No, Everyone Doesn’t Have Their Own Truth | (#072) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

The phrase sounds reasonable at first, “Everyone has their own truth.” This carries a kind of tone of tolerance and it supposedly signals maturity rather than dogma. It suggests openness, restraint, and an awareness of complexity. For people who have spent time inside complex systems, that phrasing can sound especially wise. When rules collide, when incentives distort behavior, and when certainty gets used as a weapon, skepticism starts to feel earned. [00:48.7]

After watching rigid beliefs cause real damage and pain, flexibility begins to look like growth rather than avoidance, so this phrase gets adopted with little or no resistance, and for a while in your life, it even works to your advantage. It works when the stakes are low, when decisions can be revised, and when consequences arrive quickly enough to correct course.

The problem begins when those conditions no longer apply or hold. Some decisions cannot be undone, or cannot be undone easily. Some costs show up really late. In some situations, reputation, identity or long-term direction are involved in ways that don’t allow for easy course correction, and that’s where the idea really starts to strain.

The strain doesn’t show up as an argument per se or a contradiction. It shows up as a subtle loss of orientation. In those moments, what matters is no longer whether a belief feels fair or respectful, but whether it is accurate. The question becomes whether it describes what’s actually happening rather than what fits the narrative or the story that you’d prefer to tell. [02:01.2]

This episode is about that pressure point. It’s about why the belief that everyone has their own truth begins to fail under real stress and about what that failure costs when it goes unnoticed. The cost doesn’t appear just in theory or debate. It appears in judgment, in decisions that set direction, and in the slow accumulation of consequences that shape a life or an organization. This is often where clarity begins to erode, not in a really obvious way, but silently.

A meaningful and fulfilling life and career starts with truth. Without truth, values don’t guide decisions anymore. They justify them. They become explanations added after the fact rather than standards that shape judgment before a choice is made—and when I use the word “truth” here, I’m not talking about ideology or some kind of moral posturing. I’m talking about what is actually the case, whether it’s convenient or uncomfortable, whether it supports the story or narrative that you’d like to tell or that it disrupts it. [03:07.0]

Truth, in this sense, isn’t aggressive or virtuous. It’s just descriptive. It names what’s actually happening rather than what you wish were happening or what you think should be happening, and this matters because values depend on truth in the same way that navigation depends on a map that actually matches the actual terrain.

When the map drifts too far, even sincere intentions lead you too far off course. You can care deeply, act decisively, and still end up moving in the wrong direction if the underlying picture of reality is distorted—and that’s the ground that this episode starts from, because without truth, clarity fails before anything else can or does. [03:51.2]

Here’s the first point. When people say that truth is relative, it usually sounds modest. It sounds like an admission of limits. It suggests awareness that no single person sees the whole picture, and that tone makes the idea easy to accept, especially for people who deal with a lot of complexity for a living. But if you slow down and you follow the idea carefully, its real meaning changes.

If truth is truly relative, then saying that something is true no longer means that it matches reality. It no longer refers to how things actually are in the world, independent of who is looking. The statement “This is true,” then starts to function very differently. It becomes a way of expressing preference. It signals what feels right and what fits one’s self image, or what seems useful in the moment.

Most people never say this directly, but if that’s the practical implication, then truth becomes merely personal preference or alignment. It becomes merely coherence with your identity. It becomes something like comfort or resonance. You can see the self-defeating nature of the position that all truth is relative and that there is no objective truth by simply asking of that claim, “Is that true?” [05:08.5]

So, under relative truth, the word “truth” stays the same, but the function of that word changes. That change is subtle enough to often pass unnoticed. Nothing dramatic happens when it occurs. Conversations continue. Decisions still get made. Values still get invoked. On the surface, everything looks fine, intact, but underneath, something essential has dropped out.

What disappears is the idea that truth places any kind of constraint on you or your claims. If truth is reduced to mere preference, then there is no longer anything outside your perspective that can correct it. There is no independent reference point that can say that belief does not match what is actually happening. [05:54.4]

Reality then stops serving as a standard and starts serving as material for the narrative, and once that happens, disagreement loses its edge. Evidence loses its force. Facts become mere inputs that can be accepted, reframed, or ignored, depending on how well they fit the narrative or story already in place. Nothing has to yield because nothing is allowed to outrank interpretation—and this is the real loss. It’s not that people disagree more. It’s that disagreement no longer has a way to resolve toward accuracy.

When truth is treated as merely personal, then error stops being something that can be identified and then corrected. It becomes instead something that can always be explained away, rationalized away, and at that point, almost anything can be defended. Any conclusion can be made to work. Any outcome can be justified after the fact. The language of truth might remain, but it no longer performs the role that makes truth useful in the first place. It stops orienting judgment and it starts protecting personal preference. [07:02.2]

Now, that leads to the second main point. Once truth is treated as merely relative, a specific cognitive safeguard disappears. There’s no longer anything outside your own perspective that can correct you. Reality stops acting as a stress test. It no longer presses back when an assumption turns out to be wrong or a story has drifted too far from the facts.

