I once got this fortune in a cookie: “It was when you found out you could make mistakes that you knew you were onto something.” It’s not the most eloquent fortune ever, but it is a lesson worth remembering.

There is a planet in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that couldn’t see the stars, and their understanding of the world didn’t include the rest of the universe. When they finally flew out of their dust cloud and saw the stars, they were confronted with something that didn’t fit in their worldview, and they responded simply, “It’ll have to go.” The whole rest of the universe had to go, so their flawed worldview could persist.

I suppose you could understand this as some commentary on simple-minded religion. But I think it touches my own life more nearly as I observe one of my most logical and beloved friends confront the possibility that the theories he has had about some of the most important aspects of life are just plain wrong. Will he decide to favor real-world experiences, flexibility, and tangible application of his principles in the actual situation of his life? Or will he walk away from mountains of information and things of great value for the sake of preserving a theory that will probably never line up with real life? (He doesn’t read my blog, but I guess this is sortof dedicated to him. I hope it helps others like me and my friend.) Becoming an adult looks a little different for each of us. We must learn who we are, and how our greatest strengths can also be our greatest weaknesses.

Today’s entry is for the abstract thinkers:

At some point in our lives we must all realize that real life is not abstract. The real people around us are not abstract. Our real job, our real homes, our real opportunities and obligations are not abstract. The person we marry is not a generic “wife.” She is a unique individual. Models may help us conceptualize the world, but if we live as though the model is actually reality, we will look insane and hurt people and be quite bad at life. (“First, assume a spherical cow.”)

Unfortunately, contemporary society has separated people from the realness of their lives. I have a friend who sometimes says that social norms are very important because it is unfair to ask everyone to think through how to react to every situation from scratch. Not everyone is inclined to think seriously about the consequences of their actions. So if the elite class say to everyone, “Just do what seems best to you,” some people are better equipped than others to figure out what’s best. But social norms provide everyone with a set of expectations that they don’t have to think through from scratch. In previous decades, for example, folks found it easier to get married. It was like getting a job. You had to do it, and the process was much less mysterious: that girl you’re such good friends with? Marry her! Done. Happy for seventy years. Move on to actually constructing an adult life together. These days, everyone is left trying to figure out that process from scratch, without the help of being surrounded by a particular culture with expectations.

Expectations benefit those of us who are more impulsive, those who don’t like to think, those who aren’t so bright. But there’s another group who really can’t cope without social norms and expectations. And moreover, when they finally find themselves confronted by those helpful cultural expectations, they basically implode, because they’ve been stuck in their own heads too long:

The abstract thinkers.

The trouble with being an abstract thinker is that, in the absence of social norms to follow, when they are left to fill in the gaps and start from scratch, they go overboard. They run the risk of doing all the work in their own heads, at the level of theory, so that they can end up with something totally inappropriate for the real world.

They may be more inclined to trust their own reasoning and their own mash-up of ideas pulled from other theoretical sources than they are inclined to trust anyone’s actual experiences. Not their own, not those around them. They’ve used theory to form a set of rules, but those rules are necessarily simplistic. The real world requires a lot of flexibility that theory cannot account for. Go read Antigone and ask yourself if you are the character Creon.

Abstract thinkers are at risk of jettisoning massive amounts of data for the sake of preserving their theory and rationalizing their erroneous worldview. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve done it.

Well, so far, this has all been quite abstract. I can’t make it less abstract right now without telling long stories. But learning this lesson has changed my life, and I hope it can change yours.