The thought came to me that really, none of the places I’ve gone to are really anything like what I imagined.
I always have notions of what things are like. What cultures are like, what the people are like, how much people earn, etc.
I think I’ve been guilty of thinking everyone in a certain place would be poor, and then have been surprised to see countless cars driving down the road that I couldn’t come close to affording.
I always thought Buenos Aires was on the ocean and assumed it would have a proper beach. Neither are accurate.
Basically everywhere I’ve gone has led to some great surprises, and my existing beliefs and concepts about what those places would be like are often way off.
Of course it can vary a bit (London, for example, was about what I expected), the fact remains that even if we’re confident in what we think we know, we might still be completely wrong.
And that’s just for the places I’ve been to, which hopefully not I have a more accurate concept of.
I’ve only been to maybe 0.0001% of the cities of the world, and met even fewer of its people. It’s likely that my concept of almost all of them is wrong.
And then there are ideas, concepts, industries, cultures, languages, and more that I am likely just as ignorant about.
With almost all of them, if I dug in deeper, I’m sure I would find that my preconceived notions are way off base.
Which means that I really don’t know anything about anything. I’m almost completely ignorant about the world.
And I think this applies to everyone.
The world is a huge place and we don’t live very long. You can spend an entire lifetime learning and still barely crack the surface.
I’m not sure there’s much of an actionable lesson from this, just that I shouldn’t be confident that I know just about anything. I need to always be open to new ideas because the ones I have probably aren’t the best.