I recently had a stronger experience of the solipsistic intuition that the only thing you can really be certain of is your own experience. This definitely could be just another platitude masked as a profound insight, but it has served as a helpful reminder that experience is probably the most important factor in normative decision-making about my personal well-being.
You are the only one really experiencing your experience. Imagine that you feel happy, and that you’re really aware of the fact that you feel happy and of the positive feelings washing through you at that moment, but that you also happen to be in an fMRI machine indicating that the neurochemical reactions running through your brain corresponds to how it feels to be sad. Who is right? The MRI data shows what it shows, but I’m inclined to think that if you really feel that you are happy, then you are, regardless of other metrics indicating otherwise.
I don’t think this scenario has or will take place in real life, but it is to demonstrate that you are the ultimate arbiter of your internal state, even if you’re not sure how to describe it in words. This has had a meaningful impact on how I think about advice from others and evaluate information. There are so many voices telling us what to do, often contradicting each other, to the point where I sometimes forget what my own opinions and values on a topic are. What has helped me, at least in part, is being self-aware about the fact that anyone has a chance of being completely wrong about how doing something will affect you, and that this skepticism can be a virtue.
Descartes, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, expressed that most of the beliefs he had acquired throughout his life could be false, and that he could only be certain of the fact that his thinking was what gave way to existence. Similarly, in a less abstract vein and without diving into deep conceptual weeds, I feel confident in asserting that we can only really be certain of how making certain choices impacts us.
Does a plant-based diet work for you, even if many of your friends say it will result in you feeling great? Try it out for yourself and make some observations. Maybe you feel awful. Maybe get some bloodwork, some numbers on how your body is faring objectively before you make a final decision on whether or not to continue? You could also stick with it and see if you actually start to feel better after some time. But if you don’t, maybe you never will, and your body just reacts differently to those of your friends. We should be dubious of one-size fits all, experiential evidence apart from our own, until it’s proven correct.
Asking for help is super important, as is recognizing the ways in which both unsolicited advice and genuine efforts to aid can still hurt us.
____________________________________________
Some material that has inspired this thinking:
‘The Advice Epidemic’ - https://www.theminimalists.com/convince/
‘Pâro: The Feeling That Everything You Do Is Somehow Wrong’ - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7l2hUp0CkQ
"Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it." -Andre Gide