But What if We’re Wrong, Chuck Klosterman

Chuck visualizes today’s world as it will appear to those in the future who’ll perceive it as a distant past. Examples of the past with long-term relationships that were severed simply because they attended different schools in college and could not afford the long-distance phone calls…this one hit home as it happened twice to me in relationships. A sentence in a book is written a year before its published, with the express intent that it will still make sense 20 years later. A sentence on the internet is designed to last one day, usually the day its written. When you see the phrase, “You’re doing it wrong,” the unwritten sentence in the one that follows is: “And I’m doing it right.” Which had become the pervasive way to argue about just about everything, particularly in a Web culture where discourse is dominated by the reaction and rejection of other people’s ideas, as opposed to generating one’s own. The world happens as it happens, but we will construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us too. Smart people tend to be wrong as often as their not-so-smart peers… they work from flawed premise that their world view is standard. He gave me some things to think about… always the sign of a good book.