It is definitely a useful survival trait, and it certainly helps with the progress of the species.

Man does it suck sometimes though if you’re on the ‘push even if it hurts’ part of the spectrum!

Something that has helped me over time is the awareness that the stories we tell (both ourselves and others) are almost always post-facto attempts to rationalize what we fundamentally do not understand or control (our own thoughts and reactions, and those of others).

This is often for safety - both the illusion of control for ourselves, and to spin a safe and beneficial story for others to magnify the good or hide the bad of what happened. It gets even more interesting when the possibility of influencing others (or yourself!) to your benefit comes into play. Also a necessary and useful survival trait! There are a great many things it is helpful to believe that may be plainly contradicted by evidence.

If you cut away the noise produced by this process, ignore what people say, and look at action/reaction and reverse engineer it a bit - it almost always produces a far more reliable and predictable model for understanding people and the world overall.

Either way it takes a lot of experience and data points to have any accuracy, so it’s going to be confusing as hell for a long time. Especially if you haven’t figured out that almost everything anyone says (especially yourself!) is fundamentally self serving and post-facto - not due to malice even (though that happens), but because that’s the way it has to work!