Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

and other family members through constant apologizing and explaining. But it
was too late. Her father passed away and her family would never be the
same.
It turned out Meredith wasn’t alone. As she describes in her
autobiography, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory, throughout the
1980s, many women accused male family members of sexual abuse only to
turn around and recant years later. Similarly, there was a whole swath of
people who claimed during that same decade that there were satanic cults
abusing children, yet despite police investigations in dozens of cities, police
never found any evidence of the crazy practices described.
Why were people suddenly inventing memories of horrible abuse in
families and cults? And why was it all happening then, in the 1980s?
Ever play the telephone game as a kid? You know, you say something in
one person’s ear and it gets passed through like ten people, and what the last
person hears is completely unrelated to what you started with? That’s
basically how our memories work.
We experience something. Then we remember it slightly differently a few
days later, as if it had been whispered and misheard. Then we tell somebody
about it and have to fill in a couple of the plot holes with our own
embellishments to make sure everything makes sense and we’re not crazy.
And then we come to believe those little filled-in mental gaps, and so we tell
those the next time too. Except they’re not real, so we get them a little bit
wrong. And we’re drunk one night a year later when we tell the story, so we
embellish it a little bit more—okay, let’s be honest, we completely make up
about one-third of it. But when we’re sober the next week, we don’t want to
admit that we’re a big fat liar, so we go along with the revised and newly
expanded drunkard version of our story. And five years later, our absolutely,
swear-to-god, swear-on-my-mother’s-grave, truer-than-true story is at most
50 percent true.
We all do this. You do. I do. No matter how honest and well-intentioned
we are, we’re in a perpetual state of misleading ourselves and others for no
other reason than that our brain is designed to be efficient, not accurate.
Not only does our memory suck—suck to the point that eyewitness
testimony isn’t necessarily taken seriously in court cases—but our brain
functions in a horribly biased way.