what are we so afraid of?

I spent a good chunk of my Fourth of July re-organizing my apartment and creating a working nook space by a window. I also spent some time thinking about my career and my life trajectories, including the fact that by this time next year, I may be anywhere.

This is both exciting and scary, because I view life as a series of narrowing and delving process where with each decision we make we zoom in on a field, effectively eliminating the other possibilities out there. What if I take a wrong turn? What if I don't feel the same way twenty years down the road? What if they are right?

I watched this video from a recent TED conference by Kathryn Schulz. More than just a "wrongologist", she is a journalist and a writer whose recent book is titled "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error". Here she talks about our misguided sense of "wrongness"- we don't know what is feels like to be wrong, instead we know what it feels like to realize we are wrong.

At TED2011, March 2011

Why we shouldn't focus on being right (besides that our "internal sense of rightness" can be flawed):

But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing... The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

 Reminding us that life is not predictable:

... our stories are like this[surprise endings] because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead... For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us.

I took the advice I wanted to from this video, but I imagine different people will learn different lessons from this lecture. I'm reminded that "being right" is a subjective quality that may change depending on the time and the situation. Even if a decision was indeed "right" at a certain point, the world may change, and if I had made the said decision solely to be right, that decision will no longer hold intrinsic value for me.