Two minutes of sun do more than three hours of icy wind. Why grown adults keep choosing the wind — at home, at work and at the scale of a country.
Common sense is in the minority.
When I was little it seemed to me that the grown-ups knew exactly what they were doing. That sensible adults understood cause and effect and acted wisely. After all, they already had life experience.
The older I got, the more I became convinced of the opposite.
Many of us have heard since childhood the parable in which the sun and the wind argued about who could strip the coat off a man in the forest faster. The wind swooped in and blew as hard as it could, but the colder it got, the tighter the woodcutter wrapped himself in his sheepskin. When the wind died down, the sun looked out from behind the clouds for a couple of minutes, and the man, feeling the warmth, took the coat off himself.
The moral is simple — two minutes of sun do more than three hours of icy wind.
How do grown adults apply this principle in adult life?
- In the family, most people prefer to shout at each other and criticise. Mutual accusations and nagging remarks pour out in a steady stream, in the hope that the other person will hear it all, understand, apologise and of course change.
Strange that such an icy attitude doesn’t bring any warmth into the family.
- At work, many bosses choose an authoritarian style of management built on the whip. Plenty of managers consider it normal to humiliate their subordinates in public, devalue their work and make them look like idiots.
Strange that people burn out emotionally so fast and quit hoping to forget such a “manager” like a bad dream.
- Our government here in Ukraine is currently restricting consular services for all men of draft age who have gone abroad.
Strange that men don’t want to come back to a country whose own authorities call them cowards and traitors….
You could give hundreds more examples like these, but the moral is very simple. Common sense is in a critical minority. Most of the decisions adults make are not merely bad — they are lethally stupid. The consequences turn out to be catastrophic.
So it is entirely logical that we live such a tragic fate as a society. The habit of not thinking costs a great deal.
Which is why the more often we start thinking with our own heads and relying less on other people, the better our own life gets.
Do you see stupidity around you?
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