In practical terms, this means feedback weakens. Resistance fades away. The world no longer pushes hard enough to force real revision, and what remains is merely interpretation, and interpretation is flexible in ways that feel helpful in the short term—and that’s why it’s so dangerous—and it allows decisions to move forward without friction and it allows confidence to stay intact even when the underlying picture is actually incomplete, and that flexibility becomes especially tempting under pressure and it gains in power under pressure. [08:00.6]

When ego gets involved, interpretation starts to serve self-protection. When identity feels threatened, it bends toward coherence rather than actual accuracy in tracking the facts. When reputation carries so much weight, interpretation filters what counts as relevant information, and when consequences arrive so much later, interpretation fills the gap with plausible stories that postpone doubt or questioning.

None of this requires any bad faith. In fact, it often happens easily among intelligent people. Strong reasoning skills make it easier to defend a position once you’ve already adopted it unconsciously. Verbal fluency makes explanations feel complete. Pattern recognition supplies just enough evidence to keep a story intact, and over time, these strengths combine to create a buffer between belief and fact, between belief and correction. The danger here is cognitive rather than just moral. [09:03.6]

The issue isn’t dishonesty or manipulation. The issue is insulation. When nothing outside your own framework is allowed to outrank interpretation, then we lose the early warning signs of error. Small mismatches between belief and reality no longer register as problems. They register instead as differences in perspective, and this is how confident error takes form.

It doesn’t arrive through poor reasoning. It arrives through reasoning that never has to confront a firm boundary, that never gets stress-tested without resistance. Confidence just keeps growing while accuracy, in fact, slowly degrades. The person still feels oriented, still feels justified, still feels aligned with their stated values, but what they lose is calibration. [09:55.2]

Reality’s role in thinking is not to affirm your identity or preserve your comfort. Its role is to correct distortion before it becomes too costly. When that role of reality or truth or facts disappears, judgment still remains active, but now it’s untested. Decisions continue to be made, often very decisively, but that mechanism that would normally force revision ends up staying silent, and that silence is the real risk.

When mere interpretation is allowed to just stand alone, intelligence keeps operating while self-correction slowly disappears, and over time, this produces a form of blindness that feels like clarity from the inside even as it drifts further and further from what is actually the case.

Now we get to my third point, which is that the problem becomes more serious when you move from individual judgment to systems or organizations. What could remain manageable at a personal level starts to compound a lot more once decisions affect a lot more people, affect longtime horizons or complex structures. [11:05.2]

Scale changes the way errors end up behaving. In large systems, mistakes don’t correct themselves quickly. Feedback takes a lot longer to arrive, and when it does, it’s often deluded, diluted, delayed, or reshaped as it proceeds upward up the chain. Consequences drift further away from the original decision both in time and in visibility, and by the time an outcome becomes clear, the context that produced it may already have gone.

At the same time, information doesn’t travel neutrally. Counterevidence tends to be filtered before it reaches the apex or the center. Sometimes this happens out of loyalty and sometimes out of fear, and sometimes because people want to be helpful rather than disruptive. But over time, what reaches decision-makers is a refined version of reality, one that emphasizes coherence and reassurance over friction, and thus it is distorted, and you don’t even know it. [12:04.3]

When truth is treated as negotiable in that kind of environment, the effects really compound. Assumptions that would normally be tested much earlier on remain in place a lot longer than they should, and because they’re not forced into contact with corrective pressure, they begin to feel a lot more stable than they should, and what started as a tentative interpretation gradually ends up feeling like the weight of fact—but this is an illusion.

Rationalizations also follow a similar path. Early explanations that were meant to justify a choice after the fact end up guiding future choices. They move from being stories told about decisions to becoming the logic that produces decisions, and once that happens, strategy forms around them, and the system starts to defend the story as if it were reality itself. [12:56.0]

Blind spots expand in a similar way. They don’t announce themselves. They grow quietly as certain questions stop being asked and certain data stops being taken seriously. From the inside, everything appears consistent, but from the outside, the drift is obvious, but outside perspectives rarely carry enough authority by this point to interrupt that kind of momentum.

This is why errors at scale are rarely noticed when they’re small and correctable. Early warning signs get absorbed as noise or get reframed as mere disagreement. By the time the problem becomes really visible, it’s no longer a local issue that can be easily adjusted. It has now become structural, and at that point, correction is a lot more costly and disruptive.

