Of course, confirmation bias serves a purpose, or else it wouldn’t exist. In a 2020 paper, German philosopher Uwe Peters noted that one of the bias’s evolutionary benefits might be that “it helps us bring social reality into alignment with our beliefs.” How unsustainably chaotic would it feel if our social reality and beliefs never synced up? When approached with a skeptical wink, “Saturn return” is a lens through which to bond over a shared pattern: the quarter-life crisis. It’s lovely to have excuses to connect with each other, to ignore one another’s differences because you have something
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