In the last few weeks, a question has bothered my mind: why don’t we learn from others’ mistakes?
Or in other words: why are very few people able to leverage on someone else’s experience?
The majority of us, even when confronted with the results of a friend’s bad decision, sooner or later fall in the same trap.
My reflection comes from the observation of the coronavirus pandemic management.
In Italy the Government waited days before imposing the lockdown, even if they had witnessed China’s experience on how to break the spreading of the virus.
I have relatives in Austria who told me that in their country “things were different” and probably the spread of the virus in Italy was related to our poor health care system, which isn’t so bad after all.
What I have observed on a large scale happens at individual level too.
Raise your hand if you never judged a friend for a poor decision and lack of wisdom and then you went and did the same thing, some months or years later!
I go back to my first question: why does it happen?
Our emotional brain doesn’t function like our muscular memory, you know, the one that allows us to remember a certain sequence of movements even after a long period of time. We are not able to fix in our emotional memory the feelings related to a certain experience unless we have experienced it for ourselves. We act by the rule “seeing is believing”, unless we feel the heat of the fire, we think that we will act differently, and by differently, I mean better.
When someone shares their learning in a given situation or gives us a good advice, we listen and understand the rational and logic in it, but we are unable to catch the emotional side.
That’s why, when we all saw the ghost streets of Wuhan, we couldn’t feel the sense of fear for one’s safety, the uncertainty and the anxiety for the future of beloved ones.
I want to shine a beacon of hope: if we put ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we empathize with the human condition, we can learn from others’ mistakes and maybe, maybe, avoid one or two.
It’s worth trying, isn’t it?