It’s not just because the truth is unclear, but because too much has now been built on top of that false assumption that was never properly tested against reality. The system keeps moving forward, even as its contact with reality weakens, until the gap between belief and consequence becomes impossible to ignore. [14:05.0]

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Fourth, relativism feels protective at first because it softens friction. When truth is treated as negotiable, decisions can move forward without forcing any immediate confrontation. The pressure to resolve tension gives way to the comfort of interpretation, and that comfort itself often looks like and feels like compassion or restraint.

In practical terms, yes, this approach reduces short-term discomfort. It allows a person to avoid admitting error too quickly. It makes it easier to hold on to a favorable view of your own judgment. It creates space to postpone the recognition that someone was misjudged or that a decision favored convenience over durability.

These postponements don’t feel like avoidance at the time. They feel like patience, balance, or fairness. The appeal lies in timing. When truth is flexible, painful recognition doesn’t have to occur right away. A difficult cost can be deferred. A conflict can be reframed as just a difference in perspective. A tradeoff that favored short-term gain can be explained away as a necessary compromise. [16:10.3]

Each of these moves reduces pressure in the present. The problem is that the pressure doesn’t actually disappear. Instead, it accumulates. When this pain is postponed, it doesn’t remain just static. The conditions around it change. More decisions are made on top of that earlier one. More commitments are formed on top of that. More people become invested in that outcome, and by the time the cost is unavoidable, it has spread through the system—and this is why delayed recognition is a lot more damaging than early correction.

Early discomfort limits exposure, but late discomfort arrives after the structure has already been built and so much has been built on those foundations. At that stage, revision feels threatening rather than corrective, and the longer a mistaken assumption remains in place, the more energy goes into defending it and the less flexibility remains to respond when that reality asserts itself. [17:08.8]

So, relativism offers relief by removing urgency. It makes it possible to move past tension without resolving it. That relief can be useful in limited situations, but when it becomes a default posture, then it reshapes judgment in the system. Decisions begin to prioritize immediate stability over long-term alignment with reality and facts, and when the bill finally comes due, it rarely arrives in a clean or manageable form. It arrives tangled up with other consequences that grew in the absence of that kind of correction.

What could have been addressed with modest cost now requires systemic disruption. What once asked for a small admission of error now demands a large reckoning. The protection that relativism offers is real, but it is also temporary. It shields against early discomfort at the price of later rigidity. By the time the pain becomes unavoidable, the system that needs to respond has lost much of its ability to adapt. [18:12.8]

Now the fifth point, which is about the real cost of this. The real cost of all this is not disagreement or discomfort. Disagreement is normal, and in many cases, it’s healthy. The deeper problem is loss of calibration. When calibration is lost, thinking no longer stays aligned with what’s actually happening even though it may still feel coherent from the inside.

Calibration depends on allowing some things to be definitively true, objectively true. It requires the assumption that certain claims can be checked against reality and facts and found wanting. When that assumption is removed, self-correction weakens and then disappears. Errors no longer stand out as errors. They appear instead as alternative interpretations that don’t really require revision. [19:03.3]

As this continues, humility erodes in a specific way. It doesn’t disappear as arrogance or bluster. It fades instead as a subtle certainty that one’s perspective is as good as any other, and therefore, not subject to or need to need for correction. The mind remains active and articulate, but it stops treating reality as an authority. The confidence that you feel remains high, while accuracy becomes harder and harder to measure.

This distinction really matters. Intelligence doesn’t vanish in this process. Reasoning skills remain intact. Vocabulary stays sharp. The ability to justify a position may even actually improve, because you’re smart. Your reasoning and rationalization skills are still there. What disappears, though, is the feedback that keeps those abilities tethered to the real world, to the world that they are meant to describe. [19:57.3]

Over time, as confidence separates from accuracy, decisions still feel deliberate. Explanations still sound persuasive. The internal sense of confidence remains strong. What changes, though, is the relationship between clarity and actual outcomes. When results fail to match expectations, the gap is simply explained away rather than further examined—and this is how clarity fades without obvious warning signs.

There’s no single moment where judgment just collapses. There’s no dramatic failure of thinking, at least most of the time. Instead, the system that once detected a mismatch between belief and consequences, stops functioning reliably. Small errors pass through unnoticed. From the inside, this feels like stability, because the internal signals remain calm and consistent, and there’s little reason to suspect misalignment. The absence of friction is then mistaken for correctness, and the danger here, again, is cumulative. [20:57.2]

Each decision made without recalibration reinforces the next decision. Each explanation that avoids contact with reality, and facts and truth, makes the future correction harder, and over time, the cost shows up, not just as confusion, but as misplaced certainty.

That’s why the loss of calibration is so difficult to detect and so damaging once it’s established. It allows intelligence to keep operating while slowly losing its grip on the conditions that it’s actually meant to navigate, and by the time the consequences are evident, become very clear, the habits that produced them are already too well-established, and the path back to accuracy feels far less obvious than it once would have.

