The Biggest Mistake Everybody Makes

Here’s a facebook meme waiting to happen: Describe your entire existence in two stock photos with no humans in them. Go.

Ok, Adam, but you go first.

Fine. Here are mine:

Seriously. Baseball and rainbows. That’s me, the end. Baseball, because for me everything always comes back to baseball. I love it. It’s the essence of life. We’ll come back to baseball, I promise.

Rainbows . . . ugh. There’s so much. I’ll try to explain. A rainbow takes light—which we can see, but in this formless sense that on its own doesn’t really give us any more information about what we’re seeing than total darkness does—and breaks it down into the entire color spectrum and synthesizes that breakdown into this amazingly delightful, giant arc above our heads. (Editor’s note: I KNOW the rainbow isn’t the thing that actually does this but rather the result of the atmospheric components conspiring together, but not in any kind of sentient way, to produce this phenomenon, and there’s a lot more to it; you’re very smart.)

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And rainbows have developed into this impossibly complex world of cultural symbolism in our society symbolizing both the wonder inherent in science itself and the bridge to unknown worlds beyond science. In a way, rainbows are metaphors for themselves. (I feel like I’m possibly moving further and further away from clear communication; I hope you don’t mind.)

Here’s what I mean: rainbows represent the full spectrum of visible light, as indicated by the graph below.

It’s oh so very scientific now. But as the graph’s subtitle indicates, this spectrum is only a portion of the greater electromagnetic spectrum of light. Here’s another graphic to illustrate just how small of a portion that is.

Radio waves are invisible light. Microwaves aren’t just ovens. X-rays and gamma rays are awesome, and they are called rays for a reason (and not just because everyone loves them). It’s all light. Beautiful, invisible (to us) light. As humans, we’ve named the visible light represented between the red and violet bookends of the rainbow visible because WE can see it. But let’s not lose sight of the pecking order here. Electromagnetic energy is so much bigger than us. As much as we feel compelled to do the defining here by coming up with a term for that tiny little sliver of light we have the ability to see with our eyes, let’s think for a few seconds about what all that invisible light reveals about us:

We’re so tiny. We’re so limited.

Aside from light rays in a wavelength spectrum that’s .3 millionths of a meter in variance, we can’t see anything. Something beyond our control or influence has developed in us the ability to see some light which allows us to see some stuff, and suddenly we think we’re the masters of the universe.

Still, we are pretty awesome. (I mean, we came up with baseball, for crying out loud.) Rainbows show us how beautiful the world we see can be. They also show us how much we don’t see. And somehow, they’re not even really there. They make it look like something is there that is not while simultaneously illustrating that there is so much around us that looks like it doesn’t exist.

Come ON, rainbows. You’re killing me.

And that brings me to my initial point, which I have not yet made. One of the very greatest, most common, and most destructive mistakes we make as humans is believing this statement: What you see is all there is. That phenomenon has been popularized over the years by literally everyone, but that phrase was coined by renowned, Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe a cognitive bias to which we all fall victim.

The phrase itself doesn’t seem to need much explanation, but the more you examine the ways it permeates how we live and make decisions, the more you see that its simple obviousness is just the tip of the iceberg of ignorance. We’re so smart that we too often lose sight of how much we don’t know.

(The psychologist behind the phrase, Daniel Kahneman, by the way, won his Nobel prize in economics. But it might not be possible to read a popular-level psychology or economics book published in the last 40 years that doesn’t mention the groundbreaking work he and his partner, the late Amos Tversky, did in both fields. There are plenty of great books by and about them, but the one I recommend most strongly is the one Michael Lewis wrote about them called The Undoing Project. Coincidentally, he wrote that book because he was inundated with letters and reviews about a previous book stating that none of the revelations therein would have existed without the men who had inspired them with their genius. That previous book? Moneyball. I told you, EVERYTHING COMES BACK TO BASEBALL.)

The mistake we all make is thinking, no, assuming without thinking that what we see is all there is. There’s always something we’re missing. There’s always something we haven’t thought of because we didn’t even know that we didn’t know.

And in the end, after half a life of believing something I know longer believe that would have explained everything, I take great comfort in knowing I have no idea how much everything there really is. The rainbow, the illusions, the voice that calls the young sailor . . . there is so much more out there to discover and to create.

Some people behave like they know so much. I invite you to stay here in the world of rainbows that consistently remind us of how much we can do, how little we see, and how connected we are to all of it.

We will find that connection. Lovers. Dreamers. Me. We got this.