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Each of us creates the world we live in. We choose what to include in it and we also decide what to leave out.
Interested in the latter, we dug around Reddit and found a few discussions where people have been sharing difficult-to-accept truths that they know are correct but actively try not to think about.
So we put together the most popular entries, and I gotta say, it's not the easiest list to go through, but it's definitely intriguing and thought-provoking. After all, even if we refuse to acknowledge a fact, that doesn't make it go away.
Continue scrolling to check out what things are bothering people the most and the talks we had with social science writer and researcher Jeremy Sherman, Ph.D., MPP, and professor of psychology at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, Noam Shpancer, Ph.D.
This post may include affiliate links.
According to Shpancer, refusing to think about something we know is true is a form of avoidance. "It may provide short-term relief from discomfort, and can sometimes help us keep from becoming distracted, but in the long term, a habit of persistent avoidance—a refusal to face your known challenges—becomes a bigger problem than whatever issue you were avoiding in the first place," the author of The Good Psychologist told Bored Panda.
This, let's call it practice, sounds quite similar to denial, but, as Shpancer pointed out, the latter is a refusal to accept or acknowledge the truth altogether. "The benefit of denial is that it may, in the short term, buy you some time to summon and mobilize your coping resources," he explained.
"When we hear bad, surprising news, our first reaction is often 'No, it can't be,' even if we have every reason to trust the source of the bad news. This momentary denial may allow us to 'catch our breath' as it were, before delving into the hard work of coping. Relying on denial for the long term is, however, unhealthy. Such persistent refusal to acknowledge and face facts erodes interpersonal trust and communication and leads to bad decisions. If you're falling, there's no use telling yourself that you've learned how to fly."
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#2
Just because someone is related to you doesn't mean they are a good person.
Well-Dressed Wolf 2 years ago
My mother and sister are my abusers. I remember seeing a Tumblr post about how great it is to have a sibling as you’ll “always have a friend”. I almost choked laughing at the naivety.
Sherman, the author of Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, agreed, highlighting how human life is uniquely anxious compared to other organisms. "Just compare the range of worries a human could have compared to any other critter. No contest. To cope, we need denial, escapism, entertainment, but to survive we need all hands on deck in reality too," he explained to Bored Panda.
"I'm on a campaign I call 'optimal: see illusion, safe escapism or strategic gullibility', encouraging people to take their denialist flights of fancy but always with a return ticket to reality safe in your heart pocket. It's not how far out you go, but whether you remember to come back. The big difference between a death metal concert and an authoritarian political rally is what happens in the parking lot after. After the metal concert, people return to reality. After the rally, people think they've experienced something more real than reality. That's dangerous."
#3
Voting Trump out of office won't magically fix everything. He is a symptom of a bigger disease here in the USA.
Well-Dressed Wolf 2 years ago
Yeah, but it sure made me FEEL better to help vote him out of office!
One study of 2,000 adults across the United States, which was commissioned by global tour operator G Adventures, suggests that the average American spends 12 hours and 56 minutes escaping their reality each week. (That's roughly four years over a lifetime.)
The most popular forms of disconnecting from work, responsibilities, and everything else that drives them crazy came in the form of reading books (1 hour 34 minutes), watching movies (2 hours 37 minutes), and dreaming of vacations (44 minutes).
However, as previously mentioned, this can't go on forever and we need to come to terms with the world around us. Jeremy Sherman thinks people can make it easier for themselves by focusing on what he calls ironic fallibilism.
"An ironic situation is one where you get the opposite of what you expected: you do the right thing and it comes out wrong or vice versa. An ironic attitude is recognition that despite your best effort, ironic situations are not entirely escapable. There is no sure-fire formula for living. Just when you discover the meaning of life, it changes."
"Ironism is not cynicism. It's the recognition that life is deeply tragic and deeply slapstick. Life is tragicomic," he explained.
#5
We need to stop consuming animal products the way we currently are. It's absolutely unsustainable.
The amount of downvotes this post will receive proves the title of this post.
Ripley 2 years ago
The key part of this is "the way we currently are", and this is very true. You don't have to be a vegan to not participate in the cruelty of intensive factory farming. It is possible to eat genuinely ethically raised animal products where the animal had a happy life - it's just really expensive. Killing is not inherently cruel - subjecting an animal to pain and terror before it's killed is.
"Fallibilism is a concept in philosophy and more than any other notion, fallibilism has given me peace of mind about dealing with reality," Sherman continued. "I think of the fallibilist mantra as 'no matter how confident I am in a bet, I remain still more confident that it is a bet. Life is iffy guesswork. Yoda is wrong. There's only try. One can make better bets. One can bet with high confidence. One can't escape betting."
