The beliefs we don’t acknowledge
Philippe Beaudoin · February 20, 2026
The beliefs we don’t acknowledge.
Congratulations, you’ve built a beautiful house. You’ve built it alone, with your own hands. And that house has a name:
Your self.
Maybe you’re a scientist, maybe you’re a mom, maybe you’re an activist fighting for world peace. Maybe you think AI will destroy us, maybe you think it will solve cancer, maybe you think we should let markets decide.
Whatever house you built, I hope someone, somewhere around you, finds it beautiful. I bet I would if you showed it to me candidly.
But remember that house is built on something.
Remember that there is bedrock underneath. The stuff you think unshakable. The thing you share with everyone around you, all the way back to Descartes. “I am! I exist!”
This stuff is woven so deep into you that, even as you read this post, you’re thinking: “Another one of Phil’s weird status.”
And yet you’re still reading, are you?
Because you can feel the bedrock shaking these days. There’s something too weird about the moment we live in. There’s something that forces us to think of the stuff we never thought about.
Heidegger talked of a hammer. When it’s in your hand and you’re using it and it works well, it becomes an extension of you. You forget it even exists.
But when it breaks?
Suddenly you notice it. Because you can’t work anymore. You have to stop and understand what the hammer is, what it’s made of. You thought it was an extension of you and now you see it was a bunch of different pieces.
And it sucks.
It sucks because it was NOT you. Not what you thought you were. And you wonder if you can ever be happy in a world where you think of you and the hammer as separate (ok, now im definitely stretching that metaphor a bit thin. 😆)
These days, everyone’s hammer’s is a bit wobbly. The bedrock is shaking. Who knows how we will think of our “selves” tomorrow. Some houses will crack. Some will need to be rebuilt. Watch the AlphaGo moment again. Watch Lee Sedol’s face when he says: “I failed humanity.” Hear the tears in his voice. This is what happens when the bedrock shifts.
And yet, he went on. And so will we.
We will fix the hammer, understand our “selves” differently than we did, and fix the cracks in our houses. We will rebuild the houses that were too brittle to survive the shifting ground.
And who knows, maybe the city we will discover on the other side will be more beautiful than the one we live in today. ❤️