I once sold a hologram for nearly 40 euros. Athletes told me they had never performed better. Ordinary people told me their back pain had eased. Science said the thing was impossible. I stood in the middle of all three and kept the money.
At the start I questioned everything. Does this work? Can I prove it? What am I actually selling? These were real questions, and I wanted real answers. Then the sales came, and the responses came, thousands of them. I was earning money in the gap between what the science said and what the customers said, and the gap stopped bothering me.
Nothing about this happened at a single moment. I never sat down and decided to stop asking. The interest in the questions faded first, and once the questions felt less urgent the answers followed. I can watch the shift in my own language. Early on I asked, does this work. Later I told myself, people say it works. In the end I just said, it obviously works. Each version was easier to live with than the one before, and each one asked less of me.
The falling-off tracked the revenue almost exactly. When a month’s numbers came in high, when customers reordered, when a new market opened, the effect was more convincing than any study could have been. Daily success tells you a plain thing every day: you are doing this right. If you are successful you must be right. I never said that sentence out loud, but I ran my business on it.
I was honest and dishonest with myself at the same time. I could see that the product helped people. I also suspected the effect came from their own heads and not from anything I sold them. I held both of those in mind and let only the first one out. The second one I kept quiet, because saying it out loud would have ended the daily reassurance the revenue handed me.
There was no crime here; the mechanism matters more than the blame. This is what happens when money sets the pace. When the work pays, you let go of the questions that could threaten the pay, and you do it out of reason, with no malice behind it. The questions stay open. It is simply that the people who profit have no reason left to ask them.
The same pattern runs far beyond a hologram. A company ships a product that does not do what the brochure claims, and the quarterly numbers stay on target, so nobody inside asks the hard question. Two people know something is wrong between them, and neither one says it, because the answer would be brutal and expensive. The silence is the sensible choice for everyone who benefits from the thing staying unexamined.
It moves in stages. You ask, then you ask less often, then you stop. The last stage is the one that changed me most. Once you have stopped asking, you begin to defend the position against anyone who still asks. You slid into the position without ever choosing it. Now you protect it, and by protecting it you make it harder for the next person to ask their own question. That is the point where your self-deception becomes someone else’s problem too.
I still sell nothing like that hologram now, but I have kept one habit from it. I get uneasy when I have gone too long without an uncomfortable question, when everything runs smooth and nobody pushes back. That smoothness is exactly what it felt like before.