Sherman sees ironic fallibilism as the antidote to two unworkable approaches that are often combined:
The first one is fundamentalist hypocrisy, or pretending you have the formula for living though you don't, can't, and shouldn't live by it. And the second one is cynical hypocrisy, or pretending there's no formula so you can do whatever you want.
"[Jerks] (I'm a psychoproctologist) employ both. Everyone should live by their supposed fundamentalist formula that they cynically don't think they have to live by. No deed is too dirty for saints like them."
#6
Just because you've been doing something longer than other people doesn't mean you're better at it (driving, job role, sports etc)
Professor Noam Shpancer added that we should revise our expectation that life should be easy, and the attendant aversion to discomfort. "Hardship is not the end of the world," he said. "It is just the world. The default position for human beings is resilience. Normalizing the struggle is useful."
"Second, accepting reality tends to be easier when we take a long-term perspective, because the danger and damage associated with a failure to face reality are usually obscured in the short run and clarify only in the long run. When making decisions, it is, therefore, useful to consider not only your present self but the well-being of your future self as well. When you fail to deal with the facts of your circumstance, you in effect sell out your future self."
#7
"You can achieve anything you put your mind to" is NOT true.
Not even close.
Genetics play a HUGE role in whether or not someone will be a good athlete, or a super successful scientist.
Can you be an "OK" athlete if you try really hard and practice really hard? Sure. Will you break world records or play for a professional team? No. You have to be especially gifted in the genetics department to do those sorts of things.
The same thing applies for mental pursuits. Not everyone is smart. Some people just don't... get it. You can try a million different ways of teaching a subject and some people just... won't... get it. Critical thinking (the ability to see a problem and visualize how to get a solution) comes MUCH MORE EASILY to some people than to others. Can you sit there and memorize things and get good grades and what not? Absolutely. Will you ever be a scientist who does extremely important research and solves the world's next huge problem? Probably not, unless you get hired because of nepotism are dragged along by someone who IS good at critical thinking.
Furthermore, much of what you CAN do is limited by who you know. If you're rich or your parents are rich and they know lots of people and have a large social network or a lot of people who want to please them for one reason or another, you'll likely find a job in whatever career you want to extremely easily provided you're not totally inept. If you're the first in your family to get a degree and aren't good at maintaining a social network you'll likely have an extremely hard time finding a job, even if you are the person best suited for the jobs you are applying for. Even if the job you're applying for is LITERALLY what you spent 5 years getting a PhD on, if you don't know somebody, you likely won't get that job.
Finally, we must constantly work on educating ourselves and seeking knowledge that can provide answers to questions we sometimes can't even articulate. Shpancer believes that history is the subject to start with, as it "shows what happens to those who deny the facts, and about the scientific method, which shows that in refereeing competing truth claims, following the evidence is our best bet.
"'Facts,' said John Adams, 'are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.' The evidence wins out in the end. Don’t you want to be on the winning side?"
#8
All children are innocent, but they’re not all good. Some people will grow up to be f*****g assholes regardless of what they’re exposed to.
Katie Lutesinger 2 years ago
Oh yeah, there are some shockingly evil kids out there. I've met a few.
#9
Money can actually make your life happier.
Gin. No tonic 2 years ago
Up to a certain point. If you have 100 million or 500 million, then it might not make much difference.
#10
You need to have your views challenged.
Being around and positively engaging with people who disagree with you is one of the healthiest intellectual practices we can do.
#11
Having an opinion doesn't make you right.
#12
The more children you have, the more you contribute to environmental decline. Literally nobody likes hearing this because HUMANS MUST REPRODUCE YADA YADA.
iseefractals 2 years ago
Most true for Americans, and to a lesser extent the other "western" countries. There were 1 billion people on the planet in 1800. In 1950, there were 2.53 billion, 1980 4.43 billion, 1999 6 billion, 2011, 7 billion, today we sit at 7.95 billion, and will reach 8 billion people by next year. We can't effectively sustain the human population now, 1/3rd of food production ends up wasted, while 1/4 of the global population doesn't have enough to eat because getting it everywhere is a logistical nightmare, and yet a large portion of the population continues to think the only way to solve the big problems of the world is to stay the course, continue unchecked expansion and hope that solutions will be born along with the rising population. We've been playing this game for 40 years with the climate, and we're almost out of time. Yet the mindset seems unchanged.
#13
Just because you love someone it doesn't mean they will love you back. No matter how hard you try to get them to, they just won't.
#14
Everyone's a hypocrite. Even you.
#15
I guess to counter some people in here:
Not every "real talk", "tough to swallow pill", or "harsh truth" that you have to offer someone is going to be accurate to them, or their situation.
Sometimes you're actually a f*****g d**k that is incapable of considering their perspective or feeling empathy towards them.
