Certainty sells.

One of the best ways to sound certain and maintain the illusion is to make claims that can’t be disproven. You see it in any opinion that catches on – a certain claim that you can’t really falsify. Much of religion works this way, along with things like the healing powers of crystals and stuff like that.

But here’s the thing: I like a lot of things with strong claims attached, even if I don’t believe the claims.

My middle child collects rocks and crystals and just about any little trinket she can get her hands on. She tells me their stories and their special powers, and she’s no less certain than the people who say that those crystals can align your chakras or whatever. But it makes me smile. It makes me happy to hear those stories.

I can put a “healing oil” in my house because it smells nice and I like it. It doesn’t need to be more than that. We make the claims not because we’re selling the thing, but because we’re selling the certainty. People don’t really care if you get the crystals, they care that they be seen as someone who knows things. Someone who’s certain.

But some things just smell nice, and that’s okay.

Sharing hurt is a real bond, necessary at times. So is taking the hurt for someone else, so that they can heal. Awful tragedies can happen in life – and when they happen to someone you love, you hurt with them. You let them pass their hurt to you, because that’s what it means to love them. You carry it farther away from them, release it where it doesn’t harm them further, like a wild animal far from civilization. Then you return to carry more.

We’re not very good at guessing, we humans. We’re confident when we shouldn’t be and have no inherent statistical sense. We make up stories instead of leaving room for skepticism. And we think ourselves prescient.

There’s no way to defeat this problem permanently, though there are some tactics you can employ. One way I’ve thought to try to defeat the ever-present hunch is to limit my exposure to the (useless) information that gives me hunches.

Here’s an example: job interviews are worthless. Everyone – everyone – will argue with me here, but the science isn’t even close to controversial on this: there is absolutely zero correlation between performance in a job interview and performance on the job. Even if “job interview skills” translated into “job skills,” humans simply can’t make effective judgments of those skills in an interview setting. In practice, a job interview is a total hunch farm. If you whittle down a candidate list to a top 5 based on things like their resume, credentials, and/or trial projects, then you might as well pick one of those 5 at random. You have as good (if not better) of a chance of picking the top candidate as you do by interviewing them and deciding, and it’s faster and cheaper.

Of course, no CEO will take this information and use it to make cheaper, faster, and better decisions about hiring by eliminating job interviews at their company. Because even if it were true, that would be scary in its own right. People don’t like knowing the truth, which is that virtually no one can predict things well – stock picks are voodoo, political punditry is street theater, and job interviews are people flexing for the future ability to claim great business savvy when they’re accidentally right once in a while.

So for me, I’d rather just not get the hunch-producing information in the first place. In the surprisingly frequent circumstance where additional information just causes me to think I know more than I do, why bother?

There’s an old Robert Heinlein book that I love called Tunnel In The Sky. There’s a scene where a young man about to go on a classic “big space adventure” asks his older sister, a veteran Big Space Adventurer, what kind of gun he should bring. She tells him: none. Most space monsters, she says, can’t be killed by guns at all – but a gun gives you false confidence and you get killed because of it. But if you have no gun at all you’ll be terrified all the time, and that will keep you alive.

This feels like that – I don’t want something giving me false confidence. I want to be confused and uncertain when I should be, which is most of the time. Because then I’ll have to think as critically as I can just to make it through the day.

I would rather be uncertain than wrong, as long as I can be.

The more terrible something is, the more important it is to crack jokes about it. Saying that any subject is too serious, too unhappy, or too important to joke about is letting the darkness win.

There are only two things we can do about problems: solve them or endure them. The first requires mental resiliency and the second requires emotional resiliency. Both of those things are helped if we don’t feel small and powerless.

Laughter makes you feel big and invincible.

An incredibly underrated life skill is knowing a whole bunch of weird people.

I knew a guy once who had “a guy” for everything. No matter what weird problem you were having, no matter how unusual or niche, he’d say “I have a guy for that,” and your problem would be solved in one phone call. Oh, you need tires for a car that hasn’t been made in 30 years? He’d call a guy and you’d have tires. House is infested with a bug not native to this continent? Boom, guy.

Of course, I knew that guy, so it’s like I had the same power, just with one extra phone call attached.

The point is, the more weird people you know, the more weird problems you can solve. And solving weird problems is about eighty percent of adult life.

