A few months back, a friend put it out on Facebook: they needed proper outpatient therapy, the kind that doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket.
I’ve been in this industry since 2005. So I reached out. Told them what we do, how we could help. And because I always want people to use insurance to carry the cost instead of paying out of pocket, I asked if they had a personal accident plan.
They didn’t. One of them worked in a hospital — covered while employed, nothing the day they leave. The other had nothing. The baby had nothing.
So I laid it out. Hospital coverage disappears the moment you stop working there. Public wait times run three to six months, and the range of specialist care is limited. The plan costs around forty dollars a month. Get one each.
The reply came back:
We do understand the concept of accident plan so it’s OK thanks, and it’s our personal decision whether to get it or not.
And I felt it land like a door closing. Brushed off. They know — and they still won’t act.
That’s the thing I’d watched happen a thousand times. People who know and don’t do. I know I shouldn’t eat the donut, reaching for the donut. I know I should be in the gym, twelve months since I last walked through the door. I know I should save and invest, quietly bleeding money on things I don’t even care about.
It’s not stupidity. I’ve never thought it was stupidity. It’s default programming — the code you didn’t write, running underneath the decision before you even register there’s a decision to make. Some of it generational, handed down a family line nobody thought to question. Some of it just the groove your mind drops into when you’re tired and the donut is right there. Either way, it runs by default. And “I know” turns out to be the most expensive sentence in the language, because knowing and the default are two completely different systems — and the default wins almost every time.
So I sat with my little theory. Another one who knows and won’t move.
Then I went back to check.
And it turned out I’d made the entire thing up.
They weren’t brushing me off. They’d already gone and gotten the insurance — acted on exactly what I’d recommended. There was no frustration in that reply. No door closing. I had read a tone into plain text, built a story on top of it, cast them as the stubborn one who knows-but-won’t, and walked around mildly annoyed at a person who had done precisely the right thing.
The whole drama lived in one place: my head.
Here’s what stopped me cold. I’d spent the afternoon thinking about how the default runs other people — how they know and don’t act. And the default was running me the entire time. My script wasn’t “I know but I won’t.” Mine was “my help is being dismissed.” “I reached out and got the cold shoulder.” That program fired, wrote a complete narrative, and handed it to me as fact. I didn’t catch it. I just believed it.
That’s the part worth keeping. The default isn’t a thing other people have. It isn’t their flaw and your clarity. It’s the operating system everyone is running — including the man who writes about operating systems. The only difference between someone it owns and someone it doesn’t is whether you go and check.
This is why I keep records. Why I go to the data before I go to the conclusion. Not because I’m tidy — because I’ve learned the hard way that my own first reading of a situation is the least trustworthy thing in the room. Jeremiah had the diagnosis written down a couple of thousand years before I came along: the heart is deceitful above all things… who can understand it? I used to read that as a line about other people. It isn’t. It’s about mine — the way the heart will hand you a confident, detailed, completely false story and call it truth. The feeling of certainty is not evidence. It’s usually just the default, talking confidently.
So now, when I feel that hot flush of they don’t get it / I’ve been dismissed / here we go again — I treat the certainty itself as the warning light. That’s the default reaching for the wheel. Before I build a single sentence of story on top of it, I go and get the actual data.
Most of the time, like that afternoon, the story falls apart the moment it touches a fact.
Good work, Nigel. Genuinely. You caught it — just a beat too late, and one imaginary argument too many.