Wander Forth

Your view of the world is so incredibly narrow, skewed, and flawed. That’s not a criticism of you specifically; it simply cannot be otherwise.

Firsthand knowledge is one of the few ways to get any real information. And your ability to absorb firsthand knowledge is limited to such a minuscule fraction of the world that you simply can’t comprehend the sheer breadth of what you don’t know.

A coworker of mine, who lives in India, told me today about how pharmaceutical interventions faced an uphill battle there based on a plethora of factors including the fact that white is the color associated with death and mourning (as opposed to black, as if often is in Western countries), which meant that, among other things, people were freaked out by being asked to swallow white pills. And I get it! If a doctor handed you a black pill, it might freak you out a little.

(Side note: in the Western world we often think of “white” as something like colorless, neutral, default, etc. But it’s not – you have to color those pills white the same as you’d have to color them red or green. In fact, it takes a lot of effort to make most things white. Paper and cloth don’t just come that way.)

Anyway, I found this fascinating, as I always do when I hear about ways of thinking that aren’t my own. Because it came to me from another source, I can’t be certain of the truth of the information. Any of the horsemen of falsehood could be playing with what I hear. It could even just be a convenient falsehood.

And that’s all the more reason to go out and wander around yourself. Gather as much firsthand knowledge as you can. It will never be enough, but it can help you filter the secondhand information better. The more personal experience you have, the more you’ve seen the grass and dreams of the world, the better equipped you are to contextualize the information you hear from others.

Wander forth, and be unfooled.