crumb#012: Cognitive Dissonance- How We Stay Whole by Splitting in Two
How a Failed Alien Prophecy Uncovered the Truth About All of Us
We cover:
Modern comfort vs connection: we’re oddly relieved to be alone with screens, which hints at dodging discomfort and real conversation.
Cognitive dissonance 101: that tight feeling when beliefs and actions don’t match. We say we value rest, then overwork. We say we’re fine, then we’re not.
The alien-cult parable: when reality clashes with belief, we often protect identity by rewriting the story instead of changing our minds.
Everyday masks: justifying, memory-editing, and polite silence feel “elegant,” but slowly drift us from who we think we are.
Why read this: not to chase perfection, but to spot the cracks, choose which contradictions to face, and let the rest be human- with humour, honesty, and permission to say “okay, we were wrong.”
We’re living in an age that doesn’t make sense– not biologically, not evolutionarily.
As human beings, we’re wired to seek connection. Heck, our survival, for thousands of years, depended on it.
So why is it that today, the idea of being alone almost feels like relief?
Be honest– how many times have you felt a quiet joy when plans to go out got cancelled? That warm, smug couch welcoming you back like an old friend, as you melt into it, phone in hand, TV glowing in the background.
Giving up carbon for silicon. Eye contact for pixels.
Why is that?
Have we rewired ourselves so deeply that we avoid real conversations– especially the uncomfortable ones? The kind where someone might disagree with us? Where we might risk being wrong?
I’ve always put myself on some sort of pedestal in my head. Cynicism? Narcissism? Both? Not necessarily in a negative way– more like armour. A helmet for the self.
Or maybe it’s something else entirely from the menagerie of definitions you can lie on as a person– a bit of everything and nothing at the same time. And it can be hard. It is hard.
Maybe I’m using these words too loosely. Maybe I’m already wrong.
Every day, a thousand new opinions, facts, and questions come flying at us– like moths escaping a jar. They don’t sting. They cloud.
They eclipse you– and your own thoughts.
So what do we do?
We retreat. We like what aligns with us. We block what doesn’t. Nobody wants to be wrong. Everyone hates to be wrong.
Especially not in a world where everyone else seems to be right. Living perfect lives. Saying perfect things.
And in all this noise, what really matters is hardly left.
Worse still, no one wants to admit they were wrong, not even to the one person who matters the most: the self.
And that’s where it begins.
That quiet discomfort in your chest when your thoughts are at odds with your actions.
When you know something, but you do something else. When you’re nodding along in a conversation, even though you disagree. When you say “I’m fine,” but you’re anything but. There’s a name for it.
Cognitive dissonance.
The psychological tension we feel when we hold two contradictory beliefs, or when our actions and beliefs don’t align.
It’s not just an abstract theory. It’s that subtle war we wage with ourselves– between who we are, who we think we are, and who we want to be seen as.
And what happens when those things don’t match?
We justify. We distort. We deny.
We do whatever it takes to silence that mental friction.
And I have been prey to this for as long as I can remember. That pedestal– I’ve come crashing down quite a few times. And I didn’t realise that until I started reading more about it. The more dots you connect looking backward, the more you realise they aren’t dots but bubbles you created to keep yourself afloat in a vicious maelstrom called reality.
At first, it feels like a personal failing– this quiet war between what you believe and how you behave. But it’s not just personal. It’s human. So human, in fact, that it became the subject of one of the most important psychological studies of the last century.
And funnily enough, as solemn as the topic is, the story that started the research behind all of this is anything but. In fact, it all began with aliens.
Because sometimes, it takes someone else’s delusion– one bold, bizarre, spaceship-sized belief– to reveal the architecture of our own everyday contradictions. Maybe make you feel better about the ones that you have been ignoring for so long.
And that’s exactly what happened in 1954, when a doomsday cult in suburban Chicago unknowingly opened the door to a whole new understanding of human behaviour.
