This begins our investigation into “The Three Truths No One Tells You”—an exploration that challenges conventional thinking and invites you to question the very foundations of how we understand reality. Learn more about the series here.
Truth #1: It’s All Invented
Component 1: What happens is fact. Truth is what we think about what happens.
This fundamental distinction between reality and our interpretation of it forms the cornerstone of how we navigate uncertainty and create meaning in an unpredictable world.
We’ll explore this concept in during our first live Zoom session on Friday, September 19th at 1pm EST.
Register here to participate live, or submit your questions here if you can’t attend. All participants will receive a recorded meeting summary and commentary as a complimentary 6-month paid subscription.
“The truth of today is often the joke of tomorrow.” ~ Esther Perel
We live in an age obsessed with “facts” and “truth,” yet people looking at the same information—or even witnessing the same events—routinely arrive at completely different interpretations of what happened and what it means. This isn’t necessarily a problem to be solved—it might be the key to understanding something crucial about how human meaning-making actually works.
The confusion stems from treating facts and truth as the same thing, when they’re fundamentally different. Facts are what is—the unvarnished realities of existence, whether that’s the actual size of continents, the boiling point of water, or what happened in yesterday’s meeting. Truth is what we think about it—the stories we tell ourselves, how we make sense of those raw realities using our particular purposes and frameworks.
It was once “true” that the Earth was flat, not because the planet’s shape was physically different, but because that interpretation served the purposes and limitations of the people making sense of the world at the time. We don’t passively mirror reality in our minds. Instead, we approach facts with specific intentions that inevitably shape what we notice, how we organize information, and what patterns we find meaningful.
This distinction matters because it reveals something crucial: truth is what’s useful for accomplishing our purposes while remaining accountable to factual constraints. We could debate the meaning of “truth” endlessly—the persistence of centuries-old philosophical debates suggests the concept may be too fundamental to be captured by any single definition. But perhaps truth’s complexity is exactly what makes it so powerful. Rather than searching for the one correct definition, we might ask what we’re actually trying to accomplish when we interpret facts.
Take the Mercator world map that most of us learned from in school. It was created by a 16th-century German cartographer to help European explorers navigate the seas, and it served that purpose perfectly. But the map makes Europe and Africa appear roughly equivalent in size when Africa is actually three times larger. When African leaders recently pushed to replace it with the Equal Earth projection, they weren’t just correcting a geographical error. As one African civic leader explained: “It is more than geography, it’s really about dignity and pride. Maps shape how we see the world, and also how power is perceived.”
This wasn’t simply switching from a “wrong” map to a “right” one. It was recognizing that different purposes—16th-century maritime navigation versus contemporary global understanding—legitimately require different truth-making approaches. The Mercator projection was useful for getting ships safely across oceans. The Equal Earth projection is useful for fostering accurate perceptions of global scale and challenging unconscious biases.
Imagine you’re a poet witnessing an important global event alongside a policy leader and a historian. The leader might extract truths aimed at prevention—patterns that help anticipate similar future occurrences. The historian seeks explanatory coherence—truths that make sense of how we arrived here. You, as a poet, might pursue emotional resonance—truths that capture something essential about the human experience of those events. These aren’t competing claims about the same thing. They’re different truth-projects entirely, each serving distinct purposes and potentially all valid, albeit limited.
This explains why people can witness identical facts yet arrive at genuinely different truths. Think about the last significant disagreement you had with someone close to you. You both experienced the same conversation, yet walked away with completely different interpretations of what happened and what it meant. It’s not necessarily that someone was wrong—you approached the same factual foundation with different concerns, different histories, different purposes for understanding the interaction.
But doesn’t this make truth sound arbitrary? Not if we understand how facts constrain our truth-making, even when they don’t determine it. A useful truth must remain disciplined by factual reality, even as it serves particular purposes. This applies whether we’re talking about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo or attempts to systematically ignore documented historical realities like slavery or genocide. When “truth-making” requires consistently overriding evidence or silencing legitimate perspectives, it usually serves narrow power interests rather than genuine human understanding and growth.
The relationship works more like this: facts provide the raw material, purposes provide the organizing principle, and better truths are those that accomplish intended goals while respecting factual constraints. Truth emerges from the dynamic interaction between what happened and what we’re trying to achieve by thinking about what happened.
This framework suggests that truth is inherently provisional and contextual—not because facts change, but because our purposes and frameworks evolve. What we consider true about historical events shifts as our reasons for understanding the past develop. Scientific truths advance as our predictive and explanatory capabilities become more sophisticated. Personal truths deepen as our self-understanding matures and our life circumstances change.
Rather than seeing this as relativistic chaos, we can recognize it as how humans naturally make meaning. Different legitimate purposes produce different understandings from the same facts. The key is being honest about our aims, clear-eyed about the broader consequences—intended and unintended—and whether our interpretations serve our purposes while remaining grounded in reality.
When we recognize that truth is what’s useful for our purposes, we can ask better questions: What are we trying to achieve when we interpret these facts? Are our purposes clear and worthwhile? Do our resulting truths actually serve those ends? Are we being appropriately constrained by factual reality or overriding it to serve narrower interests?
But here’s where this gets personally challenging: if truth is what’s useful, why do we so often cling to versions of truth about ourselves and others that aren’t just useless, but actively harmful? Consider the person who holds onto the “truth” that they were wronged by someone years ago, despite the fact that nursing that grievance continues poisoning their peace of mind. Or the professional who insists they’re “not a people person,” using this “truth” to avoid meaningful engagement and limit their own growth opportunities.
These “truths” serve no constructive purpose—they impede relationships, constrain possibilities, and create unnecessary suffering. If we took seriously the idea that truth should be useful, shouldn’t we be more selective about which interpretations we choose to hold onto and live by? The facts of what happened remain constant, but we have more choice than we typically recognize in how we construct meaning from those facts.
Stay passionate!
