoms like “The only thing you have to do in this life is die” to advice we receive from other people and even seemingly indomitable truths bestowed upon us by our parents and teachers, we live and learn by absorbing information from a wide range of sources. Those notions and facts and teachings together formulate our worldview and determine who we are as a person.
However, did you ever feel suffocated by all those things? As if you are imprisoned in your own mind by concepts and thoughts, both yours and someone else’s? Did you ever feel like your freedom is suppressed by yourself, or your parents, or your school, or your society?
At one point in time, I certainly felt restrained. I felt like being held back by some shackles that pushed my very own nature and potential down my throat like a shout that was doomed to never be released. I felt limited, handicapped, unable to not only achieve true happiness, but even take a shot at it. People around me kept saying all kinds of misconceptions that I cluelessly believed simply because they were recited by “many”.
They said greatness and true freedom were a privilege of the very few, that happiness in life was not a given, but a destination, a chance that you stumble upon with titanic effort. Yet some people cultivate happiness in direst circumstances and find it in small things. Take monks for example, who are genuinely happy without a single penny in their pockets.
They said that every walk has been already walked so there was nothing left to explore. Yet here we are, discovering and inventing again and again, discovering more than ever. Because as we accumulate knowledge and improve technology, we create new opportunities. They said a 9-to-5 job is the only fireproof way to make money, and I believed it because everyone worked a 9-to-5 so how could everyone possibly be wrong? And yet again, we have digital nomads, freelancers, influencers, entrepreneurs, activists, you name it. Because as the society evolved, we’ve gained access to new sources of income. Hollywood (and even my parents) said that one day you will meet the one true perfect partner and everything will just effortlessly click, and people swallowed the false prophecy, most of them either divorced or unhappy or never knowing what true love is, forever doomed to chase its shadow. And yet again, some of the happiest couples confess that they oftentimes hated each other’s guts or even broke up. Because in real world you don’t meet the perfect person, you make the person you meet perfect.
“They” said a lot of things. And ALL of the things they said had exceptions. And many things were simply wrong. The Earth is flat! The Earth is the center of the universe! The universe’s size is constant! Atom is indivisible! Because there is nothing constant in the world, we progress and discard old truths while realizing the new truths that will one day be discarded as well.
Once when I was thinking about this all, one small, slippery, yet shiny thought flashed through my mind in a futile attempt to hide in the debris of my crushed dreams and hopes, but I stubbornly caught it by the tail and took a long look at its squirming body. “Maybe, just maybe… everyone IS wrong.” But everyone cannot be wrong, that’s an extreme thought on the other end of the spectrum from “Everyone is right.” However, I didn’t ignore the thought because it did pop up in my mind for a reason. Rather, I developed it further, thinking that nobody can be perfect and therefore nobody can be completely right, thus every statement and truth I know has a chance to be wrong. Some things like “fire can burn your skin” have a miniscule chance of 0.0001% to be wrong. Other things like “there is no sentient life in the outer space” have a higher chance, let’s say 50%, of being wrong. Some things like “there are 30 days in February” have 99.999% chance of being wrong. But it’s never a complete zero.
At some point in the future we might find a method to make our skin fireproof with genetic modifications. Also, there might be an abnormal person living right now who has no idea they are fireproof. Sentient life might exist out there because, well, we exist somehow. And yes, it’s not that likely that we will change the calendar, but you can’t be completely sure February won’t have 30 days some day, as it only takes another Pope Gregory XIII to do it. Anyway, my point is not the 0.0001% things. Think about this – if we can legitimately find a reason to doubt even the most basic factual statements, why would we ever not doubt vague statements like those labeled “collective wisdom”? You know, things like “love is blind” or “time heals” or “they have weapons of mass destruction”? Oops, okay, minus the first one.
My point is that maybe collective “wisdom” is not, in fact, wise. Maybe Hollywood’s take on life only works for a 90-minute movie and not in real life. Maybe the statements we chose to live by are the very cause our unhappiness? So were we lied to? If yes, what exactly is lie and what is truth? If no, why do the wisdoms seem to not work? Wait, maybe there is lie in every truth and truth in every lie, like yin and yang? So basically if nothing is absolutely true or absolutely wrong, isn’t every single statement or thought just an… assumption?
