On Toupees, Fries, and Things Working theWay They Should by Martina Malcotti

There is a cognitive bias so delightfully named that it could double as a band name: the toupee fallacy. It goes something like this: “All toupees look fake. See? Look at that one: it’s clearly fake.” The problem, of course, is that you’ve only noticed the bad toupee. The good one passes under your radar, precisely because it’s good. It’s a cognitive blind spot, one that applies far beyond men with suspiciously dense bangs. 

The toupee fallacy is really about invisibility: about the way we miss all the competent, functioning, ordinary things that keep the world humming, because they don’t call attention to themselves. We notice when something goes wrong. We rarely notice when something goes right. 

Take trash collection. Nobody wakes up on a random Tuesday and goes, “Ah, what a glorious day! The sanitation department has once again removed the garbage from the curb in a timely fashion!” No, we only notice when it doesn’t happen, when the trash sits there all week stewing in the sun, producing smells that haunt you longer than that one awkward one-night stand you keep running into. 

Here’s the thing: once you start noticing the toupee fallacy in your everyday life, you realize how much of modern life is built on invisible competence. Elevators. Dining facilities. Air traffic controllers. People baking ___chocoladebrootjes___ and ___kaastengels___ at 6 a.m. so that your indispensable morning coffee can be accompanied accordingly. Your entire day is a parade of things working out correctly. And yet, because they work, they don’t feel like much at all. It’s an oddly unfair arrangement. Success is self-erasing. Failure is immortal. The toupee fallacy tells us that we’re only building mental lists of the screw-ups, while the triumphs slip quietly away; our perception of reality becomes skewed toward chaos and incompetence.

 Of course it seems like “everything’s broken” if you only notice what’s broken. This also explains why cynicism is such an easy personality pattern to slip into. It’s cool to mutter that “people are idiots” when something doesn’t go your way. Like when your 3 a.m. fries at Bambi are still partly frozen and you immediately compose a five-part rant about the collapse of civilization - probably fueled by one too many beers. 

Of course, I’m not arguing for naive optimism. Plenty of things are genuinely broken: healthcare systems, welfare policies, and ongoing genocides. These aren’t “cold fries” problems; they’re structural failures with life-and-death consequences. But that’s exactly why the toupee fallacy matters: it tricks us into thinking everything is failing, which is both exhausting and inaccurate. It blinds us to the moments of quiet success that could, if noticed, give us just enough optimism to keep fighting the bigger battles. Maybe the toupee fallacy can at least remind us to balance our outrage with a little gratitude. Not the saccharine, Instagram-story kind, but the simple acknowledgement that thousands of competent, mostly anonymous people are out there preventing the chaos from spilling into your day. Imagine if we flipped the script a bit. What if we noticed when our unitmate washed their dishes before they started developing a new ecosystem in the sink?

What if we celebrated the rare day when Spotify shuffle actually understood the assignment? What if we acknowledged when the group project actually had everyone contribute, instead of one martyr and three freeriders? It might feel weird at first - like complimenting someone’s toupee - but it could train us to see the invisible. 

The toupee fallacy serves as a reminder that the smooth, seamless aspects of life are real, too. Just because they don’t yell for your attention doesn’t mean they don’t deserve it. In fact, they deserve it precisely because they didn’t yell. So here’s my modest proposal: next time something works the way it should, pause for a second. Appreciate the bus driver who got you to Utrecht Centraal safely and on time for your train. The unremarkable elevator ride that delivered you to your floor and prevented you from having to climb all the way up the stairs. Maybe even the toupee you never noticed. Because invisibility, in this case, is not a failure: it’s mastery. And once you start to see it, you realize the world is full of silent successes, all around you.