Some topics really rile us up – and the questions of “what it means to be a man”, gender and masculinity are usually on the list of those topics. And when we get heated, it’s usually because we think we know so much about a topic and we’re sure that we’re right. Most of the time, we base our knowledge on our experience – which makes total sense – it’s what we know.
Then we search for proof to back up our own experience and, in the information age, information and misinformation are equally ubiquitous. So we find what we’re looking for and it feels good – good to have our ideas and experiences validated by others.
Is meat good for you or bad for you, for example. My Google search for that question produced 904,000,000 (that’s almost a billion) search results in .42 seconds. On page 10, I found “The Last Conversation You’ll Need to Have About Eating Right.” So, that means, the next 903,999,990 entries I don’t have to read – because I now have the definitive answer!
Remember, doctors used to think smoking was good for you! And Heroin- that was a good cough suppressant. You get the idea. Of course, that begs the question: “What are they wrong about today?” But I digress because the real question is: “What am I wrong about today?”
If scientists spend billions of dollars and billions of work-hours studying to understand the world around us, only to be proven wrong, how in the world can the rest of us be so right, so much of the time, just based on personal experiences backed up (mostly) by our confirmation biases? Well, we’re not. We just not right. Not me, not you.
That’s hard to hear and super easy to dismiss. As Kathrine Schulz points out in “Being Wrong,” (my favorite book of a couple years ago), we are terribly unfamiliar with being wrong, even though we spend so much of our time being wrong. Why? Because we’re usually so sure we’re right up until the moment we realize we’re wrong – and then POOF! like magic, we’re right again. We WERE wrong before, but NOW we’re right. It’s like magic – we rarely get to feel wrong for a prolonged period of time.
Recognizing that we’re wrong, basically all of the time, is somewhere between hard and impossible for us to live with. We easily move to a sense of defensiveness, denial or resignation. But in order for us to move forward in our understanding, we need to fall in love with this idea.
We will have to get fantastically okay with not being right- in fact, relishing it!
It’s not that what you believe is bad if it’s wrong – that’s a terrible false equivalent. Wrong isn’t bad. Where you were on your path yesterday isn’t bad or worse than where you are today, it’s just yesterday. And if you’re truly on a path, then you DON’T WANT TO BE WHERE YOU WERE YESTERDAY. You want to be where you are today and you want to be moving toward where you will be tomorrow.
Most of our ideas are yesterday. What we know is old. What we DON’T know is in our future – and that, frankly, is way more exciting.
We all have many things in our lives that we see differently now than we did earlier in our lives. The older you get, the clearer this becomes. If you’re 25, what you are SO SURE OF about sex is way different from what you were equally (if not more) sure of about sex when you were 12. What you are SO SURE OF about love when you’re married (or divorced) is vastly different from when you were with your first girlfriend/boyfriend.
The old ideas simply fall away and make way for your new knowledge. We don’t look back on our silly ideas of love as teenagers as bad, it was part of our growth. And that’s what we need to see about all the areas where we’re wrong now. What we know now is very different from what we knew when we go back to our earliest memories of being men/boys. We were wrong about many things. And that’s not bad. We are wrong about many things now – and that’s great!
This is incredibly important as we tackle the questions of being a man today. How we view gender and ourselves as men is supposed to be a constant, yet that, like everything else, must evolve. Unfortunately, many of the ideas that we need to let go of and be wrong about, we really want to hold on to. There is comfort in certainty and the familiar.
I used to want to be right. Now, I want to be wrong. When I come to a new understanding, it can feel like such a refreshing revelation that I never want to let it go. But I must. I must keep going. Because we have a long and exciting path ahead of us. We don’t want to stay were we are – we’re not at the end yet.
Wherever you are at this moment is good. It’s exactly where you’re supposed to be. But you don’t get to the great view if you stay here. If you’re in the middle of your journey and you think you’ve arrived, you’ll never see what’s over that next mountain.
Image Credits:
- Stocksnap
- Charles Schultz Peanuts
- www.xkcd.com/386/