¯ _(ツ) _ / ¯
BadCat 2 years ago
Exactly. Just let people be. Maybe things will work out for them. Maybe it won't. At least they tried. This is a huge problem with long distance relationship communities. You could have one minor question, seeking a boost of optimism. Then people want more information about the relationship. They use that information against the op and base dooming "opinions", some irrelevant to the op's main issue, on their own past experiences that could have been much, much different of a situation. I don't even bring it up anymore. Don't need to.
#17
Things are going to keep getting worse on our planet and we are in for some serious human tragedy.
Erin Geiger 2 years ago
Here's the thing, the planet is going to be fine, it's been around 4.5 billion years. It's the people who are F***ed
#18
Your spouse/child/home/job/vacation, etc. is not nearly as important to anyone else as it is to you.
#19
You can't control what happens to you, only how you react to it.
SelkieBlackfysh 2 years ago
You can also hold anyone who causes those things accountable for it.
#20
That there are people who won’t like you or agree with you and you won’t be able to change their mind so you just have to deal with it
#21
That all gods are man made, start taking responsibility for your own actions and stop thinking that some magical being is going to come and help you out.
#22
Your skin color / sexual orientation is the least interesting thing about you.
flutterbyy 2 years ago
Are you telling me my neon purple skin is the least interesting thing about me?? Oh well then.
#23
Capitalism as it’s currently implemented doesn’t work and only increases the wealth of the wealthy at the cost of the poor, the oppressed, and the world. We are literally destroying our ability to live on this planet, and we’ll need drastic societal change to barely survive the coming era.
CJay M (They-them) 2 years ago
Fun fact: social capitulation, a rare system used in some insignificant island nations and small Asian countries (tu mi au, xibi San ma) in which the basic necessities of survival are provided but to live comfortably you need to work. It’s an interesting system that seems to work well and I’d be willing to give it a try. An interesting blend of capitalism and socialism
#25
So many of these are negative... So how about the truth that one of the best ways to be happy in life is by helping other people. People don't want to do it, because helping other people feels like you're losing out, but it's true
Nimues Child 2 years ago
This is part of my mail .sig: "You're not a sucker to have integrity and treat people with respect." - Barack Obama
#26
Sometimes, you are the toxic person
#27
No matter how nice you are, people will still just be assholes to you just cuz.
BadCat 2 years ago
I've dealt with people at work who tried so hard to get me upset. Like really reaching. There are people who will just try to get a reaction out of you, make you feel bad for doing your job, or even just being somewhere. What they really hate is calmness and positivity in their presence of negativity.
#29
Your friends and family likely talk tons of s**t about you behind your back
#30
Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Sometimes good things happen to bad people.
#31
You can’t love someone into loving you
flutterbyy 2 years ago
SO many people need to understand this! For others' sake and for themselves as well.
#32
That people need to stop putting their trust in god to do things and do it themselves
#33
Everyone you love will die. Everyone you hate will die. Everything ends.
#34
Corona may never go away and be in our lives forever in some capacity.
Peej Maybe 2 years ago
Or some other vaccine / antibiotic-resistant pandemic. I think COVID has definitely demonstrated rather graphically what I've feared has happened to people over the course of the last 30 year though - people have become more selfish and more prone to f*cking each other over, even for something as simple as a toilet roll - and far more opinionated and entitled when presented with something relatively simple that they could do to prevent getting infected or spreading an infection (like wearing a mask)
#35
No matter what you do you polluted the planet
#36
The only person responsible for -you- is -you-.
Csaba Hegedűs 2 years ago
So parents should just leave their newborns in the woods or something?
#37
Americans don't want to hear that Columbus murdered and enslaved people.
SelkieBlackfysh 2 years ago
It's not that they don't want to hear it. It's that they were taught a GROSSLY different version of the story. Though some probably would prefer to keep believing that old lie.
#38
No one really gives a s**t what your eyebrows look like.
Jayne Kyra 2 years ago
But if being and looking groomed and neat makes you feel good and happy, go for it. Not everything is about others´ opinions.
#39
You are always replaceable.
Well-Dressed Wolf 2 years ago
Oh, thank god. I’m starting to wear out. They’d better replace me soon before one of my internal components breaks.
#40
You aren't special.
Note: this post originally had 87 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
What do you think ?
K- THULU 2 years ago
Yep ...and opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one....
Load More Replies...
Random Panda 2 years ago
Who needs this kind of negativity in their life? Most of this stuff everyone knows, but we don't talk about, because it's better to focus on the good things in life.
K- THULU 2 years ago
Yep ...and opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one....
Load More Replies... Random Panda 2 years ago
Who needs this kind of negativity in their life? Most of this stuff everyone knows, but we don't talk about, because it's better to focus on the good things in life.
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