“So, put your books and formulas aside, dare to abandon your teacher, whoever your teacher may be, and see things for yourself. Dare to look at everything around you without fear and without formula, and it won’t be long before you see.”
Anthony De Mello
Everything is an assumption
Everything is an assumption. Even this statement is an assumption. Fascinating, isn’t it? It almost feels like a paradox, like the “I’m a liar” kind of phrase, which just logically cancels itself out. But hear me out. Treating everything as an assumption doesn’t mean that you should treat everything as a lie. Assumptions aren’t lies. It’s just that you choose to believe some of them because you’ve verified their viability, and you choose to discard some of them because you found them faulty. In the first case, it is necessary to remember that even verified assumptions that you choose as your stepping stones to build your life upon should be revisited for they might not stand the test of time.
But what about facts?
With the assumption that everything is an assumption, how do we treat indomitable truths and facts?
Facts can be divided into 2 types: 1) facts or axioms or theories that we need to lay as foundations to build further knowledge upon. 2) Facts that were verified by experiments or experiences. We need the first ones as the starting points, both personally and as a civilization. We learn and produce the second ones as we live. In fact, the very language itself is a set of theories we needed to simply start communicating. Like, our ancestors just assumed that water should be called “water”, nobody really researched the topic. In fact, Facebook’s engineers once had to shut down two AI chatbots that started conversing in their own language, meaning that language is also just an assumption. Anyway, I digress.
So both of the types of facts should be treated as assumptions still because in the first case, you might actually find a fault in any of the founding axioms or a way to optimize it, and in the second case, the risks of developing incorrect assumptions is even higher.
Axioms are the most dangerous ones among assumptions. An axiom is “a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true”. In math, axioms are the founding assumptions for the entirety of Euclidean geometry. As such, the statement that parallel lines don’t intersect is an axiom, as it literally has a proof sounding something like “well, they don’t intersect, okay?”.
So for example in Lobachevskian geometry (which is called Hyperbolic Geometry in the West), parallel lines can actually meet, just very far away in the horizon, which is a contrarian axiom that nevertheless lead to an entire new branch of geometry. Even more fascinating is the fact that in a way, even the very definition of line itself is an axiom. See, a line is a set of dots that are… eh… placed in a line… Wow, what? So to define a line we need to define a line, the chicken-egg Uroboros paradox. Heck, even the definition of a dot is an axiom because what the hell even is a dot?! It’s a small circle you say, but a circle is a set of… dots… that are equidistant from a dot! Yes, I did Olympiad math at school for 6 years. Anyway, the point is that an axiom is a statement that is just believed to be true with essentially no proof, but just because it’s kinda obviously true. But the very existence of Hyperbolic Geometry should’ve illustrated how just questioning and tinkering with an axiom can spawn an entire different science. In the same fashion, changing our default assumptions and beliefs is dangerous because it’s powerful and powerful because it’s dangerous.
A fact in real life is akin to a theorem in geometry. It’s a statement that was proved to be true mathematically and logically. The thing is, a theorem is proved within its respective geometry that was built on its respective axioms. A Euclidean theorem or fact is not true in Hyperbolic Geometry, yet both geometries have a right to exist because they just took different axioms as their respective starting points, and it’s within the rules to change an axiom because an axiom is just a commonly accepted assumption. A bit of an unexpected twist, but this is the reason why World Wars happened. Too abrupt? Let me explain.
Axioms in your life are things like “you should always be kind” or “anger is bad” or any other statement that you never questioned because it’s kinda obviously true. Try changing any one of them to a complete opposite. You will probably peek through the door to an entire multiverse of possible you’s where you are not as kind or as compassionate as you are, maybe even outright evil. In fact, the difference between you, me, and Hitler is just a difference in several axioms, which lead to a huge difference in principles, which had some horrific results. Scary, isn’t it? If you can control another person’s axioms, you control their world, and so you can control the facts or at least the way they perceive facts in this world. That’s right, facts look differently from different viewpoints and in different worlds. The only reason why we somewhat agree on facts in our civilization is because we speak translatable languages and have similar sets of axioms. Remember Seven Commandments in George Orwell’s Animal Farm? Right, where they amended the commandments all the time and made every new transgression look plausible. So imagine what happens when the world by default has the fundamental difference in the axiom “my country is the best.” Ta-da.
