A series of thoughts run through my mind whenever I hear someone claim “you’re doing it wrong”.
The feeling that the phrase, and others like it, allude to there being some physical law of how to do things right. Like gravity.
The notion that we can be so utterly confident that the way we say is right IS right and that all other possible ways are wrong.
The way it creates such barriers to learning by trial and error, as well as barriers to discovering new and possibly better ways of doing, it.
And the way it’s just so obviously historically inaccurate, when you consider all the things that have changed over millennia of human history.
We’ve got nothing right. We just find ways that seem to work well for a while. We make everything up. And then change it. We’re all just bumbling along creating things and pretending we know exactly what’s going on, despite year after year, looking back and thinking the old us was wrong, but that this new us is right.
A train of thought inspired this evening by this:
And one that relates in my mind to the end of history illusion. A lovely and oddly comforting piece of research I think. To imagine being 100 and looking at your 90 year old self like an naive little whipper snapper.
If only it was easier to channel that humility at all time in the present.
Documenteering 