Eight common, slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading – and their clunky alternatives

Written: November 3, 2018 | Released: July 23, 2021

Here are eight common and slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading, along with a very clunky alternative for each that I think is truer and more useful:

1. “You’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the things you did” -> don’t try to minimize the amount of regret you’ll have – try to maximize the total amount of the things that you value.
2. “Opposites attract” -> birds of a feather flock together (in fact, only a few types of opposites actually attract).
3. “Don’t let fear stop you” -> don’t let fear stop you when you’re afraid of doing valuable things that aren’t actually risky, and in those cases, try to ignore your fear and act in spite of it even though it may feel extremely shitty to do so.
4. “Trust your emotions” -> your emotions signal useful information about your needs and your beliefs about the world, so it’s really important to learn to notice them and understand what they are telling you…but don’t assume your emotions accurately reflect reality either, since they sometimes are much stronger than reality warrants (e.g., excessive fear of something that’s totally safe), or are the result of pattern recognition gone haywire (e.g., you get a bad feeling about someone because they have irrelevant similarities to another person who hurt you), or are impacted by random factors (e.g., feeling anger that’s caused more by hunger than by what the anger is fixated on).
5. “Believe your intuition” -> believe your intuition in situations you’ve experienced many times before, where there was enough feedback on how well your predictions performed to allow your intuition to have become honed (e.g., when interpreting the behavior of people you know well in common social situations, but not when evaluating if a complex philosophical claim is likely to be true), as well as in cases where there is no time to think things through carefully (e.g., if a yelling person leaps out in front of you and your intuition tells you that you’re in danger).
6. “Love happens when you’re not looking for it” -> desperation tends to be unattractive and can lead to bad, rash romantic decision making, so be cautious if you’re feeling that way and consider working on those feelings before seeking a partner, but on the other hand, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to meet someone you hit it off with, and that’s true even if you feel desperate
7. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” -> absence often makes the heart grow fonder…at first…and then, “out of sight, out of mind,” because eventually you get used to life without that person and it gets easier to be away from them and move on.
8. “Everything that happens happens for the best” -> bad things happen frequently that are truly not good, but you can often learn useful things from bad experiences, and it’s really worthwhile to actively look for what those learnings are. Plus, it is often possible to think differently about bad things in such a way as to reduce the suffering that they cause, and it’s often extremely worthwhile to do so when you can without deceiving yourself (e.g., remembering all the other things you are grateful for, or noticing the beneficial silver linings that resulted from the bad thing).