 The Truth About Imaginary Arguments
It was 2 AM when I realized I had been arguing with my father for three hours—and he had been dead for sixteen years.
I stood in my kitchen, hands gesturing to an empty room, delivering the perfect rebuttal to a conversation that had never happened and never would. The words came with surgical precision, each point crafted to dismantle his imagined counterarguments, every pause calculated for maximum impact. I was brilliant in this solitary theater, winning debates with ghosts who could not surrender.
Why do we do this? Why do we construct elaborate courtrooms in our minds where we serve as prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge—knowing the verdict is always predetermined?
The compulsion begins, I think, with the intoxicating promise of resolution. Somewhere in our neural architecture lies the belief that the perfect argument exists—the combination of words so irrefutable, so elegantly constructed, that it could crack open the most fortified mind. We rehearse because we believe in the myth of logical conversion, the fairy tale that reason alone can reshape another person’s fundamental worldview.
But observe what actually happens in these midnight tribunals: we don’t practice listening. We practice speaking. We don’t rehearse empathy. We rehearse dominance. The imaginary opponent in our mental theater is not a complex human being with their own wounds and fears and reasons—they are a caricature, a straw man designed to lose gracefully to our superior rhetoric.
The people we argue with in our minds are never the people we argue with in reality. They are edited versions, stripped of their full humanity, reduced to the positions they hold rather than the experiences that shaped those positions. We fight shadows while convincing ourselves we’re engaging with substance.
There is something profoundly lonely about these rehearsals. They reveal our deep hunger to be understood, to have our perspective validated, to matter enough to change someone’s mind. But they also reveal our terror of genuine dialogue—the kind where we might have to listen, where we might be wrong, where the conversation might change us more than them.
I think of my friend who spent months crafting the perfect email to his estranged brother, revising each paragraph like a peace treaty. The email was never sent. The rehearsal had become more important than the performance, the preparation more satisfying than the uncertain territory of actual communication.
Perhaps these mental arguments serve as dress rehearsals for conversations we’re too afraid to have. Or perhaps they’re elaborate methods of self-soothing, ways of convincing ourselves that our positions are unassailable, that we occupy the moral high ground, that if only the world were more reasonable, everyone would think exactly as we do.
But here is what I have learned in my decades of winning imaginary arguments: the people whose minds we most want to change are often the people whose approval we most desperately seek. We rehearse with our fathers because we still need their validation. We craft perfect responses to critics because their criticism wounds us more than we can admit. We argue with ghosts because the living versions never gave us what we needed.
The futility is not in the rehearsal itself—it’s in believing the rehearsal can substitute for genuine encounter. Real persuasion rarely happens through logical bombardment. It happens through patient relationship, through demonstrated love, through the slow work of building trust. It happens when someone feels heard before they’re asked to listen.
The most profound conversations I’ve had were not the ones where I deployed my carefully crafted arguments, but the ones where I forgot to argue at all. Where I became curious instead of combative. Where I asked questions instead of providing answers. Where I discovered that changing minds is less important than changing hearts—and hearts change not through force but through invitation.
Tonight, when I catch myself mid-argument with another phantom interlocutor, I will try a different rehearsal. Instead of practicing how to win, I will practice how to love. Instead of crafting the perfect response, I will imagine the perfect question. Instead of preparing to change their mind, I will prepare to understand their heart.
Because the people who will never change their mind are not the problem. The problem is believing that minds are fortresses to be conquered rather than gardens to be tended—and that the most important garden is often the one growing wild in our own chest.
The argument ends when we stop needing to win it.