(Photo by Haberdoedas on Unsplash)
What You Don’t Know About Yourself Is Running the Show
What Would You Call It? is a four-part series that begins by confronting an uncomfortable truth: humans are hardwired for self-deception, and the comfort strategies we deploy — rationalization, nostalgia, magical thinking — quietly steer us away from genuine meaning.
The very human search for meaning is a distinctly modern burden born out of the Enlightenment, when science and secularization dismantled the inherited roles that once gave life its ready-made purpose. In the wake of that collapse, questions that were once settled by tradition became open again; the free will versus determinism debate is one result.
In this stripped-down landscape, refusing the safety of magical thinking has become a kind of intellectual honesty. Accepting our finitude doesn’t lead to despair, but to urgency — tighter priorities, more candid relationships, and the recognition that the life you’ve already lived contains the answer to the question; what would you call it?
Because Once You See It
Self-deception isn’t something other people do — it’s the water you swim in, and you’re usually the last to notice it. From the small daily lies (I work better under pressure; I didn’t want that promotion anyway) to the elaborate defense mechanisms — nostalgia, magical thinking, taboo enforcement — willful ignorance is not weakness but strategy, one that’s deployed actively and with considerable skill. Once you see the pattern, in yourself or the culture around you, the question what would you call it? becomes less philosophical and more urgent.
Now That You See It
The search for meaning, as we know it, is largely modern, born from the Enlightenment’s dismantling of inherited roles and religious certainties. Prior generations mostly lived predefined scripts, and science cracked that script open for good. What replaced it is messier and more personal. Without a universal template many default to comfort beliefs rather than do that hard work. The most practical exit from the maze may be behind you: trace your past, find the moments when you felt closest to your ideal self, and do more of those things.
The Slow Erosion of Self
Who we are is not a fixed state but an ongoing story — subject to revision, interruption, and reinterpretation — and the examined life, the one we actually bother to look at honestly, is where meaning gets made. Long before social media turned self-disclosure into a cultural reflex a 16th century Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne, was doing precisely that: making his interior life visible to strangers, exposing his contradictions, and demonstrating that the impulse to document the self is as old as human nature itself.
Your Future — Past
Accepting that this life is all there is — without a shred of empirical evidence for anything beyond it — doesn’t lead to despair; it leads to urgency, and that urgency is clarifying: relationships sharpen, time becomes precious, and meaning stops being something you defer to a vague someday. Crisis — near-death, trauma, the deathbed regrets of strangers — tends to be what finally cracks people open to these realizations, which raises the most uncomfortable implied question: why wait for the rupture?