The Skepticism Trap

What is worth believing?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had pieces published in the Republic of Letters (republished in Persuasion) on Gen Z and in The New Critic on the loss of reciprocity in relationships. You should check out those publications and subscribe to them if you haven’t already. Welcome to all the new subscribers joining me from RoL.

Enjoy today’s essay.

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I’ve always been a skeptic. I was raised Catholic, but at age twelve declared myself an atheist.

I’m not a contrarian, but I am a non-conformist. I won’t rock the boat unless I’m invited to. At fourteen, we were assigned a debate on climate change but no one in my class was willing to play a climate change skeptic, so I volunteered. Although I believed in climate change, I had no problem digging up the most reputable and convincing evidence I could find of its falsity. At fifteen, we had to write essays arguing whether Pol Pot’s actions in Cambodia constituted genocide under UN Resolution 260. The crimes were objectively horrible, but I noted did not seek to eliminate “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” since the attacks were aimed at Cambodian citizens, but not Cambodians within the government and I successfully convinced several other students on the opposing side. At sixteen, in a CCP psychology class, I was surprised to find that I was the only one willing to argue that nature had a bigger impact on a child than nurture.

At home, during the first Trump administration I debated with my conservative dad about abortion, race, immigration, and religion. He still thinks I’m a bleeding heart liberal. At college, during the Biden years, I was often the most conservative person in the room for opposing cancel culture, vaccine mandates, and critical theories that weren’t falsifiable. I founded organizations on campus that brought together Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between for dialogue, as well as one for theists and skeptics to discuss philosophy. Now, I work for a company that shows the right, left, and center perspectives on daily news headlines and lead dialogue work similar to what I did in college.

Some people admire this work. They think I’m more intelligent for having considered all the possible perspectives — I certainly sound that way. What they don’t see is I’m addicted to knowingness, but I can’t seem to accept it. Flooded with witty arguments and intellectual humility, nothing, in my mind, is ever settled. I have a tendency to immediately see the flaws, patterns, biases, and holes in any idea or ideology and it makes me good at what I do; it makes my criticisms more interesting, but it doesn’t make me happy.

In the act of understanding something I often become it. As I put myself in someone else’s shoes, I forget my experience of the world and it’s hard to find my way back to myself.

I remember the first time a seriously tried therapy was the same time Abigail Shrier was doing her book tour for Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing up. As she went on every heterodox podcast known to man insisting that therapy culture is exactly what made my generation anxious and depressed I tried to convince myself that my depression was bad enough to seek help. I was skeptical of Shrier’s sweeping claims, but I was also skeptical of therapy and its ability to resolve my mental maladies. So, I tried my best to set my skepticism aside in the therapy room, for my own sake, and trust the process for a set period of time to see if it worked without contaminating the experiment with my preconceived notions. But it's impossible to unhear theories I'd already heard. Every session, questions echoed in my head. Was I being coddled and affirmed too much? Maybe I was enabling myself to ruminate more when I should have been thinking about myself less.

In between trying to talk myself out of those thoughts and into committing to the process and trusting the therapist, while also redirecting him when needed, I hardly remembered to experience it. I kept so busy forming conclusions and rejecting them that the present moment collapsed.

When you don't believe in anything there's nothing to hold on to. I sound thoughtful until I stop speaking because I've destroyed every reason to get out of bed. I'm skeptical there is a God, but I'm similarly skeptical of the atheists idea that you can “make your own meaning,” yet I don't have a better proposition.

Skepticism is thinly veiled escapism. By engaging with intellectual arguments I narrowly avoid complete hopelessness because there is always another side, an alternative, a stone unturned. I have to keep looking because I can't trust my own experience. See, my skepticism has also kept me alive.

At age twelve I began considering suicide because I didn't know any better. I knew I didn't believe in God, which meant there wasn't an inherent purpose in the universe and I knew that humans would eventually go extinct as the dinosaurs did, and I would be lucky if anyone remembered me after 150 years (not that legacy mattered since I would be dead). It seemed that I was smaller than a small blip in the grand scheme of the universe and I didn't see anything worth living for. I looked at the adults around me that were stuck in dead-end jobs and marriages with partners that weren't nice to them. They all looked more busy than happy. I thought that I was seeing things clearly — that these were just my beliefs about the world. I hadn't yet learned the term major depressive disorder.

I did, eventually, learn all about major depressive disorder, and that maybe those thoughts weren't objectively true. I learned that I might live with this disorder for the rest of my life, and the way to survive it was not to believe everything I think. I cannot afford to take it seriously every time I have a fleeting thought of harming myself. It's much rarer now, but sometimes my mind wants to kill me or at least make me bleed. As a consequence, I cannot believe my own thoughts, I have to be vigilant in my skepticism of myself.

I suspect even the healthiest of people have to disbelieve their own thoughts sometimes, since we’re all subject to irrationality, but they seem to be able to apply it selectively. Some people know when to be skeptical of harmful thoughts, and yet believe other consequential thoughts like choosing to follow religious tenets. I’m not sure how people turn it on and off. I can intentionally try and set my critical lens aside for a set period of time, but there’s only so long I can hold off before objections manifest like an annoying pop-up ad demanding to be answered.

Skepticism is a cousin of cynicism. But cynicism is confidently dismissive. It's a disorder of thinking too little, assuming the worst outcome. Skepticism is a disorder of thinking too much. It makes sense that a certain type of person — ruminators — are susceptible to skepticism, intelligence, and mental illness, the type of person that can't find their way out of their own head.

