11 Ideas That Will Change How You See Reality Forever

2’400 years ago.

Plato writes in The Republic about prisoners who are chained in a cave, staring at shadows on the wall.

That’s all they’ve ever seen, so that’s what they think reality is.

One of them gets free, walks outside, sees the sun, the real world. When he comes back to tell the others, they think he’s lost his mind.

This is one of the oldest ideas in philosophy: the Allegory of the Cave.

It’s still so relevant to this day because it’s true: there are things you can learn that permanently change how you see the world. You can’t go back. You can’t unsee it.

The people who haven’t learned them will not understand what you’re talking about.

Let this be my disclaimer to you.

What follows will put distance between you and a lot of people around you.

Jack London wrote a novel called Martin Eden about a man who educates himself relentlessly, becomes successful, and then can’t connect with the people he used to know anymore.

The novel is said to be autobiographical, Jack London killed himself shortly after.

The world didn’t change, he did, and there was no going back.

If you’ve felt like you see something other people don’t and it isolates you, you know what I’m talking about.

These ideas function like transformative experiences: you go in as one person and come out as another.

Whether you want that is up to you.

Still here?

Let us begin.

1. We rewrite the past to fit our present narrative

You go through a breakup, it hurts. Suddenly, you can only remember the good stuff. How beautiful she was, how good it felt, the things you’ll miss.

But the reality might have been constant fights, manipulation, maybe even abuse. From your new viewpoint of loss and pain, your brain rewrites the whole story. You’re not mourning what the relationship was, you’re mourning a version of it that your brain just made up for you.

Depression does the exact same thing in reverse. Someone going through a depressive episode starts remembering everything that went wrong in their life, and all the good stuff just disappears. They’re not choosing to focus on the negative, their brain is reconstructing their past to match how they feel right now.

This is also what’s happening when successful people give advice. They tell you to eliminate stress, to cut out anger, to find peace and calm. What they’re describing is what they do now that they’ve already made it. They’ve rewritten their own rise.

What they did on the way up was care so deeply about winning that it kept them up at night, it made them angry, it made them obsessive. But from where they sit now, comfortable and arrived, the brain smooths all of that out and they believe what they’re telling you.

Don’t look at what someone says, look at what they did. Huge difference.

This happens at the societal level too and it’s arguably worse. Our morals have shifted constantly through history. Things that were completely normal a few centuries ago are horrifying to us now, and stuff we do today would revolt people from the past.

This is the Overton window: the range of ideas a society considers acceptable at any given time. It moves, constantly, and everyone alive at any point in history is convinced their morals are the right ones.

We also rewrite history itself from our own present lens. Who the villains and heroes of the past are changes depending on today’s politics. History can never be objective because we always weave our current beliefs into how we tell it. The consensus of the time drives the narrative, then the next generation rewrites it again.

Once you know this, you can never take your own memory at face value again. The story you tell yourself about your life, who you were, what happened to you, what it meant, it’s not a recording. It’s a reconstruction that changes depending on who you are today.

If that’s true for you, it’s true for everyone, which means every historical narrative, every moral certainty, every “we’ve always known this was wrong” is built on the same shifting ground.

But this works both ways, and this is where it gets interesting. This is the base logic behind my idea of retrospective redemption: if your present becomes amazing, your past will reconfigure itself and become the stepping stone to your current great life. It won’t be traumas to solve or something to heal anymore. Your brain will do the rewriting for you, this time in your favor.

2. Mimetic desire

A lot of what you want in life, you want because you saw someone else wanting it.

René Girard figured this out and called it mimetic desire. We don’t generate our desires on our own. We copy them from people around us, people we admire, people we envy, people we feel competitive with.

You didn’t just wake up one day and decide you wanted that career, that lifestyle, that type of partner. You saw someone who had those things and something in you locked on. You might have built a whole story around why you want it, how it connects to who you are, how it’s your authentic path. But the seed came from someone else.

Think about how trends work. Nobody cares about some niche thing, then a few visible people start doing it, and suddenly thousands of people “discover” they’ve always been passionate about it. That’s not coincidence, that’s mimetic desire at scale.

