Living Forwards Understanding Backwards
March 07, 2007
As a famous thinker once said, the basic problem in life is that we live forward but understand backward. In other words, we make decisions that are going to have an impact on the future, but we don’t know the future, and often we don’t know what that impact will be. All we know is what’s happened in the past, and sometimes we don’t even know that very well, because our memory gets fogged, distorted. Psychologists have observed that most people tend to repeat decisions they made in the past even though the decisions didn’t really make them happy. We forget, we thought it would make us happy the last time around, and it didn’t. Well, we try it again and again. In other words, it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing but expecting different results.