Now to the gist of it. The scariest part of axioms is that the line between an axiom and a fact in life is very blurry, even thinner than it is in geometry. Now you might wonder: if a theorem’s equivalent in life is a fact, what is an axiom’s equivalent in life? A cliché. Mic drop. Just kidding. Okay, okay, jeez! So anything you hear too often and from too many people is a cliche. Even things that our parents teach us are cliche, like “sharing is caring” and all that stuff. And some of them are things that we don’t find necessary to doubt because they are kinda obviously true. Many of them are, in fact, true and right. I mean, “life isn’t fair” is a cliche, yet it’s definitely on the list of some of the most effective phrases to prepare a child for life. Therefore, I’m not saying that cliches are bad, but I am saying that some cliches aren’t necessarily right. The tragedy is that we tend to believe cliches because we naturally tend to not oppose and actually align with the opinion of the many, as the herd mentality gene is still alive and kicking in our DNA.
Sadly, the majority isn’t always right. So many scientists burned at a stake for what was essentially true. All because they dared to go against “common sense” adopted by the majority, which made them white crows, and therefore made them incompatible with the rest of the people. Society nowadays does a mild version of that by verbally “roasting” instead of literally burning you for your contrarian ideas and beliefs. They tell you all kinds of weird cliches and make you recite them along, and eventually you believe what you hear and even often recite yourself because well, “everyone (including me) is saying that, so it’s kinda obviously true.” Gotcha.
What are such “questionable” cliches for you? For me it was “time heals all wounds,” ever not heard that? I heard it in Russian, English, Korean, and Kazakh, and I’m pretty sure every language has this cliche. Time doesn’t heal anything in your soul. You simply forget it until some other traumatic event reopens the old scars and the unresolved trauma bleeds out and leaves you and people around you shell-shocked by what just happened. Have you ever wondered why psychiatrists can go as deep into your past as your childhood memories to resolve your conflict with your spouse? Well, I’ll tell you my story later in the book. Long story short, uprooting this cliche completely was the only way for me to truly heal. Letting time deal with your trauma will only help you forget it for the time being, but it doesn’t go out of the window. This is hands down one of the worst cliches ever, -3/10, please stop saying that if you did. At the very least, every cliche including this one should come with a small remark, something like “time heals all wounds, given that you actually treat them, otherwise you will simply let the wounds become scars and get triggered by traumatic experiences in the future, good luck with that, therapy prices will probably rise given the inflation”.
Together, the axioms, or cliches, form principles. For example, a complex principle of treating people like equals would consist of several axioms. The first one would be that all people deserve respect. The second one would be that I treat people the way they treat me. The third one would be that I don’t bully others and don’t let others bully me. The three cliches together act like Azimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” establishing my ground rules for treating people correctly. I put together several more axioms, and the combined set of principles is both the foundation and the cornerstone of my personality that I put on the pedestal, in the best traditions of Stephen Covey. By the way, I highly recommend reading his books to everyone.
As for how you should treat facts, they should also be periodically revisited by you once you filter out or fix faulty cliches in your mind. I guarantee you, some facts and conclusions that you’ve come up with or absorbed along the course of your life will crumble because the underlying axioms would’ve been corrected by you. For example, because I took “time heals all wounds” as a true axiom, I built a set of facts on it. For one, I thought that if I counted to ten before responding to something that hurt my feelings, I would already feel much better and thus let it go. It was a fact for me because I did it so many times, and it did work, so it was a verified fact that other people also vouched for. However, I could never understand why I kept having flashbacks to those conversations years and even decades after. Some of those moments kept haunting me up until recently. So when I finally got rid of the faulty axiom, the count-to-ten rule that I knew for a fact vanished, and I finally understood that I just had to address the conflicts in a proper manner back then instead of carrying this emotional baggage around for years. Needless to say, I’ve never had the flashbacks since then.