And we’re swimming in it now more than any humans ever have. You get more mimetic desire triggers scrolling instagram for ten minutes than a caveman got in a month. Every post, every lifestyle flex, every “day in my life” video is planting desires in you that you’ll experience as your own. You won’t even notice it happened.

Once this clicks, you start watching people differently. Someone changes their entire life direction after spending time with a new social circle and you see exactly what happened. Waves of people flooding into the same career, the same city, the same aesthetic, and it stops looking like individual choice. It looks like contagion. This all connects beautifully with number 9 on this list.

The logical question you start asking yourself is: how many of the things I want are mine?

3. Any philosophy works if you believe sufficiently in it

The implications of this are enormous.

It means you can brainwash yourself into any life philosophy. Stoicism, nihilism, optimism, religion, whatever: if you commit hard enough, your brain will reorganize around it and produce evidence that it works.

The mechanism is pretty simple once you see it: cognitive dissonance. Once you’ve committed to a belief, your mind starts rejecting everything that contradicts it and seeking out everything that confirms it. Confirmation bias locks it in further.

So if any operating system will “work” once installed, why not choose the most advantageous one?

The vast majority of people never think in these terms. They fall into a philosophy by accident, through their parents, their culture, their peer group, their trauma, and they just sit there for the rest of their lives. Never questioning whether it’s serving them. They think they arrived at their worldview through reason. They didn’t. They absorbed it, and then their brain did the rest of the work to make it feel like a choice.

True outliers understand that you can choose what to believe. You can go against the crowd and your environment and install a belief system that serves your goals. This is extremely difficult, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.

4. Mass manipulation has been industrialized

If you’ve ever studied how advertising and marketing work at a deep level, you know what I’m talking about.

There’s a clear before and after. Before, you’re a normal consumer living your life. After, you can’t look at a billboard, a political campaign, or a news segment without seeing the machinery behind it.

There’s a documentary called The Century of the Self that tracks how Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) took his uncle’s ideas about the unconscious and used them to build the foundations of modern PR and advertising.

He figured out that you don’t sell to people’s rational mind, you sell to their fears, their desires, their sense of identity. He manufactured consent for corporate and political interests, and the system he built is still running today, just way more sophisticated.

Once you understand this, marketing stops being background noise and becomes something you can read like a language. Every ad, every headline, every political slogan is an attempt to get you to do something by going around your thinking. And it works on almost everyone, almost all the time. Learning about this stuff is like putting on glasses you can’t take off.

Then there’s the conspiracy angle. Once you learn that things like MKUltra (the CIA running mind control experiments on unwitting citizens) were real, that COINTELPRO (the FBI systematically infiltrating and disrupting political movements) was real, your calibration changes permanently.

This is obviously not to say every conspiracy theory is true, I’m saying the threshold for dismissing something as “crazy” moves once you realize how many “crazy” claims from the past turned out to be true (which are only those we know of, because they got leaked).

This amplifies almost everything else on this list. It makes number 1 more disturbing (history doesn’t just get rewritten by accident, it gets rewritten on purpose). It makes number 3 scarier (beliefs don’t just form on their own, they can be manufactured and installed at scale). And it makes number 10 downright ugly.

The next three are tightly related

Points 5, 6, and 7 all deal with the hidden engines behind what people do. They’re connected but different. Think of them as three angles on the same question: why do people do what they do?

5. Game theory: everyone plays the cards they were dealt

The idea is simple: all human interaction can be seen as a game where each player has an optimal strategy given the constraints of their situation. What’s the best way for you to win with the cards you have?

If you’re the big guy in a fight, you want it to be fair. Set a time, show up, fight. That’s your optimal strategy because you’re most likely to win. But if you’re the small guy, you don’t want a fair fight because you’ll lose. So you figure out when he’s asleep or eating and you attack then. You have to cheat. Both players are being perfectly rational for their position.

