the inertia of human worries

There’s a strange human experience that everyone knows, and which becomes more common as you grow older and get stuck more easily in habits. I’m referring to those cases where you’re worried about something, then someone eliminates the worry completely by providing new information, and then a few hours later you’re worried about it again, having somehow forgotten that the problem is now completely solved.

Sometimes this happens over the very long haul. The most obvious example, in my own case, is that before trips I’m always annoyed that I don’t know what sort of weather to dress for in the place I’m going. And from time to time I realize: “this problem was solved long ago for anyone with internet access.” And thus, this evening, I found myself annoyed about not knowing how to dress for Philadelphia, until I remembered the obvious fact that a few mouse clicks can clear up the problem. Philadelphia is, unsurprisingly, quite a bit colder than Cairo right now. But not as big a discrepancy as there would have been a month or two ago.

There’s another weird variant on this, which is that upon waking up in the morning I’m sometimes annoyed at not knowing how to dress for Cairo weather. But in fact, there’s a huge balcony right off the main bedroom here, and all one needs to do is open the door, go outside, and feel the weather for oneself.

Much of this is just the result of comical human absentmindedness, but there’s a real issue here that probably exerts a strong influence on history. In addition to the many looming problems we don’t suspect, there are also plenty of problems that are already solved without our knowing it, simply because our patterns of thought are aligned with older historical conditions that are no longer applicable, if only someone could point that out to us.

This can happen on the global level, but also on a more local level. In the last week or two, for instance, I’ve heard some people remark that such-and-such policies of our university were built to address conditions that are no longer applicable, and in several cases this came as a surprise and as a complete revelation: the remarks were correct. This happens in philosophy too, and I’m sure everyone can think of numerous examples.