Revisiting past assumptions
Logically speaking, every person might have their own cliches and facts they came up with based on those cliches, so everyone should do the work on their own and revisit their core assumptions given their own unique circumstances. Even the same person might have different convictions at different times in their life, much less to say about different generations. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons why different generations struggle to understand each other – we simply spawn to a new world with new rules and new conditions where previous axioms and facts might not be applicable any longer, and we are often forced to comply with the doctrines that our parents impart on us. While it must’ve been true for older generations that simply working a stable job can afford you a house and several cars, the axiom is simply no longer applicable to our current circumstances where the inflation has stacked up and made buying a house with a 9-to-5 job a pipe dream. Well, while we and anyone else are definitely not at fault for this or other differences in understanding, it is certainly our responsibility to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, this is a life-long process, so it requires constant effort and open-mindedness to be able to analyze our past and present assumptions. Fortunately, this is a life-long process, so you’ll never be bored or stagnant. I call it a win-win, no L’s taken.
So how do you revisit your past assumptions? You don’t have to go through the archive of your memory record by record, I think that nobody is really able to do that. Instead, let the world throw new assumptions at you, so that your job is only to analyze them and make a decision whether to add it to your Self or not. Read, listen, watch, talk, argue, discuss, ask, do whatever you can to expose yourself to as many assumptions from as many different sources as you can. In other words, just live your life and have fun, be your authentic self, and people who disagree with you will either bring it up to you on a silver plate, or show it with their body language, or gossip behind your back. And you should be courageous enough to face their disagreement and be willing to reconsider your point of view on anything as long as the arguments are persuasive enough. Here you might ask several questions. What if I am wrong? What if my assumptions are weaker, doesn’t it undermine me? What if I have to accept the new assumptions, isn’t it betraying myself and being spineless while bending my back to everyone? I think the real concern for many people asking such questions would be that they are too afraid to accept that they are or were wrong. It is a legitimate concern, and I don’t ridicule or belittle that in any way, in fact I myself was terribly afraid to be wrong. In case you have such a concern, let me tell you one thing right now: it’s okay.
What if I was wrong?
First of all, there is nothing completely wrong. Everything that you chose to believe at some point was the best possible option given those circumstances. Just like my choice to not believe in love at one point in time shielded me from a lot of unnecessary and potentially harmful heartbreaks, so did believing in love later on save me from loneliness and loss of interest in life.
Let’s make an analogy. Let’s imagine that your life is constructing a building. Your ego is a vulnerable entity that you keep inside the building of your convictions to protect it from harm. The foundation is your set of core principles each composed of axioms, and the walls are the parts of your identity that you build with bricks of assumptions that you gather along your life. For example, my foundation would be my set of principles, such as treating people like equals, giving love unconditionally without expecting anything in return, and so on. My walls would be my interests and things I use to identify myself, such as my family, professional skills, hobbies, love, social skills, etc. I would build up the walls and strengthen the foundation my entire life by gathering solid assumptions, i.e. bricks, and stacking them up on top of my foundation. Obviously, I don’t want anyone to destroy my ego, and I don’t want my ego to go rampant and hurt anyone as well, so constructing the building is a two-way protection that keeps my ego intact yet harmless. So here you have it – if and when people attack any part of you, your ego stays intact because they will attack your identity, i.e. the walls. Replacing an assumption in case it wasn’t strong enough to sustain the damage is therefore completely fine, and actually you should thank the attacker for showing you a weak spot in your defenses. Otherwise, if the assumptions you used were too weak, you might suffer a blow to your ego, in which case you would still need to accept the fact that you had a blind spot and fill it in with a strong assumption. In any way, it’s not a losing game unless you are willing to continuously build yourself up, so there is really no need to be afraid of anything.
