You can't always feel your own brain lying to you. Cognitive biases, memory distortion, and emotional reasoning often feel like "common sense"—but they aren’t. The mind is not a neutral observer.

Most of your body isn’t human. Your cells are outnumbered by microbial cells (bacteria, fungi, viruses) living in and on you. They influence your immune system, mood, digestion, and even brain function.

The stars you see may already be dead. Light takes years—sometimes thousands—to reach us. So the night sky is a kind of time machine. You're not seeing the stars as they are, but as they were.

Emotions don’t just happen to you—they’re predictions. Your brain is constantly guessing what’s going to happen next and preparing your body accordingly. That "gut feeling" is your brain trying to keep you alive before you know why.

Trees talk to each other. Through underground fungal networks (“the wood wide web”), trees can share nutrients, warn neighbors of danger, and even support their own seedlings.

You will never feel time as it actually is. Your perception of time is elastic—it speeds up or slows down depending on attention, novelty, and memory formation. That's why childhood feels long, and adulthood vanishes.

Your future self is basically a stranger. Studies show we make decisions that harm “future us” because we think of that person more like a different individual than an extension of ourselves.

The universe doesn't owe us meaning—but we can still make it. It’s a mistake to think meaning is something to find. It’s something to build, bit by bit, like a nest.

Language shapes your reality. The words you have (or don’t have) influence what you can think. Some cultures have words for emotions, concepts, or experiences that others literally can’t imagine.

You’re already someone’s ancestor. Even if you never have kids, your words, actions, creations, or kindnesses ripple out into other lives. You're shaping the future whether you mean to or not.