An essential perspective.
Heretics drive forward history. There are many people who were persecuted in their own time, or made fun of, or thought ridiculous, who actually turned out to be right, and extremely innovative. The classic examples are figures like Socrates and Galileo. But perhaps the most extreme example is Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a 19th-century man who theorized that doctors should wash their hands in between seeing different patients for different reasons, for safety purposes. His ideas were mocked and rejected by his colleagues, and he became a black sheep. Tragically, his mental health fell apart, and he died in an asylum. Only years after his death did his lifesaving ideas gain acceptance. The tricky part about unorthodox ideas, though, is that there’s also an availability bias at play when we look at examples like this in history. For every heretic that propels humanity forward, there are one hundred kooks, conspiracy nuts, and wacky theories that end up being completely wrong. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore certain strange ideas that are outside of conventional wisdom. We definitely still should, because the needles in that haystack are what changes the world.
Coffee shops are like gyms for your mind.
I love imagining what it was like when Enlightenment-era writers and philosophers met up in cafes across Europe to discuss new ideas and discoveries. This was, after all, the beginning of people making unprecedented levels of scientific, technological, and moral progress. As author Tom Standage points out in his book A History of the World in 6 Glasses, caffeine helped fuel it. “Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain,” writes the historian Jules Michelet, “which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.”
Alas, human nature.
“Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness.”
―Dostoevsky