Reevaluating past assumptions for some people might seem like undermining their building’s entire foundation and thus risking crumbling completely, but what it is in reality is that you simply replace one brick in your walls or an axiom in your foundation with another one. Of course, in most cases it starts a chain reaction where you reevaluate a lot of assumptions, so to say, replace a lot of bricks or entire walls, but ultimately it is a necessary and rewarding process. In the end, just like with actual buildings, some people have entire “walls” that need complete renovations. Some people’s ideas of love, or ideas of friendship, or any other core beliefs are completely wrong, and so they decide to never touch those areas of their personality out of the subconscious fear of going down in a pile of dust. Then let me pose a rhetorical question: is it right to live in an old building that has a shaky wall? Of course not, it can crash down on you any time! It is both funny and tragic then how so many people find it completely normal to have “shaky walls” in their minds and souls. The only right course of action is to continuously maintain your “building” in the utmost perfect condition, and you can only do it by renovating parts of it once you find them unsatisfactory.
By the end of the “renovation” of your personality you will end up as a more refined and enlightened person, and if you revisited your core assumptions carefully, you will not need to repeat the process for a long time. Naturally, as you revisit your deepest convictions and beliefs, you will resolve things like childhood traumas and even things that your parents taught you when you were five, and once you do it properly, you will be reborn and most likely will not need to go this deep ever again. You will have sturdy walls and a strong foundation in your “building,” and even if there are not many walls, they will be devoid of unreliable “bricks,” or assumptions. So here we have it – your “spine.” It is a set of beliefs that you would be willing to change if they were wrong, but they are just too stable and well built with verified assumptions, which you can articulate in a calm and peaceful manner to anyone. From then on, the spine will only grow, naturally giving you the confidence and wisdom to never again feel insecure about your opinion. Nevertheless, it should be a continuous process because things we believe in and circumstances change all the time.
The problem with many people is that they don’t have a strong spine, and thus are clinging to whatever weak spine they have, furiously defending every little assumption that constitutes it. Usually, such people are not exposing themselves to new opinions or interests, thus revolving their identity around the few things in their life that they hold dear to their heart. It is totally understandable because the few things are unable to properly cover their identity, so approaching such people from their blind spots is akin to attacking their identity. Metaphorically speaking, their “buildings” have very few walls riddled with holes and a shaky foundation, wouldn’t you feel insecure in such a building as well?
Story time. I myself was unaware of most of the problems with my upbringing until the moment when I discovered how those problems evolved into trust issues and inability to fall in love or experience true romantic feelings. It was therefore a complete shock to me when after deciding to get to the root of the problem and genuinely forgiving everyone and everything I got the spectrum of my emotions back. If you are familiar with the Attachment Theory, I was a fearful avoidant in my relationships, which means that in every relationship I had at some point I just completely lost feelings for my girlfriend at once as if they were snapped by Thanos. I found it bizarre, but I didn’t give it much thought until I decided to get to the root of the problem once and for all. What saved me was the realization that people should not be like that, and the following introspection revealed that the fear of impending commitment made me shut down my emotions because they were approaching a certain threshold, a kind of limiter that I placed there myself. It wasn’t enough, so I dug deeper. And I felt absolutely terrified to re-unlock the core memory of the 5 year-old version of me clutching my ears while hiding in a closet and whispering something like “I don’t want to feel anything” in a futile attempt to stop crying during my parents’ fight. Turns out, the reason why I placed the limiter was because of the unstable household situation created by my parents when I was a kid, as I simply found it easier to not feel anything beyond a certain emotional agitation level, making it part of my survival strategy. Also, I discovered this weird belief that I formed back then that a marriage was supposed to be like that, and therefore I didn’t want it. Well, the wish came true, and there I was 15 years later feeling absolutely nothing when my then girlfriend attempted to address my abrupt loss of feelings for her. So I finally admitted to myself that it was totally fine to cry back then. I forgave my parents for they didn’t know better. I gave them the dose of hatred they deserved and loved them still. I took out the rotten bricks, and the whole wall came down as if it was never meant to be there, and behind it I found my heart. I was finally free.
If everything is an assumption…
If everything is an assumption, then you should only trust things that you either verified yourself or found an indisputable proof of. Think about this: even seemingly absolute facts like “fire is hot” were once assumptions before they got tested by our monkey or even earlier ancestors (or by Adam and Eve, if you don’t believe in Darwinism) and then proved again and again by subsequent generations. Then what if one day there will be a child or an entire new generation who will have somehow mutated or evolved to be fully resistant to fire? How would we ever find out? It is only possible if the child, in his or her incessant curiosity, touches the fire without getting hurt. That’s how we know for sure that even the very core assumptions of our culture and civilization are still true.
