Post by Adesanya Ayotola (@adesanya_ayotola)

THE DELUSIONS WE LIVE BY

One of the most interesting things about human beings is our ability to deceive ourselves and still maintain a reputation for honesty. We convince ourselves that we are always right, that our intentions excuse our actions, that our success is entirely our making and that our failures are always somebody else's fault.

In our families, we sometimes confuse authority with wisdom, age with correctness and sacrifice with entitlement. We expect people to understand us while making little effort to understand them. In relationships, we mistake familiarity for understanding, attraction for compatibility and possession for love.

At work, we believe competence must automatically attract recognition, forgetting that visibility, relationships and workplace politics often influence who gets ahead. As citizens, we blame the government for the condition of our nation while excusing the same dishonesty, indiscipline and selfishness in ourselves when they serve our interests.

Even in success, we delude ourselves into believing that we are entirely responsible for our victories, forgetting the circumstances, opportunities, privileges and people that helped us along the way and when life disappoints us we call it injustice when it is simply reality refusing to obey our expectations. Our greatest delusion is the belief that we see things as they are, rather than as we have been conditioned, positioned or emotionally invested to see them.

The problem is not that we have our biases. It is that we rarely interrogate the ones that benefit us. Maturity begins when we stop asking only what is wrong with other people and start questioning what we might be getting wrong ourselves. So, here is the question: What is one delusion you think we have normalised in our personal lives, families, workplaces or society?

Good morning.....

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