Blurry
Hindsight is not 20/20.
Ironically, we often forget this.
Years ago, I spoke with a friend who was previously an early employee at a startup that is now worth billions of dollars. She told me how she had missed the old days: “It was great. There were no office politics, no bureaucracy, and no distractions. You just came to work and got to work! I was so much happier then. I wish I could go back in time.”
I caught up with her more recently and she shared an interesting revelation: “You know…I was reading my personal journal I used to keep from the early days of working at [REDACTED]. It is funny, because I don’t remember it like this AT ALL… But I was not happy! There are dozens of entries from me complaining about how frustrating it was working at a startup with so few resources. Almost every entry included a complaint about my manager who I felt was totally unqualified to manage. And I even wrote how distracted I felt by all the chaos.”
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I wonder how often this happens, and on what scale. Which of my core memories are not true at all? Which of them have I warped to fit narratives that are more comforting, more reassuring, more positive for me? Which of the personal heuristics I currently use are not based in reality?
I also wonder how much it matters to be accurate about our memories. In the case of my friend, it mattered at least a little bit. She was experiencing nostalgia about a lie. And if she hadn’t looked at her journal, maybe she would’ve joined an early-stage startup again and hated it. But perhaps there are false memories which are serving you better than the real ones, and if your inaccurate version of events doesn’t harm anyone else, well, does it matter if you remember a lie?
I’m not sure.
“Hindsight bias” is the term we use when someone acts as though things that happened were more predictable than they really were at the time. I wonder if we need a new term, “hindsight bias bias”, for when you believe your memory is accurate but it’s actually quite blurry.
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If this topic is interesting to you, carve out a few minutes today or this weekend to read The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang.
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