What If Truth Isn’t What We Think It Is?

This is going to be a deep dive into the rabbit hole. If you’re not up for it, we can part ways here.

My best thoughts come when I’m on my cosy balcony, taking a puff and staring at the world below. From the seventh floor, I get enough distance to detach from everything and let my mind wander.

Here’s where the stray thoughts led me this time.

Reality encompasses all that exists independently of belief—factual, verifiable, and universal. Truth is the slice of that reality an individual recognizes and accepts, influenced by their capacity and willingness to bear it.

Before we begin to theorize, we must first acknowledge the historical perspectives:

• Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE): Treated truth as something uncovered through relentless self-examination. For him, truth was inseparable from moral awareness and could only be approached by someone willing to face uncomfortable reality.
• Plato (c. 428–348 BCE): Placed truth in a transcendent realm of Forms—perfect and unchanging ideals beyond the physical world—accessible only through rigorous thought.
• Aristotle (384–322 BCE): Brought truth into the empirical world, stating that truth matches reality.
• Avicenna (980–1037 CE): Believed truth emerges when the trained intellect grasps the necessary connections between concepts and reality.
• Francis Bacon (1561–1626): Saw truth as the result of putting aside biases and relying on careful observation and testing.
• René Descartes (1596–1650): Defined truth as what can be known with absolute certainty, grounded in clear, undoubtable reasoning rather than sensory experience.
• Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677): Claimed truth comes from perfectly clear and complete ideas that match reality exactly.
• Voltaire (1694–1778): Advocated questioning everything with reason and evidence.
• David Hume (1711–1776): Distinguished between analytic truths (a priori) and empirical facts (a posteriori), noting that most beliefs stem from habit, not reason.
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804): Argued that reality is filtered through the mind’s categories, so we see appearances, not “things in themselves.”
• Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860): Asserted that truth is just our mental representation of the world, while the underlying “will” remains unknowable.
• Herbert Spencer (1820–1903): Saw truth as provisional—an evolving approximation of reality directed by advancing knowledge.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): Claimed there is no objective truth—only perspectives and useful stories people tell themselves.
• Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): Defined truth as logical statements aligning perfectly with actual facts.
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): Grounded truth in authentic self-recognition, where the only absolute truth is one’s own existence.

Looking at these thinkers, it’s clear their definitions were often products of their environments, cultures, and times.

Philosophy claims to study the fundamental nature of reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Then it could be likely, that when these great minds studied the world around them, much of their understanding became a derivative of the specific time and world they inhabited.

For example, Voltaire emphasized evidence-based questioning—likely influenced by his distrust of the political and religious authorities of his day. Nietzsche’s “army of metaphors” could today be reframed as individual or collective delusions rather than truths.

If truth changes over time, is it really truth? Or is it simply our understanding of reality, conditioned by psychology?

Consider Joe Black, an alcoholic who drinks every hour. The reality: he is addicted. His truth: it’s under control, so it’s not an addiction. Only after years of trouble and an intervention does he acknowledge the addiction. The reality hasn’t changed—only his recognition of it. That recognition transforms him.

Reality remain constant for everyone. Truth is when those facts become an internal, personal experience. This is the “burden of truth”—recognition that alters how you see yourself or your situation, often at a cost.

This is why presenting more facts rarely changes minds. Facts are external; truth begins internally. But internal truths can become shared realities. Galileo’s recognition that the Earth orbits the Sun began as an internal truth against consensus. Through evidence and persuasion, it became part of collective reality.

If this framework holds, it could influence how we think about education, therapy, and relationships. In education, it’s not enough to transmit information; students need the capacity and courage for internal recognition. In therapy, advice and techniques can create conditions, but the transformative moment must come from within. In relationships, conflicts persist when people fixate on external facts instead of acknowledging internal truths.

True transformation is rare not because we lack information—we have more than ever—but because facing uncomfortable truths requires courage. Self-deception is the human default. We avoid truths that threaten our identity or demand hard changes.

Perhaps the most meaningful truths aren’t discovered in laboratories or proven through arguments. They emerge in quiet moments when we stop avoiding what we’ve always known but couldn’t bear to face.

The question is whether recognizing the gap between external reality and internal truth helps us understand why denial persists despite evidence, and why the most important changes often happen privately.

But then again, this definition of truth might just be my conditioning from the world I inhabit. Tomorrow, someone else may find a different one.

Until then—stay truthful.