I’d expand this a lot. When someone tells you something about his or herself, there’s a good chance they are trying to convince themselves of it.

I don’t mean that people are dishonest. It’s more that we mostly learn about one another’s internal mental lives by telling each other about them. And our ability to maintain a consistent theory of mind is limited. We walk around worrying about this or that, and then we expose our mental states to one another with a snippet of a stream of consciousness. So it’s only natural we are constantly exposing our personal fears to one another.

Another corollary: 50% of the things people tell you are true, are things they wish were true but know are not.

I guess the trick is figuring out which 50% is which

Yup. It does narrow it down pretty good. You know it’s true or not true. Nothing else is probably true.

This is so true that you have to really develop an intuition for identifying sociopaths that will manipulate this natural human trait for their gain. I've had the displeasure of staying with a sociopathic lawyer one summer in my younger years that was a pro at feigning mutual interest/mirroring your insecurities to get on your good side and then gaslighting you to get you to do them favors. In the end it was only minor things they got from me but the lessons learned have been huge for me in the corporate world where I work with these types of people, most often seen in senior management roles.

After having experienced it I'll never let someone use mw in that manner ever again as I've learned how to call them out and use their own logic and tactics against them and I've built some solid internal heuristics for spotting the methods sociopaths employ to deceive people. Pretty fascinating subject, can anyone relate to my experiences/expand on the topic?

Could you please share an example so I could better imagine what you mean? Thank you.

I'd be so curious to hear more about this, with examples of things they'd say and how you'd spot them (and what to respond with, ideally).

We change as we interact. This is just as easily explainable through a perceptive bias - the difference between experiencing and having experienced.

> Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure.

-- Hannah Arendt

Good marketing often makes us act irrationally — we buy lots of stuff we don’t need — surely it’s not because we’re insecure?

What are you talking about? 95% of advertising/marketing trades on people's insecurity.

It's exactly because we're insecure

What do you mean by "need" in this context? Is it immoral to sell anything that's not basic sustenance?