your perception is subject to a statistical phenomenon known in probability theory as kurtosis. Kurtosis in essence means that things tend to become increasingly steep in their distribution… that is, skewed in one direction. This applies to ways of seeing everything from current events to ourselves as we lean “skewedly” toward one interpretation, positive or negative. Things that are highly kurtotic, or skewed, are hard to shift away from. This is another way of saying that seeing differently isn’t just conceptually difficult—it’s statistically difficult.