Now if you want to really put a bow on this whole thing, add one extra step: Make sure you’re weird. Pick a weird thing you can do really well, and make sure your weird friends all know about it. Because I’ll tell you, getting the phone call instead of making it feels really great.

Some memories are stickier than others. It’s not always a good thing. We’ve all gotten jingles or misconceptions stuck in our heads forever – even after we want to abandon them.

Something I practice is trying to actively prevent “bad info” from becoming a lodged memory. I try to mindfully distance myself from information I know is just going to be wasted space or outright unhelpful. Sometimes it’s like trying not to think about a pink elephant, but often it’s successful. And it gets better with practice.

At least, I’m pretty sure it does.

A few weeks ago, I saw a short video clip of a standup comedian telling what seemed to be kind of a risky joke. However, in the video, the audience was roaring with laughter so I just thought maybe I was the outlier in thinking that the joke seemed a little too “out there.” Whatever, I thought, to each their own.

The other night I happened to catch the full comedy show that the clip was from. When it reached the joke I had heard before I recognized it, but something was off. I paused the show and looked up the clip on my phone.

Sure enough! In the clip, the audience was loudly laughing and cheering. But in the actual show, the joke fell flat, barely getting a few awkward chuckles. For the clip, someone had edited in the sound of uproarious laughter.

That was the only edit. The joke is the same, and the camera angle doesn’t actually show the audience so it’s easy to put in a laugh track. But it’s amazing how different the two clips seem! The delivery of the joke, the face of the comedian, it’s all identical – but in one, they’re met with enthusiastic agreement and in the other, awkward silence. And my perception of the joke was very different!

Like many jokes from comedians, it wasn’t a “bit,” but rather an opinion delivered in a funny way – and how I perceived agreement with that opinion was easily manipulated. In the short clip, I was convinced that I was an outlier for not sharing the opinion. In the full video, my impression is more that the comedian was the outlier. If I didn’t already have a fairly established opinion of my own on that subject, I could see it being easy to sway me with this trick.

Not all lenses are clear and straight, is what I’m saying. Every hoop information jumps through before it gets to you is a chance for someone to tweak what you hear and see, even if only through the context in which it reaches you. Keep your wits about you.

Some people bite into a piece of delicious food and their eyes roll back in their heads. Their taste buds fire off a symphony of experience and they savor every second of it. Either my taste buds aren’t as well-developed or my brain doesn’t get those signals as clearly, because no food has ever given me an experience like that.

However, there are certain songs – many, actually – that give me such a feeling of transcendent emotion that I can’t drive while I listen to them. Some songs have made me feel stronger emotions than actual events in my life ever could.

My point is that we all have different soft spots. Different parts of our brains are finely tuned versus bluntly calibrated. Don’t find it strange – instead, enjoy the opportunity for connection. Let someone describe their favorite food to you (or whatever their thing is), and marvel at the incredible range of human experience. Then, savor yours all the more because it belongs only to you.

People are funny about gifts and favors. They have a strange way sometimes of turning the receipt of one into the expectation of many.

When you do something nice for someone, especially the first time, there’s benefit to mastering the subtle art of putting the gift in its proper context. If you say, “Hey friend, I can give you a ride to work today,” the last thing you want is for them to get out of the car and say “Thanks, same time tomorrow?”

People will often get mad when you can’t (or even just won’t) repeat the gift forever! But me letting you slide on a dollar for your morning coffee one time doesn’t mean coffee is free now.

So it helps to put a little verbal bow on the present. Something like, “Hey friend! The timing doesn’t usually work for me, but I happen to be headed past your place tomorrow morning. Can I give you a ride to work?” It’s still a kind gesture, but you’ve set the stage for it being a one-time event without having to be awkward about it.

I write publicly. Not only here, but I’ve got a few other places where I share thoughts and opinions. Sometimes I share opinions that – gasp! – not everyone agrees with. And sometimes these folks share their disagreements with me. Passionately.

I almost always respond the same way when someone shares a strong counter-opinion with me: curiosity. I don’t claim to be infallible and I try not to accidentally act like I am. So when someone opines at me, I usually respond with something like “Could be! Could you tell me more about your experiences that led you to this thought?”

And nine times out of ten, that’s just… the end of the conversation. I really am curious, but I also seem to have accidentally stumbled onto a surefire way to end pointless arguments before they begin. Because if I don’t get an answer to that question, I’m guessing the other person just wanted to argue.

I don’t mind.