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Comment by in_cahoots | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, developing a deep relationship with someone very different than myself (different religions, native languages and countries, socioeconomic class, race, gender) has shown me the lies I've been telling myself all my life.

It's easy to identity lies and hypocrisy in others. But the brain has all sorts of tricks to prevent it from looking inwards; at least for me it prefers feeling rewarded to deep self-criticism. Finding someone who sees me and will happily call me on my assumptions, conditioning, and BS has been a great gift.

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I'm not sure I'd have phrased it as "lies I've been telling myself", but I have a similar experience from a cross-cultural relationship, from mid 20s to early 50s. We had to work through conflicts more explicitly, with a lot more communication. Many things may be misunderstanding due to divergent assumptions, expectations, and even different body language signals.

I guess the "lie" exposed here is the way people can automatically believe they're seeing the truth of a social situation. It is easy to project false experience and motivation onto others. A more truthful approach recognizes windows of uncertainty around many encounters.

I think this applies to basic single-culture contexts too. Even in the same culture or the same family, we don't really know exactly what another person is experiencing.

Many seem cocksure that their social read is correct, and any grief is the other party's deliberate action. It takes a certain detachment to realize that your misreading of a situation may well be the genesis of a negative spiral, rather than a justified response...

The social aspect is a part of it, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. So much of how we fundamentally see the world- the role of the individual vs society, luck vs skill vs determination as being important for success, what defines a 'happy' life- is determined by our own conditioning. By seeing someone else's perspective you start to appreciate that there aren't many 'first principles' in life.

Take a simple example, marriage. If you're a Millennial you were probably brought up to think marriage is for love, and should produce kids. Depending on your orientation and enculturation, the wife is 'supposed' to stay at home or 'supposed' to have a career. We don't question the basic outlines of what a marriage looks like, unless you happen to be a part of the polyamory or fundamental religious communities, in which case you probably take those standards as being the ideal.

My husband's entire family had arranged marriages. Seeing their relationships gave me a new perspective on what a marriage can be, and forced us to be intentional about what parts of our culture we bring along. It's not that we're doing marriage 'better' than anyone else, but when you can't assume anything about what a marriage looks like you have to really examine it in detail.

From an evolutionary standpoint what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself? Certainly lower animals mostly just go with what instinct tells them, maybe with memory of prior experience in the larger-brained ones. Most people also seem to operate on their feeling of "common sense" without much reflection, at least in my observation.

> what would be the benefit of the brain looking inwards and constantly questioning itself?

When what you think matters. An animal that questions its belief "there is no tiger behind that bush" and finds a tiger lives longer than one that doesn't.

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