So why would you believe an infinitely weaker assumption of a single person that you’re ugly? Why would you internalize a random teacher’s remark that you are hopeless? Why would you ever doubt your talent and potential in anything just because of a single person’s snide comment? Why would you force yourself to either agree or disagree with anything coming your way?
The first person to cure cancer will not believe that cancer is incurable. The first person to run one mile in under four minutes didn’t believe in the then scientifically proven (!) fact that a human can’t do it. Pretty much every breakthrough in science is a result of a minority of opinions going against a majority of opinions. So you never know before you try and find out for yourself.
And it doesn’t matter if 10 or 10,000 people tell you that you can’t do something. Sounds pretty cliche and idealistic, but here’s the catch: it doesn’t matter if 10 or 10,000 people tell you that you can do something either. If you yourself know that you can’t, then you can’t. People can only motivate or demotivate you to do or try something. But you never truly know before you truly try. And to truly try is to believe that you can do it. Only if you truly believe that you can do something, can you claim that no other factor like self-fulfilling prophecy was in play in case you fail. So, the conclusion is simple: everything is possible, but some things are indeed impossible for you, but you can know for sure only if you truly try, and you can rightfully claim that you truly tried only if you truly believed it was possible for you, and to do this you have to believe that everything is possible. Back to step one. Okay, let’s make it really simple: everything is possible.
It is not a radical or innovative idea. In fact, Ezio Auditore said “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” which essentially delivers the same thought that you have to contemplate everything before blindly believing it and so you will free your mind. And they said games can’t teach you anything. One of my favorite writers Mark Manson also subtly (pun intended) hinted to this idea in his books by saying that most of the time people care about superficial things, but what really matters is what you really do and what you really think and how you process things and outcomes of your or other people’s actions.
There are a lot of mindblowing takeaways from the wonderful realization that everything is an assumption. I will describe and analyze many of them in my second book Above All. AA Method to Deal in Absolutes. I honestly would love to write about them all at once, but I aim to give you food for thought and let you digest it on your own to let you come to your own conclusions and progress authentically. In short, no spoilers. Also, I would’ve put this paragraph in the afterword, but I know for a fact that not many people give a… give enough attention to the afterword.
For now, it’s sufficient to know that the main effect of treating everything as an assumption is the magical ability to process other people’s and your own thoughts and actions without rose- or poop-tinted glasses. As a great side effect, it eradicates the binary perception that everything is either right or wrong that many people somehow have by default. It allows you to dissect opinions and statements and give a proper consideration to both the statements you agree with and the ones you disagree with. Everything and everyone becomes your teacher, and nothing can hurt you anymore because by treating everything as an assumption you give yourself a choice and enable yourself to anchor your self-worth in your own perception of yourself. And this is the starting point for a truly great transformation, the results of which will shock you and everyone who knows you. To get a glimpse of what will happen, you can watch an anime called Vinland Saga, where the main character undergoes a mindblowing transformation from a vengeful and violent barbarian to an enlightened and peaceful sage.
Finally, the mere understanding that everything is an assumption allows you to question the very essence of your problems and concerns. It is such a powerful and in a way even frightening concept because at a deeper level it allows you to reconsider even the most serious topics like life and death, meaning of existence, happiness and suffering. You can explore the deepest parts of your soul and get to the root of your unhappiness or lack of emotions without fear because the fear of unleashing your inner demons stems from an assumption that you will not be able to tame them. Here’s a counter assumption: you can befriend them and use them for your benefit.
Maybe your numbness to life is just a faulty assumption that you are doomed? Maybe whatever you think you can’t do is actually doable? Maybe you were just hardcoded to be mediocre, but maybe you can shoot your shot at greatness? In the end, if even the statement “The only thing you have to do in this life is die” is but an assumption, maybe we can eventually live forever. If the entire concepts of Hell and Heaven are just assumptions, maybe we only have this life, so maybe we should live it right. If there is nothing absolutely right or absolutely wrong, maybe you are free to do what you want and seek your own truth?