So let me tell you about Dorothy Martin. About aliens. About the night the world didn’t end, and why that, somehow, mattered more than if it had.
Dorothy Martin was, on the surface, quite unremarkable, to put it bluntly. A middle-aged woman in the quiet suburbs of Chicago, 1954. Churchgoing. Polite. And in regular contact, she claimed, with beings from the planet Clarion.
They told her a flood was coming. A great and terrible flood that would swallow the Earth on 21 December– unless, of course, you were one of the chosen few. The believers. The faithful. Those who had shed all attachments to this corrupted world and were ready to be whisked away to safety by spaceship. Yes, spaceship.
And people followed her.
They didn’t just believe quietly. They left jobs. Said painful goodbyes to families. Sold homes, donated savings. These weren’t naïve people– many were educated, thoughtful, emotionally aware. But belief does strange things when it becomes the only thing holding your world together.
They called themselves The Seekers.
Leon Festinger, a psychologist already curious about how people handle contradictions in their minds, saw an opportunity. He and a few colleagues joined the group undercover, not to mock or disprove, but to watch. To listen. To see what would happen when belief met reality– and lost.
The headlines were immutable, and the belief immovable. There was only going to be one outcome, and he wanted to ensure he documented every bit of it.
Unsurprisingly, the flood didn’t come (would’ve been some story if it did).
Midnight passed. The living room clock ticked on. No aliens. No beams of light. Just a still, silent house full of people who had dismantled their lives for something that didn’t happen.
Now here’s the part that mattered, the part Festinger had predicted but still found staggering in real time.
They didn’t leave.
They didn’t break down in despair.
Instead, they doubled down.
Dorothy Martin claimed that she had just received a phone call from the aliens themselves, acknowledging the great work done by The Seekers.
They said their faith had saved the world. That their collective belief was so powerful, it had convinced the aliens– and the universe itself – to spare Earth. They weren’t wrong, they insisted. They were heroes.
And suddenly, Festinger saw it with terrifying clarity: when belief and reality clash, we don’t always adjust the belief.
We bend reality to fit it.
Because admitting you were wrong isn’t just admitting a mistake. It’s tearing down the scaffolding of your identity– brick by brick. It’s looking in the mirror and saying, “Maybe I built my life on something untrue.” And that is almost too much to bear.
So instead, we rewrite the ending.
That was the birth of cognitive dissonance as we know it– not as some sterile lab concept, but as something raw, human, and painfully familiar.
And if we’re being honest, we’ve all done it. Most of us just aren’t holding up “The end is nigh” signs in our driveways while waiting for Clarion to call back.
We’re doing it quietly. Elegantly. In offices, in group chats, in voting booths, on dating apps, in mirrors.
It’s tempting to see cognitive dissonance as something distant– a concept that only applies to cults, contradictions, or the people who clearly don’t have it figured out.
But it’s much closer than we think. And much more mundane.
It’s in the way we live with ourselves, quietly negotiating between belief and behaviour, values and convenience. The thin lines you tread on, convincing yourself that what you’re doing is correct when it really might not be. That small, uneasy feeling when we say one thing and do another – not because we’re dishonest, but because we’re tired. Conflicted. Stretched thin by the world and by ourselves.
Take a simple scroll through your phone.
You see a post about mental health– maybe it’s a thread on burnout, or a reel about boundaries, or just a quiet reminder that it’s okay to slow down. You feel it resonate. You nod. You even share it with a caption like “needed this today”.
And then, not even five minutes later, you’re back in your inbox– replying to that one email you could’ve left for tomorrow. Saying yes to a meeting you don’t have the capacity for. Keeping Slack open like a lifeline.
You believe in rest. In balance. In saying no.
And yet, you keep saying yes.
Not because you’re a hypocrite. But because you’re scared– of seeming lazy, of letting people down, of falling behind. You have certain standards to maintain after all. The pedestal.
