We need that. Nobody works out the whole world from scratch before starting to live in it. Long before we have reasons for what we believe, we have people whose word is enough.

What's strange is how little of it feels borrowed. A view about work, money, other people, or what makes a good life can feel like our own simply because we can't remember a time before we held it. It was never decided. It was just there.

But then we hit that moment of distrust. Often it's the teenage years, when we realize maybe what they shared wasn't true.

Did we ever actually confirm it?

That question is harder than the discovery. Finding out someone was wrong is one thing. Realizing we never checked is another. We took it on trust, the way a child takes everything on trust, and kept carrying it long after we could have looked.

Distrust on its own doesn't fix that. When we stop trusting one source, the easy move is to find another: a new community, a confident voice online, a book. The source changes. The habit of accepting certainty from someone else can stay exactly the same.

I've met a great deal of people who read one book and said, "Wow, this is it. This must be true." It could be self-help, fiction, anything.

It happens to serious thinkers too. As a teenager, John Stuart Mill read Jeremy Bentham and came away transformed. "When I laid down the last volume," he wrote later in his Autobiography, "I had become a different being." He now had "opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy."

I get the appeal. A book can give you words for something you've felt for years, and that's real. But there's a leap between "this explains something about my life" and "this is how the world works," and it's easy to make without noticing. An idea becomes a stopping point precisely because it helped.

This is where being informed and having thought about something come apart.

Picture repeating a view you picked up somewhere, confidently, until someone asks one simple question and you realize you have nothing past it. You knew what the view was. You knew who held it. You never knew why you should.

One of my earliest memories was regarding what makes fog. I was told it's when the ground temperature and air are 4 degrees difference. It was precise, simple. I repeated that for years until one day I caught myself sharing it with a coworker and then stopped myself and said, "Wait, let's confirm that, because I don't know that I ever actually fact-checked it." Sure enough, it wasn't completely wrong, but it also wasn't true.

Fog forms when the air near the ground cools down to its dew point, the temperature where the water in the air starts turning back into tiny droplets. The 4 degrees was real, sort of. It's a rule of thumb forecasters use: when the air temperature and the dew point get within about 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit of each other, fog is likely. So I had the right number but the wrong two things, and I'd been treating a warning sign as the cause.

Mill had a phrase for exactly this. The danger, he wrote in an 1840 essay on Coleridge, "is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole."

Being informed means I can tell you what someone else thinks and why they think it. Having thought about it means I can tell you why I think it: what persuades me beyond who said it, where it falls short, and what would change my mind.

Nearly forty years after he found his creed in Bentham, Mill put it more sharply:

However true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859 (chapter 2).

Mill's point is about true beliefs. A belief can be right and still be dead: correct, but held without its reasons. That's why originality isn't the goal. I can think something through and land exactly where the author did, or where my parents did. The difference isn't the conclusion. It's that the conclusion is alive now, and I can stand behind it.

The ability to take in knowledge from many sources and form your own opinion, not just by that but then backed with experience: it's everything. Perhaps that is wisdom, yes?

I think so. Reading gives you other people's reasons. Experience is where you find out which of those reasons hold up in your own life. Neither is enough alone. Someone who has read everything and lived very little has plenty of answers and no way to test them. Someone with plenty of experience who never reads can only confirm what already happened to them.

Wisdom, maybe, is where the two meet: knowing when a lesson applies, and noticing when this time is different.

How then do we still stay curious in those moments? How do we push ourselves to continue to grow and learn?

The hard part is that we need convictions. We have to make decisions, raise kids and live a life before every question is settled. Curiosity has to fit inside a life that's already moving.

Maybe that's why it rarely arrives as a grand decision to question everything. It shows up as a small interruption: wait, let's confirm that. It's a sentence, not a philosophy, and it's easiest to practice where the stakes are low. Being a little wrong about fog costs nothing. Nobody's sense of self is built on the dew point. But each time we say it out loud, it gets easier, and the habit is there when a belief that matters comes up.

It's also easier to welcome questions about things we've already doubted than about things we still believe. Curiosity comes easily when it points at the past. It's harder when it points at whatever we're sure of now. So the moment worth watching for is when an idea becomes something we feel we have to protect. When a question irritates us, is it because it's a bad question, or because it complicates something we've grown attached to?

That's where "it defines us" comes back. The beliefs we soaked up earliest aren't just things we know. They're part of how we know who we are. Questioning them can feel less like checking a fact and more like checking ourselves, and almost nobody does that willingly.

It helps to remember that a belief is something we hold, not something we are. If I change my mind about fog, I'm still me. If I change my mind about something bigger, I'm still me then too, just with better reasons. Growing doesn't mean throwing out everything we were given. It means picking each thing up, one at a time, and asking whether we'd choose it now. For a lot of what we believe, that's the first time it has ever really been decided.

We can also go looking for the strongest version of the other side, not the weakest. If the only arguments I've heard against a view are the bad ones, I haven't tested it. I've just been reassured.

How do you deal with those that don't budge or move in their opinions?

There's no clean answer. One thing worth remembering is that someone's refusal to agree doesn't tell us, by itself, how carefully they've thought. From the outside, our own firmness probably looks a lot like theirs.

Then there's the question of what we actually want from the conversation. Understanding someone, changing their mind, and deciding something together are different goals. The first is almost always possible. The third often is, even while two people still disagree. The second is the one we usually want, and the one we control least.

Part of the reason is the same thing that makes our own beliefs hard to check. If a view defines someone, asking them to drop it is asking them to rebuild part of who they are, on our timeline, because we said so. Put that way, not budging looks less like stubbornness and more like self-preservation. People do change their minds, but rarely mid-argument. It tends to happen later and quietly, when experience or someone they trust gives them room to.

What we can do is make changing our minds look normal. Saying "wait, let's confirm that" about our own beliefs, in front of other people, shows that being wrong is survivable. It won't move anyone on the spot. It might make it a little easier for them later.

So we can try to understand their reasons and explain ours. Sometimes we find a way forward while still disagreeing. Sometimes the conversation hits its limit, and it's fine to leave it there.

What we shouldn't do is let someone else's certainty become our excuse to stop questioning our own.

We start by soaking up whatever we're given to stand on. Some of it holds when we finally look. Some of it, like the fog, turns out to be close but not quite true. Some of it doesn't hold at all. A few things turn back into questions.

And eventually we become the ones others soak things up from: our children, our friends, anyone who trusts us. What we hand down isn't only what we believe. It's how we hold it. The most useful thing to pass on might be the question itself: did we ever actually confirm it?