Crossposted from https://substack.com/home/post/p-183478095 

Epistemic status: Personal experience with a particular failure mode of reasoning and introspection that seems to appear within different philosophical frameworks (discussed here are rationality and Tibetan Buddhism), involving intolerance of felt uncertainty, over-indexing on epistemic rigour, compulsive questioning of commitments, and moralisation of "correct" thinking itself. 

If you do this correctly, you’ll be safe from error.

This is the promise I’ve been chasing for years: across Sufi treatises, Western philosophical texts, Buddhist meditation halls, rationalist forums. Each framework seems to offer its own version: think rigorously enough, examine yourself honestly enough, surrender deeply enough, and (here my anxiousness steps in, with its own interpretations) you’ll finally achieve certainty. You won’t ask yourself whether you’ve got it all wrong anymore. You’ll know that you’re doing it right, taking the right path, being the right sort of person. 

This isn’t what I believed consciously. I would, confidently, say that certainty is unattainable, and that it's better to keep one’s mind agile and open to new evidence. This seemed like the only respectable position to me. My behaviour, however, has suggested a less relaxed attitude: relentless rumination, nose-length scrutiny of my motives, endless reassurance-seeking through rumination and feedback, and an inability to fully commit to, but also fully leave behind, any framework I’ve encountered.

This has come with some heavy costs.

The price of over-indexing on epistemic rigour

Oscillating between frameworks

The primary consequence: a sort of analytical paralysis in my spiritual commitments. For a long time I saw this as avoiding premature foreclosure, but now I suspect that it actually comes from needing certainty before acting: needing to be as sure as possible that this is the right path, the right community, the right teacher, before committing fully (which for me meant not only practicing it seriously, as I did, but also explicitly excluding other possibilities). I've long had a deep anxiety about my beliefs, as if I had to protect them against every possible objection so that the ground itself isn't pulled away from beneath my feet, demanding a radical re-evaluation of my entire identity.

There was a lot of distrust. Staying in only one tradition and learning nothing about the others didn’t seem okay, because what if it wasn’t the right tradition for me, or what if sticking rigidly to any tradition is spiritually sub-optimal, or what if it’s actually an ancient cult that can only perpetuate its belief system by isolating its members? And yet, sampling all the meditation techniques, and choosing whichever technique seems to work best, also didn’t seem okay, because that would be mystical window-shopping and therefore disrespectful to the traditions (so went my thinking).

At the same time, I couldn’t allow myself to drop any tradition before going deep enough into it (in thought or practice), which would take at least ten years or so, because then I would be abandoning it prematurely too.

In my attempt to figure out the perfect balance of curiosity and commitment, self-reliance and trust for my teachers, respect for tradition and intellectual openness, I ended up oscillating between frameworks of judgment. Whichever one I was in, I doubted whether I should be there.

Monitoring for hidden moral failures

Another consequence has been an exhausting internal hyper-vigilance. It is like having an internal surveillance system that inspires constant terror: a terror of self-deceiving, of being hypocritical or insincere, of seeing myself as more morally motivated than I am, of doing good things for other people to virtue-signal rather than to do good. After a few hours of introspection, I can often (mostly) reassure myself of my sincerity; but in the moment, while standing before another person, I am confused, distrustful of myself, afraid that I will unintentionally lie to them. 

Reading my recent series on introspection again, there is, at the moment, nothing significant I would change in what I have written (although I'm less sure that I’ve been embodying the spirit I described—the spirit of attending to moment-to-moment experience without judgment or analysis). I still think openness is crucial, still believe in seeking out criticism, still think self-deception is better avoided.

But now I am much more conscious of the ways this approach—of internally saying something about the self, wondering about what we’ve said, then circling back to it again and again, to paraphrase Escher—can harm someone. Rigorous self-examination can easily turn into unreasonable discomfort with uncertainty, and that, I suspect, contributes to the very mental noise I have been trying to cut through.

Here is the trap: you start examining your thinking to assure yourself that you aren't self-deceiving. The examination reveals spots of darkness, like shadows on an X-ray, so you look even closer. This reveals even larger, more ominous spots of darkness, and the longer you look, the more they expand. Confused by your inability to ascertain what they are, you turn your gaze on your examination, and see a space of darkness there too. 

The issue isn't that you haven't thought about it carefully enough. It's that "carefully enough" has no floor, and you're falling. If you don't allow yourself to stop, you will never land on solid ground. 

Practicing under relentless self-scrutiny

It has also made it much more difficult to pursue my spiritual practice.

Especially when I was more firmly rooted in Tibetan Buddhism, I worried a lot. Is this paralysing doubt, or inquisitive doubt? Are my reservations about a practice something I must overcome? Are my criticisms of a given teacher or practice justified, or are they just my ego seeking faults, my pride giving me excessive confidence in my thinking, my cultural conditioning with its fixed ideas about critical thinking and authority? Perhaps I would have to cultivate radical epistemic humility, abandon any notion of figuring things out myself, in order to learn anything. Sometimes I convinced myself of this, telling myself I was too confused to see anything clearly. Any extreme proved unsustainable.

From a journal entry during this period, during a two-month retreat: "My identity is composed of components that seem to be arbitrarily chosen. There are a few things I am deeply committed to, like my values, but everything else seems anything but necessary. I am painfully aware that for every pursuit I undertake, I can come up with a dozen reasons not to do it. The only thing that seems obviously, undeniably meaningful to me is my spiritual practice, and yet I am unable to focus on it or pursue it continuously because I don't fully believe in this tradition, and have paralysing doubts about which practice is right for me."