Now the sixth and final point is to notice that, at this higher level, the thing to do turns toward a single question. It’s not a dramatic question and it doesn’t flatter the person asking it. It’s also not the question that most people reach for first. Instead of starting with belief or alignment, this question starts with description. [22:03.0]

The question is simple: “What’s the truth here? What’s actually the case?” independent of what feels justified, independent of what would be convenient, independent of how you would prefer the situation to resolve.

This question tends to slow people down. It doesn’t invite a position. It doesn’t reward fluency. It doesn’t offer immediate reassurance. Instead, it asks for contact with reality before interpretation takes over, and that contact often carries some discomfort because it introduces constraint. Certain options fall away once facts are taken seriously. Certain narratives lose their force once evidence is allowed to speak without being reframed or reinterpreted—and that narrowing is precisely why the question works. [22:52.1]

Without constraint, thinking drifts too far. With constraint, thinking has a surface to push back against. Correction becomes possible, because now there’s something solid enough to register error. Good friction returns, and with it, proper orientation, and this kind of friction isn’t punishment. It’s actually information. It tells you when an assumption doesn’t hold anymore. It tells you when a strategy no longer fits the true conditions. It tells you when confidence has outrun accuracy, and without that signal, judgment becomes merely self-referential, but with it, judgment regains its necessary external reference point.

The question also changes the order of operations. Instead of beginning with what feels right or what would preserve the story, it begins with what’s actually happening. Values still matter, but they come later. They respond to truth rather than compete with it. When values enter after reality has been acknowledged, then they can guide action without distorting perception, and this is why the question restores proper orientation. [23:59.5]

It reopens a channel that relativism closes. It allows reality to resume its role as a corrective force rather than a resource to be harnessed or shaped, and over time, this restores proper calibration. Confidence becomes more tentative where it should be tentative. Conviction becomes firmer where the evidence supports it, and there’s no guarantee of comfort here.

The question doesn’t promise ease. What it offers instead is reliability. It gives thinking a way to reconnect with conditions as they actually are rather than as they’re explained or as you want them to be—and that reconnection is the starting point for sound judgment, especially when the stakes are high and the margin for error is thin.

Once the question of truth returns to the center, a second question follows almost immediately: “If this is true, then what should be done?” and this is where many people just jump to and try to start from there, because action feels urgent and reflection can feel like delay, but action without a clear view of what’s actually happening tends to just produce mere motion rather than direction. [25:09.1]

Here we run into a basic philosophical distinction. Facts describe what is. Values guide what ought to be done. Confusing those two creates predictable problems. When values are used to determine facts, then perception becomes too selective. When facts are treated as if they already contain some moral conclusion, then judgment becomes automatic and rigid.

So, values do not replace truth. They, in fact, presuppose it. Truth comes first because it sets the conditions within which any responsible choice must operate. A map doesn’t tell you where you should go, but it must tell you where you are. Without that, even sincere values become detached from reality and start functioning instead as mere rationalizations. [26:00.0]

Once the facts are clear, they still may not decide the action. Many real decisions involve tradeoffs, competing goods, and limited options. That’s the point where values enter, and they do so as decision infrastructure. They define what counts as a cost, what counts as acceptable risk, and what counts as a line that should never be crossed. They’re not slogans or identity markers. They’re the structure that allows an “ought” to be grounded in an accurate “is.”

I want to make this concrete with a brief example because this pattern rarely announces itself in theory. It shows up instead in real decisions made by capable people who are trying to do their job well. Let me tell you about a past client.

This person was a strong leader who had built a strong track record and had good reasons to trust his own judgment.  Early on, a few signals appeared that something wasn’t working as expected. They were inconvenient signals, and they came from people that were much more junior, so they were treated as just another perspective. Nothing was obviously wrong, and the explanations on hand felt coherent enough to move on. [27:09.3]

Over time, though, more decisions were made on top of those early interpretations, and each one made sense on its own. Each one fit the story already in place. Because nothing external was allowed to challenge that story with any kind of real force, the needed correction never happened. By the time the cost became visible and impossible to ignore, it wasn’t a small issue anymore that could just be adjusted easily. It had become systemic, and reversing it meant admitting that an early foundational assumption had been wrong.

The failure there wasn’t bad intent or lack of intelligence. It was the absence of correction when correction was still cheap. Reality wasn’t allowed to push back early on, so it pushed back later, and by then, the options were a lot more narrow and the costs much higher. [27:59.4]

That brings us back to the core claim. A meaningful and fulfilling career and life starts with truth. When truth loses its role, values don’t just disappear. They stop guiding action and start post hoc justifying things after the fact.

Before asking what matters most, slow down and ask a deeper question: “What’s actually the case here? What’s the truth here? What’s the reality” even if the answer makes the next step harder. [28:29.8]