i-told-you-so-

No person can claim to have a global view we can have depth and width to our perspectives but if we hold wisdom we can’t claim to have a complete world view. As Socrates famously remarked. We all see the world from different perspectives. One of those perspectives is time.

As with many things “time,” is effectively seen in a variety of resolutions, or “chunks.”

We can’t easily analogise people in a useful way here unless we look at the outcomes of disability instead I turn to the world of other species to make my case.

If we consider Fauna who’s majority sense of the world is gained through taste taxa such as Snakes. We can more easily consider given their shape, size and sensory perception that their world view is very different than ours. The dimensions of how they experience the world is fundamentally different.

Without delving into Einstein. Is it possible to consider at an experiential level that in the same way that the snake has a different perception of physical 3 dimensional reality, than us, that we may all be set at a mental level on different time clocks?

When we miss the events that seem to jump up and hit us in the face, while others say “I told you so,” is it in fact because of an actual inability to see at certain time distances correctly. Effectively do some of us need “glasses,” or the “hearing aid,” for our time sense? Technically and pragmatically what a complex task monitoring the time dynamics of personal evolution and change would be.

Of course we can train our time perception at the edges and make it stronger, just as we can train our eyes, we may miss something the first time but look at it with new eyes a second time. That said some people seem to always see the issues as they arise at certain time distances and avoid them.

It would seem we are long sighted or short sighted in this sense, at a very broad level.

At the extremes we all know people who on a day to day basis certain people get relationships completely wrong, they crash from one failure to another when it comes to daily life, and yet they accumulate wealth, influence and success over longer periods in a way that the individual who took a steady daily path never can imagine. These people always look 5 years ahead and hence with the correct judgement see how concepts rise and fall very clearly. Often their personal relationships tend to get left behind as those round them have a very different sense of reality and judgement, but every once in a while they suggest the profound in a way that drives others to consider new pathways.

On the antithesis we all know someone supremely gifted, talented and able, with good all round skills, who gets by day to day but never achieves great things. At the end of their lives they are still looking at tomorrow. They look towards tomorrow and lead each individual day as perfectly as they can, missing the futurist fractures navigated by the time sense of the long sighted person, walking into industry changes that result in redundancy of skill sets, increases in competition and market forces that drive prices down. These people tend to be happy, and able to closely relate to others in a way that has meaning on a day to day level but often have dreams never realised given the constant forward momentum sensitises them at a daily level to perceive short term failure as a descriptor of their person.