You Don't Actually Believe That.
On belief, provocation, and the gap between what we argue and what we actually think.
Saturday lunch. Shabbat table. Great food, a little wine, family, my mom’s friend, and my friend and I pulling out nicotine pouches post-meal.
That’s all it took.
Suddenly we’re in a full debate about nicotine. Is it addictive? Is it the nicotine itself or everything that comes with it, the additives, the preservatives, the ritual? She’s telling me it’s not the nicotine, it’s everything else bundled around it. I’m telling her nicotine is the addictive compound, full stop.
No phones on the table. That’s the thing about Shabbat nobody talks about enough. You can’t just Google your way out of a disagreement. You’re stuck with what you actually know, what you actually believe, and whether you can defend it with nothing but your own reasoning. It’s the oldest philosophical setting in the world and it happens every week at a dinner table.
So I asked her: if it’s the additives making people addicted, name one. Name a single chemical.
She couldn’t.
And then I provoked her. Not condescendingly. I went straight for her credibility as a thinker. I questioned whether she could actually find real information, whether she was just pulling from whatever the internet handed her. It hit a chord.
Here’s what I’ve noticed about people who actually believe what they’re saying: you can’t rattle them with a wrong accusation. If I tell someone they’re something they’re clearly not, they don’t get offended. They look at me like I’m crazy, because I am the one saying the crazy thing. The offense only lands when there’s a crack. When some part of the person isn’t fully sure. The provocation isn’t cruelty. It’s a search. And the response tells you more about the belief than any argument ever could.
She got offended.
But this only works inside a container of trust. I’ve provoked people without that foundation and it just damages. The provocation only becomes useful when the other person already knows that you are not trying to hurt them. That you want them to be fully themselves. Silly, wrong, goofy, right, whatever. When that’s established, the provocation isn’t an attack. It’s a nudge back toward their own truth.
My dad is sitting at the head of the table, saying nothing, just smiling. He already knew where it was going.
After all of it, the pushback, the laughter, the failed chemical names, she said something that stopped me. Nicotine isn’t bad for you. And I agreed. Completely. I think there are real benefits to nicotine, as a nootropic, for focus, in its cleanest form.
We had been fighting over two different claims the entire time. I said addictive. She heard bad. And that gap wasn’t random. It came from somewhere. Her life, her associations, whatever she’d been told or seen or lived through that made those two words collapse into the same meaning. Most arguments aren’t really disagreements about facts. They’re two people defending different definitions of the same word, neither of them realizing it, both of them convinced the other one isn’t listening. The fight was real. The disagreement wasn’t.
I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’ve stopped believing that’s possible in a single conversation. But I try, every time I talk to someone, to show up as my truest self. And the biggest form of love and respect I know how to give is to search for someone else's truth with the same hunger I search for my own.