The Easiest Person to Fool

What almost became a retirement listicle taught me about thoughts, fictions, and who actually checks your story.

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I sat down to write about retirement mistakes. The usual list. Underestimate healthcare costs. Move too fast. Chase weather, views, and real estate instead of people. Standard advice column material, the kind that gives internet writing a bad name.

Upon closer inspection, the reordering kept revealing the same mistake wearing different clothes.

Someone pictures a life. The picture feels good, feels true, the obvious next move. Action is taken without first checking this picture against anything outside their own head. No trial run. No outside voice. No third party. Just a story that felt real, forgetting they were the one telling it. And when told convincingly enough, that’s apparently the only qualification required.

I recognized this pattern because five years of meditation practice has forced me to watch it happen at a much smaller scale, thousands of times, in my own skull.

The instruction in meditation is simple enough. Close your eyes, breathe, and pay attention. Notice a thought. Then watch it go, because you can’t chase it and more are on the way.

At first I assumed the thoughts would be important. Some insight about work, a problem I hadn’t solved, something that needed writing down before I lost it. I treated my own mind like a stock ticker, convinced that if I looked away, I’d miss the trade of a lifetime. So I’d sit down to be calm and still while anxious about missing a thought I was sure I needed to act on.

Then came that common meditative experience: after months of anxious sitting, the thought I was so sure was significant would arrive, sit there for a second, and dissolve into the next thought, which felt exactly as urgent and was usually about something else entirely. Lunch. A conversation from three days ago. An itch. I learned there’s no editor back there sorting the premonitions from the noise. Turns out it’s all noise, and the sensation of importance wasn’t attached to the content of the thought at all. It was just how thoughts feel when you’re inside them, every single time, indiscriminately.

That’s a humbling thing to sit with. Not because the thoughts were wrong, exactly, but because I realized I had never once checked whether they were right. I just felt the pull and assumed the pull meant something because it was mine.

Which is where Yuval Harari’s argument in Sapiens started rearranging itself in my head. Harari’s claim is that humans run the planet not because we’re smarter than other animals in some raw sense, but because we’re the only species that can believe in things that don’t physically exist and get millions of strangers to believe in them too. Money. Nations. Corporations. A dollar bill is worthless paper that we’ve collectively agreed to treat as real, and that agreement is strong enough to move ships and build cities. It’s an extraordinary trick, and for Harari it’s the whole reason we’re not still forty of us to a valley, foraging.

What doesn’t get said enough about that trick: it only works, it only stays sane, because it’s shared and proven over and over. A dollar’s fiction gets checked by millions of transactions a day. If it stops working, the whole system feels it and corrects. A corporation’s fiction gets checked by courts and shareholders and competitors who have every incentive to find the cracks. The fiction survives because it’s constantly being stress tested by people who don’t already believe it.

Our private thoughts get none of that. Nobody audits the story we tell ourselves about why this house, this weather, this person, this version of our future is the right one. Our own imagination is the only one validating the story, which makes us the only shareholder, the only vote, the only signature on the annual report saying everything’s fine. No surprise these thoughts pass review. We already agreed with ourselves before the meeting started.

So the retirement mistakes I’d originally sat down to list weren’t really about underestimating costs or overestimating weather. They were about the same machine that builds money and nations, running solo, in one skull, with no outside vote. Someone pictures the bigger house, the better climate, the lower cost of living, and this picture feels complete because it was generated by the same undiscriminating process that generates every other thought, confident or not, true or not. It feels like a plan because it feels like something, and something is all a thought has ever had to feel like to get taken seriously.

I’ve watched people move for the weather and miss their friends within a season. I’ve watched people stay in relationships held together by nothing but the sentence “we can make it work,” repeated with enough conviction that conviction started standing in for evidence. In both cases the fiction worked fine right up until it met a territory that hadn’t agreed to match the map.

Plenty of my fellow retirees report the same thing: a new disdain for the BS they spent careers and younger years absorbing without question. I didn’t expect that to be one of the dividends of leaving a job, but it is. The mind that generated all that BS-tolerance hasn’t stopped, though. Thoughts still arrive dressed in the same urgent costume they always wore. What’s different is that the costume doesn’t fool me the way it used to. I know now it’s just the mind doing what it evolved to do, manufacturing urgency it can’t actually back up.

So before I act on a thought these days, I check it against something outside my own head. A while back I decided, with total conviction, that I was meant to be a photographer. Bought the deluxe rig. It sat in its bag with nary a picture taken. Eventually I asked a friend who actually shoots for a living how he does it. Most people think they can become photographers overnight, he told me, only to realize how hard and inconvenient it actually is. I had a camera. I wasn’t that guy. Sell it on Facebook, he said, it’ll be gone in a day, then go buy another bike, since I’d actually use that. I sold it that week.

I’m still the easiest person in the room to fool. I’ve just gotten a little harder to fool by myself.