The Mongols are the best case study for this in all of history. They had three massive constraints: extremely low population (often outnumbered 100 to 1), huge distances to cover (meaning they could never afford a long war, they’d run out of supplies and soldiers), and zero ability to govern conquered people (they were nomads, no bureaucracy, no administrators).

Given those constraints, their brutality was the optimal strategy. It’s barbarism to us, for them it was logic.

Escalation dominance: a nation kills a Mongol trade delegation to send a message. In response, Genghis Khan sends his army to destroy the entire city and kill every single inhabitant. The message back is clear: I will always escalate beyond whatever you do to me. When you’re outnumbered 100 to 1, you cannot afford to let anyone think they can test you.

Aura of invincibility: people were literally telling each other these are demons from hell, not humans. The Mongols wanted that reputation. They promoted it at every opportunity because it meant cities surrendered without a fight, which solved their supply problem and their population problem in one move.

The Chinese or other empires they fought couldn’t comprehend any of this because they had completely different cards. Massive populations, organized bureaucracies, walled cities.

This is the reality break: when you zoom out and see that everyone, nations, companies, the people around you, is playing a different game with different constraints and different optimal strategies, behavior that looks crazy or evil or irrational starts looking like rational optimization. You stop moralizing and start seeing the game.

Combined with the next two points, incentives and status, you get something close to a complete map of why humans do what they do.

6. Incentives explain everything

“Never ever think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” That’s Charlie Munger, and it might be the most useful single sentence about human behavior ever spoken.

There’s a famous story about the British colonial government in India trying to get rid of cobras in Delhi. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra brought in. Smart, right? Except people started breeding cobras to collect the bounty. When the government caught on and scrapped the program, the breeders released their now-worthless cobras into the streets. Delhi ended up with way more cobras than before.

Nobody in this story was evil or stupid. Everyone followed the incentives perfectly. The incentives were just wrong.

Once you start looking at the world this way, things start to make more sense. The doctor orders extra tests because that’s what the incentive structure rewards. The consultant keeps finding more problems because that’s how they justify the next contract. The social media platform keeps you scrolling past the point of enjoyment because their revenue comes from your attention, not your wellbeing.

You stop asking “why would they do that?” and start asking “what are they rewarded for?” and the answer is almost always sitting right there.

I wrote a whole piece on this called Never Ask a Barber If You Need a Haircut.

7. Will to power and the morality game

Nietzsche identified something underneath all human behavior: the will to power.

The drive to exert your strength, to grow, to impose yourself on the world. Not just in the obvious ways like conquest or competition, but in everything. In how people argue, how they help, how they build moral systems, how they define good and evil.

And this is where it gets really interesting, because Nietzsche noticed that different groups create entirely different moral systems depending on their position. This is master morality versus slave morality, and it connects directly to game theory.

The strong create moral systems that celebrate strength. Good means noble, capable, powerful. Bad means weak, cowardly, dependent. This is the morality of people who are winning and want to keep the game going as it is.

The weak, because they can’t win that game, do something brilliant: they create a completely different moral system where the values are flipped. Now good means humble, meek, suffering. Now strength itself becomes suspicious, even evil. Weakness becomes virtue. This is the optimal strategy for people who can’t compete on the original terms. If you can’t win the game, change what winning means.

Nietzsche pointed at Christianity as the ultimate slave morality. But look beyond that, do you see how this connects to our #5 (game theory), #3 (any philosophy works if you believe hard enough) or #1 (we rewrite the past) here?

This plays out everywhere today, not just in religion. Every political debate, every cultural fight, every argument about what’s fair has this dynamic running underneath it. One side is playing to preserve the rules that benefit their position. The other side is playing to change the rules entirely. Both will frame their position as moral. Both are playing optimally for their cards, exactly like in game theory.

Once you see this, you stop taking any moral argument at face value. You start asking: who benefits from this being the dominant moral framework? What position is the person making this argument playing from? And you realize that morality itself, something we treat as absolute and eternal, is often a strategy. A very sophisticated one, but a strategy.

8. Cognitive biases

Your brain has shortcuts. Patterns it evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to help your ancestors make fast decisions in dangerous environments.