So, I cannot trust my thoughts, my beliefs are subject to change, and I'm not sure anything like a “soul” exists. What then is left?

According to Descartes — the OG skeptic — what is left is consciousness. “I think, therefore I am,” means “I” must exist in some form. I've always been sympathetic to Descartes' view. All the philosophers after him scrambled to prove that we actually could have knowledge. Some argued that we could call any justified true belief “knowledge.” Until 1963, when Edmund Gettier formed a counterexample dubbed the “Gettier problem.” Gettier problems involve instances where beliefs are justified and just so happen to be true, but through some kind of surprise twist. For example, let's say your coworker A drives a red Ford truck. When you pull into work, you see a red Ford truck and conclude that A must be in the office today. When you walk in you find that A is in the office, but he tells you his car broke down and he drove his wife's green Subaru into work and the red Ford truck belonged to someone who was interviewing for a new position at the office that day. So, you were justified in believing A was there based on your original knowledge, and that belief was true, but it wasn't true for the reasons you thought, so we wouldn't call that knowledge.

Gettier left philosophers scrambling for a new definition of knowledge, some amendment to justified true belief that would get around the problem, but none of them quite work for me. Most of them come off as desperately trying to prove that we have knowledge out of fear of the alternative, fear that total skepticism doesn't offer them anything. Like me they turn over every stone searching for hope because they have to trust something.

I suspect I’ve always loved the Gettier problem because it’s one of the rare ideas that seems intuitively true to me — we can try and be as logical as we want and still be wrong. I get why others can’t accept it though. You need to have some foundational belief to build things from — to build ethics, to build an understanding of cause and effect, to answer questions about why suffering exists and why we fall in love. But I can’t help myself. What belief is worthy of being unquestionable and sacred? How would we know? What if it’s wrong? What if it ceases to be useful? What if these questions are unanswerable?

I’ve met the rare person who is pathologically curious and radically open-minded instead of skeptical. They get excited by the idea that they don’t have the answers. To be a skeptic is to be in intellectual free fall. Recently, I described to one of these pathologically curious people that I was having the sensation of falling when I was lying down and he said he didn’t mind that sensation, that it was like letting go.

“But when you’re falling, don’t you brace for hitting the ground?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Falling doesn’t necessitate that I have to hit the ground. Maybe I’ll die winning a Darwin award.” He laughed at his own assertion, admitting his optimism might catch up with him. When I am falling I am skeptical that anything will be there to catch me, whereas he is skeptical of the belief that anyone needs to be caught.

We went on to talk about the pendulation between grounding and letting go, but, ever the critic, I had to problematize my own pendulum analogy. I pointed out there are times that are neutral, not leaning into either being grounded or letting go, times that are opposite, such as agitation, and times where you're seemingly pulled into both states. For the example of being pulled in both directions I explained that one could make the intentional decision to let go by deciding to put their phone down and stare at a wall or go outside in the grass, but let go of any particular thought or agenda, let go of any time limits, and just sit, experiencing thoughts and emotions as they come up and watching them pass.

A pendulum is a nice image. It implies that we’re tied to a center, and that when we feel out of balance gravity will naturally draw us back in the other direction. I immediately wondered if the pendulum could snap, if it was easier than the pendulum imagery implied to lose touch with reality. Unwittingly, my brain produced counterexamples where one could be both letting go and grounded, or neutral, or neither, and therefore the pendulum didn’t work. It didn’t exist. It can never be easy to have a comforting image because it’s not logical or applicable, my brain seems to say.

Whereas the pathologically curious says, “Huh, that’s interesting. I look forward to exploring whether the pendulum is actually a circle!”

“You would!” I chuckle because I cannot fathom that lack of fear.

I have nothing because no intellectual foundation is good enough. I’m not cynical, I know I could build something beautiful here if I just picked a starting point, but all I can manage to see is all the possible ways it could crumble — all the ways it will crumble if given enough time and bad weather. He has nothing and is happy to see all of the possible castles and cottages he could build if he picked a foundation. In the meantime, without shelter I am afraid of every storm and he seems to know he’ll be fine.

These aren’t so much core beliefs as temperamental differences. I don’t believe that something bad will happen to me if I don’t choose a particular belief system. I'm open to the fact that it’s an advantage, but I worry about the consequences. I know everything involves tradeoffs. Even if I could choose to believe in God, or something else foundational, I would worry I chose the wrong one. Some seem to worry less. They fall without planning to hit the ground.

It makes me wonder whether skepticism is the problem. If I was skeptical of simple answers, but had the trusting, easygoing temperament of the pathologically curious, maybe I’d feel differently. Maybe I’d still feel like I’m falling, but that sensation wouldn’t be an issue I need to solve. Maybe I just need to let go of the desire to have answers, beliefs, and values. Even now, I’m both-sidesing myself unwilling to commit to a conclusion because I’ve found holes in the theory, always holes.

Most people have too little intellectual humility, but I have too much. My essays get more likes when they lack nuance. When they tug at a trend and tease it into a broader generalization because it sounds clever. Compliments always feel hollow on those pieces because while it was written with genuine emotion, I don’t know if the conclusion is true. I worry about writing things that are attractive, beautiful, interesting, and false, but if I waited to write what I truly believed, I’d never publish anything at all.

I’d like to leave you here with something at least marginally uplifting, if not a solution than some kind of balm for the soul, some silver lining or promise about the type of person someone can become post-skepticism, but I am not certain any of that would be true (or untrue). I can only report from the wild edge of emptiness. Emptiness is despised in the West and enlightened in the East — I’ll let you know if I decide what to believe it is.