Belief feels exactly like knowing

I am fairly sure I believe a number of things that are not true. I cannot tell you which ones. That is the point.

A belief does not arrive labelled. What I think I know about which customers buy online, or why one shop is busy and the next is empty, or what people in a certain city like, sits in my head in exactly the same place as the things I have checked. It feels as solid. It comes to mind as quickly. Nothing inside warns me that one was tested and the other was picked up in a conversation years ago and never looked at again.

For a long time that mattered less than it might have. People mostly lived and traded among others who shared the same untested beliefs, so those beliefs rarely met anything that disagreed with them.

Dubai is a good place to see what happens when that stops. A small seller here may hear from customers of a dozen nationalities in a single week. The assumption that worked perfectly well back home, about what counts as a fair price, a polite reply, a reasonable wait for delivery, is suddenly tested by people who grew up with a different one. The belief does not feel any weaker for it. It just keeps running into the world, and the seller keeps being surprised.

Every new kind of customer, every new market, every new neighbour is another collision with something someone was sure of.

The more of those meetings there are, the more it costs to keep mistaking the feeling of certainty for the fact of it.