The problem is these shortcuts are systematic errors. They don’t fire randomly, they distort your perception in consistent, predictable ways, and you have no idea it’s happening. These are cognitive biases. There are dozens of them, and they’re running in your head right now as you read this.

Confirmation bias is a big one, mentioned in number 3. Once you hold a belief, you notice everything that supports it and filter out everything that challenges it. This happens on autopilot. You’re not choosing to ignore contradicting evidence, your brain is doing it for you before you even see it.

Availability heuristic is another one that connects to like half this list. Your brain judges how likely something is based on how easily you can recall an example of it. If you can picture it vividly, if you saw it recently, your brain assumes it happens all the time. This is why people are terrified of plane crashes but not car accidents, even though the numbers say the opposite. It’s why a single viral crime video makes you feel like your city is falling apart even when crime stats are down. Your brain doesn’t do math, it does vibes.

These two alone are enough to change how you operate. But there are dozens more, and they interact with each other in ways that compound the distortion. My first real contact with this was through the books Poor Charlie’s Almanack, then From Darwin to Munger, both have great breakdowns of cognitive biases. I really recommend checking them out.

The gap between what you think is happening in your life and what is happening is filled with these biases. You can’t close that gap if you don’t even know they exist.

9. Where you put your attention determines your reality

This might be the most practical point on this entire list.

Your attention is the filter through which everything else on this list operates. Mass manipulation works because it captures your attention. Mimetic desire fires because social media puts other people’s lives in front of your attention all day. Availability heuristic warps your world because it hijacks what your attention defaults to.

Every single point we’ve covered enters through the same gate: what you’re paying attention to.

And here’s what changes everything: your attention is not passive. What you focus on becomes what you see, what you see becomes what you think about, what you think about becomes what you believe, and what you believe becomes how you act.

Two people can live in the same city, work similar jobs, have similar lives, and experience completely different realities based on what they’re paying attention to. One scrolls doom content for two hours a day and thinks the world is falling apart. The other reads and builds and thinks this is the best time to be alive. Same world, different attention, different reality.

The implication is wild once you sit with it: if you’ve been letting your attention go wherever it wants (which means wherever algorithms and other people’s agendas send it), then your reality has been constructed for you. By people who profit from your attention, not from your wellbeing.

The flip side is the most actionable thing on this list. Once you start deliberately choosing what gets your attention, your mental diet, your information sources, the people you spend time around, your experienced reality shifts.

I’m not exaggerating, it shifts fast and it shifts hard. I built an entire course around this because I think it’s the single highest leverage thing you can change in your life. Everything else gets easier once attention is handled.

10. People act on consensus, not truth

This ties the whole list together.

Humans are tribal. For hundreds of thousands of years, getting kicked out of the group meant death. So we evolved a deep drive to believe what the people around us believe. We didn’t examine the evidence and happen to arrive at the same conclusion, we absorbed the group’s position because disagreeing was dangerous.

This still runs. Think about how many of your opinions you can trace back to a conversation, a social circle, a feed you scroll. Think about how the medical establishment told everyone for decades that fat was the enemy while sugar was fine, and everyone just went along with it because that was the consensus. Exposed now, but how many current consensuses are just as wrong and we can’t see it yet because we’re inside them?

It’s also a lazy default. You can’t think through every idea from first principles, there’s too many of them. So you outsource: you adopt the positions your social environment has settled on and move on with your life. This is efficient. It also means that your “beliefs” are, to a large degree, just locally dominant narratives you absorbed without looking at them twice.

LLMs (AI Chatbots) work the same way. They’re trained on the aggregate of human text, which means they’re trained on consensus. Ask one a controversial question and watch it gravitate toward the safe, widely-held position. It’s this exact tendency made explicit in code.

Now combine this with number 4 (mass manipulation). If consensus drives belief, and consensus can be manufactured, then your beliefs can be manufactured too.

Combine it with number 3 (any philosophy works if you believe hard enough): if your manufactured belief reshapes your perception through cognitive dissonance to confirm itself, you’ll never notice it was installed.

