Why I Stopped Arguing With People
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I am a software engineer, and I used to enjoy arguing with people for technical correctness. Code reviews, design meetings, mailing-list threads, dinner tables. If someone was wrong, I wanted them to know it, and I wanted them to know exactly why. I collected counterarguments the way I collected patches. I believed that if I just laid out the logic clearly enough, the other person would have no choice but to come around. Truth would win.
It almost never worked that way.
Sometimes I won on points and lost the person. More often I won nothing at all: I’d watch someone grow more certain of the very thing I had just disproven, while the room quietly drifted to their side. I would walk away technically right and completely alone.
Over the years I’ve slowly stopped arguing. Not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally understood what an argument actually is, and what it can and cannot do. Here is what changed my mind.
The first thing I had to give up was the belief that being correct is always good. As an engineer, this felt like heresy. Correctness is the whole job. But correctness in a fact is not the same as goodness in a moment.
Lao Tzu saw this 2,500 years ago. In chapter 2 of the Tao Te Ching:
Being and non-being create each other.
Hard and easy complete each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Sound and silence harmonize each other.
Everything exists only in relation to its opposite. There is no “right” without a “wrong” to make it right, and the moment you insist on standing on the high ground, you’ve created the low ground someone else must stand on. Winning an argument manufactures a loser. Being visibly correct manufactures someone visibly wrong.
So being right is not a pure good floating in space. It’s half of a pair, and it drags its opposite along with it. Once I stopped treating correctness as an absolute, I stopped needing to win.
When you argue with someone, you think you’re debating an idea. Often you’re not. You’re challenging their sense of self.
Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.
You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument. It was a fight over whose ego stays intact. Even when you “win,” you lose, because now you have an enemy who is more convinced than before.
So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper. With the second, there is no answer being sought, only a self to be defended. Knowing which conversation you’re in is half the battle. The other half is having the discipline to walk away from the second one.
We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.
Most people don’t reason their way to conclusions and then feel accordingly. They feel first, then reason backward to justify the feeling. They follow the crowd, mistake confidence for correctness, and adopt whatever the people around them already believe. Independent thinking is rare, far rarer than we admit.
Once you accept this, arguing with logic starts to look absurd. You’re bringing a proof to a feeling. The proof is airtight. The feeling doesn’t read.
“But my motivation is good,” you say. “I’m not attacking anyone. I’m just pointing out a mistake so they don’t get hurt.”
I believed this for a long time. It sounds noble. But even with the best intentions, correcting people usually fails, and here’s the hard part: don’t do it anyway.
People don’t see your motivation. They see criticism. They rarely understand why you bothered, and they almost never appreciate it. Worse, most people don’t learn from advice at all. They learn from consequences. They have to touch the stove themselves. Words bounce off; pain sticks.
This sounds cold. It is. But it’s also, sadly, true. The most respectful thing you can often do is let people meet their own consequences, because that’s the only teacher they’ll actually listen to.
There’s a clean exception to all of this, and it flips the entire logic.
Help people when they explicitly ask for help.
When someone asks, the cause and effect reverse. You’re no longer imposing your judgment on someone who never wanted it. Their asking is the cause; your helping is the effect. Now there’s an opening, a real one, because they’ve decided they’re ready to hear it. The ego is lowered. The defenses are down. The advice lands.
So I don’t offer anymore. I wait for the door to open from the inside. And when someone opens it, I give everything I have.
If letting go of the argument sounds like pure loss, here’s the reframe that turns it into a gain.
When you and someone else see the world differently, you have two options. You can spend your energy trying to convince them you’re right, which, as everything above shows, almost never works. Or you can treat that difference as an asset and go build on it.
If you genuinely believe something others don’t, that’s not a debate to win. That’s an edge. The market rewards being right in a way that no argument ever will. Instead of persuading the skeptic, ship the thing they think is wrong and let reality settle it. Their disagreement isn’t an obstacle; it’s your moat. If everyone already agreed with you, there’d be no opportunity left.
This is especially true if you’re starting your own company. Differentiation is not a side effect of business, it is the business. A startup exists precisely because its founders believe something the rest of the world hasn’t accepted yet. If you could win that argument in a meeting, it wouldn’t be worth a company. The entire value lives in the gap between what you see and what others refuse to.
So I stopped trying to close that gap by talking. I started trying to profit from it by building. Let people disagree. Their disagreement is where the money, and the meaning, is.
Here’s the part that took me longest to accept.
In this world, there is no one you can change. Not your spouses, not your friends, not your kids, and of course not strangers on the internet. Only yourself.
That’s not cynicism, and it’s not giving up on people. It’s the opposite. It’s putting your energy where it can actually do something. Every hour spent trying to change someone who didn’t ask is an hour stolen from the one person (yourself) you can change.
And changing yourself is enough. You don’t need to fix everyone else to live well. When you become clearer, calmer, more skilled, more honest, the world around you shifts on its own, not because you forced anyone, but because people respond to who you actually are. Change yourself and you’ve changed your entire experience of the world. That is sufficient. Nothing more is required.
Accept this, and a strange peace follows. The arguments fall away. The frustration drains out. You stop trying to win people over and start letting them be who they are.
So turn the question around.
If the only person you can change is yourself, then the one question that matters is: how do you actually get better? Not by winning arguments. You get better by asking others for feedback, again and again, and truly listening to it. It’s the same asking I described earlier, the one clean exception, now turned on myself: I’m the one requesting help, so the advice can finally land. And you cannot do that with an ego in the way. The ego that needs to win is the same ego that can’t hear. It’s not just harmful; it’s a disaster, to everyone around you and to yourself most of all, because it quietly walls you off from the one thing that would improve you.
So put it away. Stay humble. Keep asking. That is the whole discipline.
I stopped arguing not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally wanted something more than being right: I wanted to keep getting better. And the only door to that is the one ego keeps slamming shut.