Burdens of Truth seeking

[Terell Kirby]

A few listed after contemplating (feel free to add others not mentioned):

• Reduced selfishness- reduced capacity to take one’s finite identity as true and valid. Reduction in survival drive for self preservation. Removal of many of the cognitive advantages of self bias as it relates to building material wealth.
• All things being equal-reduced capacity to lie, cheat or steal. Lower tolerance for living a life based in falsehoods and delusion.
• All the above affords you: blissful ignorance, unconscious survival- all of which can be looked at as making life easier in a sense if only one values the reduction of pain and suffering and increased pleasure (ie. Dopamine )
• Easier access to procurement and satisfying of essential survival: food, shelter, sex, power, money.
• Larger emphasis on social status and approval/validation. Sense of belonging and community. These are at risk due to nonconformist nature of valuing truth and its incompatibility with groupthink and shared narratives (fantasies).
• Recognition that a good amount of human survival activity is rooted in the pursuit of social approval and belonging. If one no longer is driven by this (having achieved a certain level of autonomy) one’s life becomes quite solitary. This can turn negative if not properly framed.
• Reduced access to opportunities in areas of money, power, sex, fame & status- all of which are largely contingent on one’s social connections.
• Absence of belief systems, difficulty adopting beliefs. While it opens up one’s mind to explore unfamiliar terrain, new/novel ideas-it can make life tricky to navigate. Belief systems offer a ready made map of reality; this reduces cognitive load required for existential thinking, which in turns allows more bandwidth to securing one’s material position in the world. 
• Having no map of reality means dealing with the burden of having to derive your own process of sense making; this introducing challenges with maintaining epistemic responsibility and intellectual integrity, while battling periods of existential crisis as it relates to sense making.
• Admitting wrongness- prioritizing seeing situations truthfully, resisting urges to blame/smear/demonize others while moving being rigorous about pointing out one’s own self deceptions and bias thinking 

Edited 1 hour ago by Terell Kirby