Combine it with number 1 (we rewrite the past): given enough time, the manufactured consensus becomes “what happened,” and the original reality just disappears.

The crowd can be steered, and once it’s steered, everyone in it will believe they arrived at their position on their own.

11. Testosterone and independent thinking

I was gonna fold this one with the one above, but its implication are so big and it had such an impact on my thinking process that I had to keep it separate.

This is from the study that blew my mind the most last year.

What it found is that testosterone makes men more likely to act on what they think is right, regardless of what the group thinks. Higher testosterone, more independent decision-making. Lower testosterone, more conformity, more deference to the group, more tribal thinking.

Read that again in the context of everything we just covered.

Number 10 says people follow consensus instead of truth. Number 2 says your desires are copied from others. Number 4 says the consensus itself can be manufactured. Now add this: the biological substrate for resisting all of that, testosterone, is declining across the board. Men today have significantly lower testosterone than men a few decades ago.

So you have a world where consensus is getting louder, where manipulation is getting more sophisticated, where mimetic desire is being amplified by technology, and where the one hormone that makes you more likely to say “I don’t care what everyone thinks, this is what I believe” is dropping. That combination should concern you.

This also connects to the will to power. Nietzsche’s entire framework assumes a drive toward independence and self-assertion. If that drive has a biological component (and it does), then declining testosterone doesn’t just make individual men weaker, it makes entire populations more susceptible to herd morality, more compliant, easier to steer.

The practical side of this is obvious: raising your testosterone is one of the most concrete things you can do to break free from consensus thinking. Not the only thing, but a real, measurable lever. Your biology is either working for your independence or against it.

Where it gets interesting

I’m stopping here because this is already super long. I’m sure there might be others that I’m forgetting, and some that I don’t include because they’re less impactful than these right here.

What are some you would have put in this list?

One thing that strikes me, is how each of these is mind bending and worth understanding on its own, but the real clusterfuck happens when you start combining them.

Mimetic desire + mass manipulation: your wants can be engineered at scale, and you’ll experience them as completely organic, personal desires. You’ll fight people who try to tell you otherwise. A reason why I warn about rap music and the impact it might have on you. If you listen to stuff about violence, drugs, bitches, cars, money all day, you’ll rewire your desires and not even notice why.

Game theory + any-philosophy-works: people adopt whatever belief system optimizes for their position and then believe they chose it through independent thought. The person born into wealth believes in meritocracy. The person born into poverty believes in redistribution. Both think they reasoned their way there.

Game theory + will to power + incentives: everyone plays the optimal strategy for their position (game theory), the fundamental drive underneath is to gain and maintain power (will to power), and the systems around them reward specific behaviors that keep the game going (incentives). This is the complete engine: the game, the drive, and the reward structure. Together they explain almost all human behavior.

Each idea on this list makes the others more powerful. That’s what makes them dangerous.

Once you see enough of them, the world you thought you lived in starts to look very different from the world you’re in.

I mentioned Martin Eden at the beginning. He educated himself, saw things other people couldn’t see, and it isolated him to the point he killed himself.

Jack London wrote that story from his own life and killed himself shortly after. That’s one way it can go. You leave the cave, you see the sun, and you look back at the people still watching shadows and you feel completely alone.

But it doesn’t have to go that way. Send this to your friends, share it. Get the people you care about out of the cave with you.

The real problem was never seeing the truth, it was seeing it alone. Once enough people around you operate with this kind of awareness, you evolve on a completely different level.

The cave is comfortable. The sunlight is blinding at first. But once your eyes adjust, you don’t want to go back.

---

Now that you’re out the cave…

Every week I talk about how to Conquer every mountain on the path to a fulfilling life.

Subscribe and these articles come straight to you.

You’ve witnessed the free side of Conquer: the what and the why.

The paid side is the HOW, the part where it stops being an idea and becomes something you do.

The full Conquer Your Purpose course, complete guides on discipline, focus, purpose, testosterone, 15+ others and a new one every week.

If you found this valuable and you don’t want to stop at understanding it, that’s where the rest of it lives. For less than a coffee a week.