The Illusion That Shapes Your Entire Life

For most of human history, people believed the Earth was flat. And why wouldn’t they? You look around, and everything looks flat. No one felt like they were living on a spinning sphere hurtling through space. The idea of a round Earth seemed ridiculous—until someone looked deeper.

Then came the belief that the sun revolved around the Earth. Again, totally reasonable! Every morning, the sun obviously rises, crosses the sky, and sets. It took astronomers centuries to figure out that, nope, it’s actually the Earth that’s moving. But until then, people were absolutely convinced they had it right.

Misunderstandings like these are fascinating, not just because they were so wrong, but because they felt so true.

They weren’t just mistaken ideas; they were entire ways of seeing the world.

Even today, we carry around misconceptions. We talk about electrons “orbiting” an atom’s nucleus like tiny planets (they don’t). We say sound “travels” through the air (it doesn’t—it’s pressure waves passing energy along, more like a stadium wave than a moving object). Even something as simple as a rainbow isn’t really an object hanging in the sky—it’s a specific angle of refracted light that only exists from your unique perspective. If someone standing ten feet away from you points at “your” rainbow, they’re actually seeing a different one.

These are all harmless enough. The world keeps spinning (on its not-flat axis) whether or not we get the details right. But there’s one misunderstanding—one false assumption—that isn’t just inaccurate, but actively shapes our entire experience of life.

It’s the belief that our feelings come from the world around us.

Most people live as if this is just obviously true. A traffic jam makes us frustrated. An unkind comment hurts our feelings. A sunny day lifts our mood. Just like the flat Earth or the rising sun, it looks like external events cause internal feelings.

But that’s not how it works.

All of our feelings—all of them—come from our thoughts about what’s happening, not the events themselves.

We don’t feel traffic; we feel our thinking about traffic. We don’t feel other people’s words; we feel our interpretation of them. Our moment-to-moment experience isn’t dictated by the outside world—it’s created from within.

This misunderstanding is the mother of all misconceptions. Unlike thinking the sun revolves around the Earth, this one isn’t just a scientific error—it’s a fundamental illusion that determines how we navigate life. When we think our well-being depends on circumstances, we spend our days trying to arrange the outside world just right, believing that’s the key to happiness. But the truth is, peace, clarity, and resilience don’t come from fixing external conditions. They come from seeing through the illusion itself.

The good news? Just like every other misunderstanding in history, this one falls apart the moment we really look.

So, what do you think is making you feel the way you do right now?

And what happens if you question that?