Assumptions are funny that way.
They don’t arrive as villains. They arrive as shortcuts.
Little mental discounts we apply because thinking deeply feels like effort and certainty feels efficient.
You assume someone understands you.
You assume silence means agreement.
You assume that tone equals intent, that vocabulary equals intelligence, that confidence equals competence.
And life nods along. For a while.
The bill comes later.
It always does.
Assumptions are expensive not because they are loud—but because they are invisible. You don’t feel the money leaving your account. You just wake up one day and wonder why everything feels… underfunded. Why conversations feel hollow. Why trust feels thinner than it used to. Why you’re tired without having done anything dramatic.
The worst part isn’t being wrong.
It’s realising how comfortably wrong you were.
There’s a particular kind of vertigo that hits when you realise you’ve been living inside a fabric of false pretence—not because someone lied outright, but because you filled in the gaps yourself. You stitched meaning where none was promised. You translated politeness into care. You read fluency as depth. You mistook articulation for alignment.
No one corrected you.
Why would they? Assumptions are cooperative illusions.
And then there are the conversations.
Ah yes. Those conversations.
Where people speak in circumlocutions—Sircar’sum logic, if you will—sentences that orbit a point but never land. Language used not to communicate, but to signal. Words deployed like silk scarves, meant to suggest intelligence without risking clarity. It’s performance disguised as precision.
You sit there nodding, half-impressed, half-unsettled.
Something feels off.
They’re not trying to be understood.
They’re trying to be perceived.
This is the moment that rattles you. Not because they’re doing it—but because you realise how often it worked on you before. How often you assumed that complexity meant insight, that abstraction meant thinking, that verbal gymnastics meant depth.
And suddenly the room feels different.
You notice the evasions.
The way questions are answered around, not through.
The way smart-sounding fog is used to avoid being pinned down.
You realise: this isn’t intelligence. It’s insulation.
And the realisation stings—not just because of them, but because of you. Because somewhere along the way, you outsourced your discernment to appearances. You let language do the thinking for you. You trusted style over substance because it was easier, smoother, socially rewarded.
Assumptions are expensive because they delay truth.
And delayed truth accrues interest.
By the time clarity arrives, you’ve already invested time, energy, respect, even affection. You don’t just lose the assumption—you lose what you built on top of it.
But here’s the quiet, uncomfortable grace in all this.
The moment assumptions collapse, perception sharpens.
You stop being dazzled by verbal chandeliers.
You start listening for coherence, not charisma.
You learn to value pauses over polish.
You ask cleaner questions. You tolerate fewer foggy answers.
You realise that real intelligence doesn’t mind being simple.
And real understanding doesn’t need camouflage.
Most importantly, you start catching yourself mid-assumption.
That tiny hitch in your chest before you fill in a gap.
That pause before you nod along.
That instinct to ask, “Wait—what do you actually mean?”
Assumptions don’t vanish forever.
We’re human. We’ll always make them.
But once you’ve seen the cost, you stop spending so recklessly.
And you stop living in borrowed certainty.
Which is expensive, yes—but never as expensive as pretending you knew all along.