Reading this now, I can see the trap: the very fact that I couldn't be sure I was making the best possible choice made my commitments feel arbitrary. If I couldn't prove a choice was absolutely necessary, with impeccable justification, it felt illegitimate, lacking in weight, too easy to destabilise by new ideas or counter-evidence. I could get temporary relief through my self-criticism, but then my mind would find another weak spot, another objection I had to defend against. 

Since no choice could meet my standard of justification, I was stuck in perpetual internal vacillation. The problem wasn't that I was aware of other traditions, but that it wasn't actually possible to choose one correctly enough for my taste. I practiced Tibetan Buddhism as traditionally as possible for five years, but despite my outer committedness, doubt haunted me throughout. The uncertainty I felt made my commitment feel dangerously provisional and fragile. 

The altar of epistemic rigour

When I started learning about rationality, it was partly with the intention of engaging more carefully and honestly with the mystical traditions I’d been studying. But it soon morphed into something else. The new refrain became: am I being epistemically rigorous enough? 

Am I engaging in motivated reasoning? Can I still treat spiritual experiences as epistemically valuable, or is that suspect too? Am I, given what I’ve learned about confabulation and introspective bias, thinking in the right way about my own thoughts and feelings? And so on and so forth. I replaced one idée fixe with another. And I haven’t dropped it yet: a part of me still believes I just haven’t thought about any of these topics carefully or long enough, that with some more thinking, I’ll figure it out.

As a result, I am in a rather complicated liminal space: multiple internal frameworks, all with their own value, but all of them suspicious of each other and of themselves.

If this isn’t scrupulosity, it may just be perfectionism: even when I try to keep my mind open, that becomes another task I must perform to the highest standard, requiring continual self-monitoring to ensure that I am keeping it open in the optimal way. Paradoxically, the very thing making me want to submit to the Tibetan Buddhist worldview seems to be what makes me so concerned with epistemics now. I suspect that, if I were Sufi, I would be wondering whether my thoughts are whispers from Shaitan.

Perhaps the problem isn’t the correctness of any given framework, but this compulsive, certainty-seeking relationship to frameworks themselves; this demand that, whatever system I engage with, I must be certain that I am thinking and acting and doing everything in the correct way—either thinking fully for myself, or being perfectly open and epistemically humble, or maintaining exactly the right balance between openness and self-trust.

But where did this compulsion come from? What made me believe that perfect thinking was possible, or that it should be my highest priority? To answer this, I’ve been examining something that I’ve been taking as self-evident: the value of truth-seeking itself.

For me, this meant asking myself: do I actually care that much about Truth, and Truth alone?

Questioning the primacy of Truth (or at least, of epistemic optimisation)

I am not so sure anymore. In principle, I would much prefer to have beliefs that accord with reality, and I strongly prefer not believing that an AI-generated video is real, and if God exists, I would much rather believe that He does, especially if Pascal was right and Hell exists. But I’m not so sure that any of these preferences are really about a cool-minded pursuit of Truth.

What I notice, instead, is something that seems more intuitive and independent of any conscious reasons: an urge to interrogate certain questions more deeply, a difficulty letting certain questions go, a need for my beliefs to not contradict each other logically and a sense of disturbance when they do, a desire to understand the world better so that I can change it in what I feel is a more positive direction, and a sort of fascination with the unknown within myself and within others, for which I have never needed justification.

And beyond this, I know I have multiple other values and desires. I want a heart that is open to others, and that I am deeply in touch with, rather than solely with the head; I want to experience beautiful sights and be moved by them; I want a mind that is wakeful and responsive to new information, but also not so weighed down by its own self-scrutiny; I want to reflect when it is time to reflect, and act decisively when it is time for that; I want to be able to connect with all kinds of people and be a positive force in their lives; I want to feel deep commitment to something in life.

This, to me, sounds much more like different facets of another overarching, more heartfelt desire: I want to live well. And it seems that my fascination with everything from philosophy and rationality to Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism, have been ways of serving that. But the belief that I should want to have correct beliefs over and above all these other things, this sense that I cannot hold any belief that has not survived brutal interrogation, has been overpowering everything.

For the first time, I am wondering: if optimising for epistemic hygiene gets in the way of honouring these other values, perhaps it isn’t always Truth that should win.

What would it mean to live in this way, seeking truth in service of life? I don’t really know. It may well be a cognitive skill issue, something I can learn with time. Or perhaps my mistake is treating introspection and reasoning both as moral purity tests, not as means to a more expansive end. There’s probably a way of relating to them which is more effective and less psychologically costly; if there is, I would love to hear about it.

If you recognise this pattern in yourself, here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: you don't need to be sure that your motivations are pure before you can help someone. You don't need to purify yourself of every negative thought for others to be safe around you. You don't need to resolve every meta-level epistemological doubt before you can commit to something. You're allowed to spend some time thinking about it, find a position that's good enough (for now), and then act.

For now, I am starting with some questions to remind myself of what matters when I’m lapsing back into this pattern, and which I hope will be valuable for others with a similarly compulsive, perfectionistic thinking style:

Notice when you’re optimising your reasoning as a way to feel as secure as possible, not just to be incrementally less wrong.

Notice when your truth-seeking has become compulsive, something distressing, something you believe you must do to feel okay.

Notice when your demand for airtight arguments hinders you from taking action or committing to something—whether to a path, a profession, a partner, or anything else.

These observations won't end the pattern. Still, I have hope that naming it can lessen the power of the inner morality police, which currently patrols our thoughts and punishes us for our supposed mental transgressions. When you can see it for what it is—an anxiety-driven compulsion, not a necessary guarding of your conscience—you can see through the illusion that one more hour of research, one more year of thinking, one more decade of exploration, will finally give you the clarity you think you need. They won't.