Things That Make Sense, but Not Really
1. Midnight starting at 12:00am
Makes sense: We need a Universal system of time for scheduling things like meetings and when planes need to depart.
Not really: Nothing really changed between 11:59pm – 12:00am. A new day starts when we wake up.
2. Joining a running festival
Makes sense: An organised sports event that you’ve paid for gives you greater motivation to train. You also receive a medal to flex on your non-runner friends.
Not really: You can literally run the course for free any other day.
3. Swimming
Makes sense: Earth has so much water. Why not move around in it?
Not really: Why are we trying to be fish?
4. Wearing pants
Makes sense: It protects us from harsh environmental stimuli and serves as a fashion statement.
Not really: Pants give us atrocious tan lines and no other animal wears them.
5. Personality tests
Makes sense: People have personalities. Let’s test them and see where they match compared to others.
Not really: Can you seriously group 7.9 billion people into 16 (MBTI) or 9 (Enneagram) categories?
6. Formal education
Makes sense: You learn to socialise with people at a similar stage in life and make friends. Also, it’s important to be educated so you can enter the professional workforce and earn lots of money.
Not really: You can socialise with similar people through other group activities such as sports, volunteering or music. Furthermore, any school class can only reach a particular level of ability: if you are above the standard, you are held back; if you are below the standard, you are left behind. The abundance of high-quality online courses these days makes self-directed learning much more accessible. Books can teach you more about the world than your lived experience ever could. Lastly, employers don’t care about your degrees and are more interested in what skills you have, particularly soft skills; things schools don’t teach nearly as much as they should.
Makes sense: Under experimental observation, quantum entities may be described as either a wave or a particle.
Not really: ???
The point of all this is that the world is filled with ideas we take for granted but don’t really make sense under closer scrutiny (at least to me). I wonder what other dubious narratives are out there.
Earth is a weird and wonderful place.
2 thoughts on “Things That Make Sense, but Not Really”
Such a fun post – it’s interesting how most of the examples you’ve provided are essentially social conventions that all of us have more or less blindly followed. Thanks Eric š
A pleasure as always, Bryan!