You take in raw experience, sensation, and uncertainty, and your mind reshapes all of that into ideas, concepts, interpretations, and conclusions that help you function. The purpose isn’t to give you a flawless copy of some objective reality. You don’t have direct access to that anyway.
Your thoughts have done their job when they help you live more effectively. When they help you predict what might happen, weigh outcomes, make decisions, and respond well to real situations, then your thinking is doing what it’s meant to do.
So the real question isn’t whether your thoughts perfectly match some absolute truth out there. The real question is whether they’re useful. You test an idea by living with it, by seeing what it allows you to do, where it helps, and where it falls apart.
Put simply: your thinking is a tool for navigating life, not a mirror of ultimate reality.