“The problem when you ask a common person about their beliefs is that it’s not them that answers. It’s the feature of their mind that has this job. And its goal is not to believe or even disbelieve things. Its goal is to »keep its job. Humans ‘split’ into different aspects all the time, but are unaware of this. Mostly, our actual nature and spirit, mind and concerns, have become, like much of our actual lives, about artifacts. Making them. Buying them. Avoiding them. And all the jobs that arise and persist and dominate us due to this. So our interiority, from one important angle, becomes a reflection of the ‘split-off’ features of our ‘societies; (these are not actually societies, at all). The banker deals with money, the cop with problems, the fireman with disasters, the believer with beliefs, the fake self with fake questions, and most of the time we’re just splitting off into anything that might temporarily distract us from this problem, by collapsing it into the kind of thing that ‘one of the jobs inside me’ handles.”

— infraheard