Should Have Known Better

Sometimes we don’t realize how bad something is until we experience a much better version. “Good” and “Bad” are relative terms, right? We look back on the way people did certain things a hundred years ago and we laugh at how horrible it was to, for example, take a long journey on a steamship or get Polio or whatever. But certain things are normalized for their context; intellectually you may be aware that travel and medicine will certainly improve over the next hundred years too, but you don’t really feel it.

In fact, the only way you think of something as good or bad is if it’s better or worse than the norms you’ve already experienced. You don’t think of air travel as inherently good or bad, it just is. But if you take an especially bumpy or late flight or have a very good hospital experience you’re aware of it – and you become aware of the standard you’re measuring that experience against, all of a sudden. A great doctor’s visit makes you say “Why can’t they all be like this?” A crappy flight makes you say “Most flights are enjoyable, why did this one fall short?”

But if you never take that horrible flight or get that great doctor’s attention, you may never know. A hundred times a day you probably experience something that could be much better or worse and you have no idea.

An upshot of this: often whatever you deliver could be much better, and you have no idea.

I mean, let’s say you make sandwiches in a cafeteria. Maybe they’re fine. They could be way better though – but you have no idea unless someone else comes in and, with the exact same ingredients, puts together a way better gourmet meal. And it’s very easy to accidentally engineer our lives so that never happens.

In many ways, I think it would be great if more people had to be like barbers. A barber can’t cut their own hair, so they have to pretty regularly interact with someone else who does what they do professionally. That’s not a bad thing, and most of us don’t do it. Most of us deliver something professionally for years or even decades without necessarily experiencing someone else delivering the same thing, but much better.

It’s worth looking out for. The bubble can be an average-making machine, and how would you know better unless you saw it?