Can you imagine? Being wrong for hours, sometimes even days was life before the internet and our ability to pull Wikipedia out of our pocket. Before portable computers and our instant ability to resolve factual disputes, writer Ben Tarnoff points out in a New Yorker article on tech privacy how we spent an awful lot of time not knowing.

The difference now? We’re pretty sure we know. But do we really?

Not really say the Buddhists. Even the benefit of Wikipedia cannot unseat the affliction of delusion embedded in our nature. Technology isn’t likely to help the other two afflictions they’ve identified either. The whole set, bluntly dubbed, “The Three Poisons,” includes:

1. Greed/wanting
2. Hatred/aversion
3. Delusion

You can tell you’re in a state of affliction by the way it feels in your body:

1. Greed and wanting feel like a hole in the heart.
2. Hatred and aversion feel like a fire in the heart.
3. And delusion? It feels like the truth.

That last one….it usually takes a beat or two for the meaning to sink in.

Put another way, “Being wrong feels like being right,” says Kathryn Shultz in her enlightening and entertaining book Being Wrong: The Meaning of Error in and Age of Certainty and her equally entertaining TED talk.

Our brains facilitate delusion by constantly skimming through vast amounts of information, looking only for the pieces that confirm our case and skipping all the rest. What’s more, as psychologist Leon Festinger and the author of A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance says, being challenged only makes us double down on our rightness. That’s how we resolve the dissonance. It’s perverse, really, but I know I do it. It just feels so bad and vulnerable to be wrong. Then what? We’re left with no ground to stand on. Sometimes I even get nervous just listening to a podcast that threatens to unravel a belief I hold dear.

The saving grace, though, is that being open to being wrong means we have the opportunity to put something to rights. To that point, it’s a good thing we figured out that corporal punishment is not a great way to get children to behave (in addition to being plain wrong). Besides the opportunity for correction, taking inventory of where we might have possibly gone wrong can also be liberating. While writing this piece I asked myself that very question: what have I gotten wrong in my life? What have I not seen clearly? What have I been so dead certain in my convictions about?

The first thing that came to mind was speed. I always thought time was for beating. When I was younger full of fast-twitch muscle fibers it was fun to finish first. I’m not talking about running races where speed is the point; I’m talking about springing out of bed early, whipping through to-do lists and racing through the day. I was constantly monitoring the clock and nudging life — conversations, hikes, plans, projects, meals, everything — along more swiftly. Underscoring my mastery, I could more often than not guess the time to the minute, as if the mechanisms of a clock were inside me were you to open me up. Then around age 55 my high-twitchiness started getting tired and I couldn’t keep up with internal driver of all this speed. With flagging energy, I began to sense that what was actually driving me was an underlying thrum of disquietude, nipping constantly at my heels. What I got wrong and came to see (ironically very slowly) is that time is not for beating; it’s for living.

One of my biggest lessons on how I could avoid being wrong happened after reading an email from someone and instantly thinking I knew exactly what was going on – you know, the whole substory — how this thing played into that, what they were getting at under the surface, the slick maneuvers they were trying to make, how they were setting me up…the whole thing. I knew it. Being absolutely certain, I dove in aggressively and a brawl broke out. Now when I am seized by such a conviction, I try to remember to do one simple thing: clarify. Probe a little. Say, “Here’s what I am hearing. Do I have that right? Is that what you meant to say?” A simple clarification can save a world of pain.

In the polarized world we find ourselves in right now, just the allowance of the possibility that we might have gotten something a little bit wrong and the other side might, just maybe, have a little bit of a point, is something to work with. A little bit of light.

Ultimately, being open to being wrong is a huge opportunity. Kathryn Shultz describes breaking out of our bubble of rightness as the “single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap we can make.” That seems like a big statement until you consider how right Hitler felt in his convictions about eugenics and a master race.  It’s a reminder that when we catch ourselves feeling absolutely locked onto a belief or a behavior and convinced of our rightness, that’s the cue to remember that being wrong feels exactly like being right. When absolute certainty takes over, it’s a good time to start looking for objective evidence. It’s also a reminder to expect that the best ideas probably also hold the embryos of unfortunate repercussions. Take social media. (What could possibly go wrong?) Just knowing we will absolutely get things wrong and there we are wrong in multiple ways right in this very minute can help us look less defensively for where those wrongs might be.

So, if I were to ask you where might you be getting it wrong right now, what comes to mind?

E