The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so h... — George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Insight: There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to be right all the time, and Shaw captures something darkly funny about it. We spend enormous energy gathering evidence, fact-checking ourselves, asking other people for their takes—all in service of confirming what we already suspect. And then one day you realize: you were going to believe what you wanted to believe anyway. The verification was theater. What makes this sting is how relatable it is. We all know someone (often ourselves) who researches selectively, who asks leading questions, who remembers conversations in ways that support their existing view. The painful part isn't that we're wrong—it's that we've invested so much effort in the illusion of rigor. We wanted to feel like the kind of person who changes their mind with evidence, so we gathered the evidence. But we gathered it while already knowing the destination. The twist is that Shaw isn't necessarily endorsing this tendency. He's naming it with the weariness of someone who's watched himself do it repeatedly. There's a strange wisdom in admitting that most of our careful reasoning might be elaborate decoration around conclusions we made on instinct or feeling. Sometimes the most honest thing is to stop pretending the verification was ever going to matter.

Source: Collected Letters, 1898-1910, p. 714