Knowing Thyself

We like to believe that we are unique, that we know ourselves better than almost everybody else (except maybe a spouse or parent or very close friend). Oliver Burkeman says we are wrong in that belief:

“You have a huge amount of detailed information about your preferences and past experiences. But it also gives you overconfidence in your judgments; an emotional resistance to facing certain awkward facts; and an outsized sense of your uniqueness and importance.”

And so:

“Alarmingly often, when you’re faced with a big decision, you’re better off trusting the judgment of a friend – or even a stranger – than your own.”

Friends I can understand. But strangers?

The strangers part is more relevant when it comes to long term decisions like getting married or having kids. Since those would be new experiences, you really have no idea how you’ll respond to them. There is no past behavior to look at!

“It starts to look as if the best way to make a big decision might not be to intensively weigh your options, but to seek out someone else who did something similar and ask how it panned out.”

All this is so hard to accept because:

“It’s extraordinarily difficult to accept that you might be deeply statistically normal, and best advised just to do whatever most normal people in your situation have done in the past.”

Ouch!

I guess we should console ourselves with the converse to all this, as pointed out by Alex Balk:

“You don't even suck above average.”