“Hindsight is 20/20.” Or is it?
How a proverb become cliché might be undermining us
This week, I had two clients say, “Hindsight is 20/20,” after discussing situations that had not turned out quite how they’d hoped. The clients seemed to mean it in a compassionate way, giving themselves grace for errors in judgment or poor decisions from the past. I appreciated their statements because I often find that clients need a lot of encouragement to even consider being gentle with themselves. These ladies were doing it.
But when they said it, I heard an undertone of regret intermingled with the compassion. And I felt a compulsion to disagree.
I heard an undertone of regret intermingled with the compassion.
So, I questioned whether or not hindsight actually is 20/20 and prompted my client to think about what she realistically might be able to change if she could have do-overs as a wiser person. She didn’t argue with me; I saw that she let it sink in. Then a second client said it a few days later, and I heard a similar tinge of regret. So, I challenged her, too.
Having this come up twice in the same week made a few Google searches irresistible. I found that one origin of the phrase is:
“based on the idea that people can see things more clearly in hindsight than when they are in the middle of something.”
That made perfect sense to me, so why had I been unsettled by hearing my clients use the phrase? Then I found a meaning attributed to it:
“an ability to see clearly what should have been done.”
What my gut instinct couldn’t resist challenging was the implication that if my clients could go back with the knowledge they currently have and do what should have been done, things would turn out better. Because how can we really ever know what should have been done in most real-life, nuanced situations from the past?
It turns out that even 20/20 vision is more nuanced than most of us (or maybe just me) realize. According to the American Optometric Association, “Having 20/20 vision does not necessarily mean you have perfect vision. 20/20 vision only indicates the sharpness or clarity of vision at a distance. Other important vision skills, including peripheral awareness or side vision, eye coordination, depth perception, focusing ability and color vision, contribute to your overall visual ability.”
“Having 20/20 vision does not necessarily mean you have perfect vision.”
Just as “sharpness or clarity” is only one important vision skill, we are only one important element in any given situation. No matter what outcome we’d like to orchestrate, the amount of control we have is limited — regardless of what hindsight might indicate should have been done.
Wherever you are today, whatever you have learned, you still only have limited control in those situations you probably stress about most. Wherever you were then, whatever you knew, you only had limited control in the situations you probably stressed about most. I bet you know where I’m going next, “Wherever you are in ___ days/hours/months/years, whatever you know, you will only have…” what? Yup, limited control in the situations you will probably stress about the most.
Wherever you were then, whatever you knew, you only had limited control in the situations you probably stressed about most.
What I’m suggesting is that we, as a society, have been attempting to comfort ourselves and one another with a well-intentioned proverb laced with a cognitive distortion — a straight-up “should” statement that could also fall somewhere in the realms of magical thinking, personalization, or fortune-telling.
I have sat with my own regrets, reminding myself that I didn’t know then what I know now…and I haven’t been able to get away from the unspoken subtext that if I had known, I somehow would’ve been able to make the most appropriate choice. In the absence of catastrophic consequences, how can I know with certainty that the choice I did make with the information I had at the time was not actually the most appropriate choice?
Take, for example, what has been one of my biggest regrets: turning down a scholarship to a prestigious HBCU. As a full-grown adult, I now know some truths that my 17-year-old self would’ve appreciated:
- You don’t need to be afraid of leaving home. Even if you are afraid, you can tap into other feelings (e.g., excitement) that might be just as big as the fear is.
- Being away from familiar people and things gets easier as new people and things become familiar to you.
- If you hate the experience, you can go back home, and that won’t mean you failed — it will just mean that you learned something about what works for you and what doesn’t.
- It’s okay to make decisions that make your mom cry. It’s okay to make decisions that make you cry. It’s okay to make decisions that make your dad sad, bordering on angry, because he won’t let you see him cry.
- It’s even okay to change your mind and do the damned thing that makes you cry if you decide it might be worth the tears.
Even if I could go back and tell her all of that and more, I would not be able to assure her that choosing to take the scholarship would have led her to connect with the people and things her adult self currently appreciates most. I could never guarantee her that the butterfly effect would be worth it because whether or not she took the scholarship was always only one factor in any possible outcome for her life.
I could never guarantee her that the butterfly effect would be worth it…
Photo by JoelValve on Unsplash
Maybe take a moment to consider your idea of hindsight. Is it actually rumination over what you should or would have done differently had you known better? If so, try focusing on the origins of the idea rather than the meanings society seems to have attributed to it. The passage of time often does foster a clarity we did not have when we were in the middle of a thing. Allow that clarity to build foresight, which Oxford dictionaries defines as:
“the ability to predict or the action of predicting what will happen or be needed in the future”.
It seems to me that if hindsight is 20/20, then foresight might be 20/15.
