How your brain cuts corners and calls it thinking.

A heuristic is your brain’s way of saying:

“That looks close enough — let’s go with it.”

It’s a mental shortcut. A lazy estimate. A rule-of-thumb that saves energy, skips nuance, and gets you to a conclusion fast — whether it’s correct or not.

It’s the reason you:

• Judge someone in 3 seconds and feel justified about it.
• Assume something’s true because you heard it more than once.
• Choose the “safe” option without really knowing what it means.
• Buy the expensive thing because it must be better, right?

You didn’t think. You guessed — with style.

Why do we do this?

Because real thinking is effort.
And your brain, bless it, is a stingy little miser when it comes to spending mental energy.

Heuristics are its way of conserving power, like a phone on 5% battery:

“Quick, use the last juice to do something vaguely sensible before we shut down.”

Except “vaguely sensible” often turns into:

• Biased.
• Wrong.
• Overconfident.
• Disastrous.

Classic examples:

• Availability heuristic:
  “Sharks must be common because I saw five documentaries this week.”
  (No. You just binge-watched Netflix.)
• Anchoring:
  “This car was $30,000, but now it’s $24,000 — must be a deal.”
  (You’re being manipulated by numbers, mate.)
• Representativeness:
  “She wears glasses and reads a lot — she must be a librarian.”
  (Or a lawyer. Or a cult leader. You don’t know.)

The truth?

Heuristics are often useful.
But they’re also how idiots become confident,
how bad decisions feel good,
and how people end up absolutely certain — and absolutely wrong.

Your brain doesn’t like being uncertain.
So it slaps on a shortcut, skips the thinking, and calls it a day.

It’s efficient.
It’s seductive.
It’s stupid.
And you’re doing it right now.