You tell yourself you’ll slow down later. When the week ends. When the next deadline passes. When things finally calm down.
They never do.
Or think about that time someone made a political statement at dinner– one that clashed with everything you stand for. You disagreed, deeply. But you said nothing. Maybe you laughed it off. Maybe you nodded just enough to keep the peace. Because arguing felt harder. Because the moment passed too quickly. Because sometimes silence is easier to justify than confrontation.
And so we carry these mismatches. Quietly. Elegantly. We wrap them in explanations.
I was being polite.
I needed to buy that bottle of perfume, or that new wristwatch.
I didn’t want to ruin the mood.
And in doing so, we drift not too far, but just enough– from the person we tell ourselves we are.
It’s a beautiful illusion– being right all the time. But it leaves no room for doubt, for messiness, for evolution. No room for vulnerability. All you are left with are layers on top of layers of impregnable walls. And ironically, it makes dissonance worse. Because now, when the cracks do appear, we don’t just feel confused, we feel exposed. We feel naked.
And we are not ready to be naked.
So we adjust the narrative. We tweak the memory. We tell ourselves that the contradiction wasn’t real– or worse, that it was justified. We become experts at subtle revision.
And over time, that becomes the new truth.
Not because we are liars. But because the discomfort of holding two truths at once– two versions of ourselves– is too much.
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But here’s the truth: not everyone buys the dissonance narrative. Some psychologists argue we’re not so much tortured truth-seekers as intuitive storytellers, cobbling together explanations for our actions after the fact (an idea called self-perception theory). Others point out that the pressure to be consistent is cultural, not universal- in societies less obsessed with individualism, living with contradictions can feel more like harmony than failure.
Even Festinger’s original theory has cracks. Why do some people lean into dissonance, wearing their contradictions like badges of honour? Why do others shrug and move on, untouched by the mental tug-of-war? Critics argue that framing every internal conflict as “dissonance” risks oversimplifying the messy, glorious incoherence of being human.
The most damning critique, though, is personal: dissonance theory assumes we want to align our beliefs and actions. But what if we’re content with the gap? What if the space between who we are and who we pretend to be isn’t a flaw, but a refuge- a buffer against the exhausting work of constant self-auditing?
So where does all this leave us? Maybe the real lesson isn’t that we must always strive for perfect alignment between what we believe and what we do. Maybe it’s about learning to live with the cracks- recognising that contradiction isn’t a personal failure, but part of being gloriously, stubbornly human.
Cognitive dissonance isn’t a villain lurking in the background, waiting to trip us up. Sometimes it’s a nudge, a gentle reminder that something inside us wants attention. Other times, it’s just background noise- a sign that we’re complex creatures, capable of holding multitudes, even if they don’t always make sense together.
Perhaps the courage isn’t in erasing all our inconsistencies, but in seeing them clearly and choosing which ones matter enough to confront. Maybe the gap between who we are and who we wish to be isn’t a flaw to be fixed, but a space to be explored; a place where growth, humour, and even a little grace can live.
And if the Sorting Hat in your head puts you in Slytherin instead of Gryffindor- if you find yourself not quite matching the version of yourself you thought you’d be- that’s not something to be ashamed of. You don’t have to conform to what is seen as virtuous, or right, or courageous. You can make mistakes, and follies. You can be wrong. The real magic is in acknowledging it, not denying it.
Maybe the grapes were never sour; maybe we just weren’t ready to admit we wanted them.
That’s it for this crumb, which, let’s be honest, turned into a bit of a feast. See you in the next.
Enjoyed reading it
Outstanding post
"Why do some people lean into dissonance, wearing their contradictions like badges of honour?"
That was actually addressed noting that some had walked away when the original prediction failed to materialize. The determination was that how much a person had invested in the belief, especially how much of their identity, determined how strong cognitive dissonance would play out. Of course, this could be a simplistic answer to a complex question.