Competing Truths: How to Choose a Helpful Story Without Pretending It’s the Only One

Your brain wants one story. Reality offers many.

This is the tension at the heart of everything we have covered in this series. Your mind is built to simplify. It takes the buzzing, contradictory, irreducibly complex mess of any given moment and compresses it into a single narrative — a headline it can act on quickly. That compression is not a flaw. It is how you get through the day without being paralysed by possibility.

But it has a cost. The single narrative feels like the whole truth. And once it does, you stop looking for the others.

Think of it this way. Your mind hates open tabs. It wants one window, full screen, filling the entire display. One interpretation. One story. One verdict. And once that window is maximised, you forget there were ever other tabs open behind it.

This final post is about learning to keep two tabs open at once. Not twenty. Not an infinite scroll of “well, anything could be true.” Two. Two competing narratives, held side by side, long enough for you to make a deliberate choice about which one to act on.

That is the skill. Not finding the right truth. Holding two and choosing the functional one.

Two People, One Event, Two Realities

Imagine two colleagues leave the same meeting. One thinks: “That went terribly. My idea got questioned and nobody backed me up.” The other thinks: “That was a good discussion. People engaged with the idea and stress-tested it, which means they took it seriously.”

Same meeting. Same facts. Two completely different realities.

Neither person is lying. Neither is delusional. They are each constructing a narrative from the same raw material, and each narrative is defensible. The difference is not intelligence or accuracy. The difference is which assumptions each person brought into the room — and which details those assumptions made salient.

The first person assumed: questions equal criticism, silence from allies means abandonment, and a good meeting is one where everyone immediately agrees. The second person assumed: questions equal engagement, silence might mean people are thinking, and a good meeting is one where ideas get tested.

Same data. Different assumptions. Different worlds.

A story can feel true because it is familiar — not because it is accurate.

This is the landscape we are operating in. Not a world where one person is right and the other is wrong, but a world where multiple defensible interpretations coexist at all times, and the one you land on shapes everything downstream: your emotion, your behaviour, your relationships, your sense of yourself.

The Trap: Relativism vs Rigidity

When people first encounter this idea — that multiple truths can coexist about the same event — they tend to fall into one of two traps.

Trap one: relativism. “If everyone’s truth is equally valid, then nothing matters. There are no standards. Everything is just perspective.” This is comforting in a way — it dissolves conflict by dissolving meaning. But it also collapses accountability. If every interpretation is equally true, then nobody can ever be wrong, nobody can be held to a standard, and the concept of “better” or “worse” interpretation disappears. That is not wisdom. That is intellectual surrender.

Trap two: rigidity. “My interpretation is reality. The way I see it is the way it is. If others see it differently, they are wrong or uninformed.” This feels strong. It provides certainty. But it is fragile, because it cannot accommodate new data without cracking. Rigid interpretations do not bend. They break. And when they break, the person breaks with them.

The third position — the one this entire series has been building toward — is neither relativism nor rigidity. It is what I would call defended subjectivity. It goes like this: “I know my interpretation is partial. I know other interpretations exist and may be equally defensible. But I have examined my assumptions, weighed the evidence, considered the consequences, and I am choosing this narrative as my operating framework — for now — because it is both justifiable and functional. And I am willing to update it when new data arrives.”

That is not wishy-washy. That is structurally humble and operationally decisive. You hold uncertainty in one hand and commitment in the other.

Assumptions Are the Hidden Levers

Here is something most people miss. Subjectivity does not enter at the level of the final conclusion. It enters much earlier — at the level of the assumptions you did not notice you were making.

Consider the sentence: “This meeting went badly.”

That sounds like a fact. It does not feel like an interpretation. But embedded inside it are at least three hidden assumptions:

• That the tone of the questions meant disapproval (assumption: tone = intention).
• That the silence from certain people meant they disagreed (assumption: silence = judgement).
• That being questioned meant being criticised (assumption: questions = attacks).

Each of those assumptions is debatable. Each could be wrong. But they are doing the real work. The “fact” that the meeting went badly is downstream of assumptions that were never examined.

This is where the leverage is. You cannot change what happened in the meeting. You can identify the assumptions you brought into the room and ask whether they are the only defensible ones. Almost always, they are not.

The mind confuses coherence with correctness. A story that hangs together well feels true — even when it is built on unexamined assumptions.

The “Two Narratives” Skill

This is the core teaching of this post, and in many ways, the core teaching of the series. Everything before this — the distortion channels, the internalisation mechanisms, the filter protocols — was preparation for this single skill.

The skill is simple to describe and difficult to execute under emotional load. Here it is:

When you notice yourself locked onto a single interpretation, deliberately generate at least one alternative narrative that is equally defensible. Then compare the two on three dimensions:

1. Evidence-fit. What facts does each narrative explain well? What facts does it struggle to account for? A narrative that requires you to ignore or dismiss multiple data points is a weaker narrative — even if it feels more convincing.
2. Assumptions. What must be true for each narrative to hold? Write these out. The narrative with fewer hidden, untestable assumptions is usually the more honest one.
3. Consequence. What does each story make you do next? What behaviour does it drive? And where does that behaviour lead over the next week, the next month, the next year?

Then ask the central question: “Would someone reasonable, looking at this same situation, be able to convey a different but equally truthful impression?”

If the answer is yes — and it almost always is — then you have room to choose. Not the narrative that feels best. Not the one that hurts least. The one that is at least as justifiable and more functional.

Three Examples in Depth

The Competing Truths Scorecard

The Assumption Hunt

What This Is Not

Choose the story that makes you braver and more accurate — not just the one that makes you feel better.

Frequently Asked Questions

“But what if my negative story is correct?”

Then the experiment gives you data. The Scorecard does not ask you to reject your default narrative — it asks you to test it against an alternative. If the evidence strongly favours the painful version, you act on the painful version. But in my clinical experience, most anxiety-driven narratives are exaggerated forecasts dressed in certainty. They are worst-case scenarios presented as base rates. The Scorecard does not change the facts. It reveals whether your narrative is built on all the facts or just the threatening ones.

“How do I avoid naive optimism?”

The functional test requires justifiability, not positivity. Your alternative narrative must be defensible — grounded in real evidence, built on testable assumptions. “Everything will be fine” is not a competing truth. It is a wish. “Based on my track record and the available evidence, this is more likely to go adequately than catastrophically” is a competing truth. The criterion is: at least as justifiable, and more functional. If it is not justifiable, it fails the test — no matter how good it feels.

“What if I can generate endless narratives?”

Two is enough. The point is not to catalogue every possible interpretation. The point is to break the monopoly of the default narrative by introducing one serious competitor. Once you have two — your default and one honest alternative — you have enough to make a deliberate choice. Then choose, and test. If the test produces data that changes the picture, update. You do not need a hundred tabs open. You need two.

“Isn’t this just overthinking?”

No. Overthinking is looping through the same narrative repeatedly, gathering reassurance, never landing. This is ten minutes of deliberate, structured analysis — then action. The Scorecard has an endpoint: “my functional choice for now.” You write it down, you act on it, and you move. Overthinking avoids action. This tool demands it.

Key Takeaways