I'm sharing an 𝕏 Thread here for value sharing🌟 ## “Revealed Preferences” might be the single most transformative concept I ever learned. No other idea has ever changed my life so drastically. --- I learned the term when I was 24. I was living in a place I didn't like, with people I wasn't fond of, working a job I didn't love, or at least thought of as being beneath my potential. so this idea hit me like a ton of bricks. --- The idea that I might actually like it, or that this way of living served some psychological drive or met some need, was extremely jarring. I would go blue in the face telling people how much I didn't like this. Could this concept explain why I was staying there? --- Turns out, it did. Mortified by my motivations being explained so simply, and embarrassed at how I'd been deluding myself, I tried to take the next step—asking myself what I really wanted. --- Did I want to live there forever? Did I want to keep company with these people for the rest of my life? Is this the work I felt I was supposed to do every day? No. But I was acting like the answer was yes. --- I had to reckon with the idea that I needed to change. If this way of living suited who I was right now, fine. But I didn't want to be this person forever. So I had to consciously change those things. --- At the time, I was still reeling a little, so I equivocated. I said, well, I'll change what I do and where I do it—I'll move and start a new career path. But I'll bring some of these people along with me. That should've told me something, but the psyche resists change. --- It would all be for naught anyway, as the pandemic lockdowns happened just as I was planning to move. The best-laid plans of mice and men, you know. So, in a certain sense, I was doing everything right as I tried to wrestle with who I was and who I wanted to be. --- I probably would’ve ended up ditching those people at some future point, but fate gave me a shove. After the lockdowns, my plans were in tatters, so I made new ones while equivocating even more.