Conventional Wisdom: Does it even make sense

We thought we could change this world with words like love and freedom.

We were part of the lonely crowd inside the sad café.

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Oh... expecting to fly

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Some of their dreams came true, some just passed away

Some of them stayed behind, Inside the sad café

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But things in this life change very slowly

If they ever change at all

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The Sad Café (Eagles)

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Does conventional wisdom make sense, or not? Whether we should listen to advices of our parents, elders, teachers and well-wishers. And is conventional wisdom conservative in nature? Well, I think so.

After all, one could say that it is the sum total, the juice of learnings that our ancestors have handed down to us after having faced centuries of societal changes. The dichotomy of anticipation and fear among homo erectus and neanderthal man, constantly foraging for food and hunting out in the open – never sure whether at the next corner, food awaits or death - would’ve deeply infested human psyche to play it out safe. It was a given that if primitive men could protect themselves, they could elongate their chances of surviving. The flip side to this survival tactics was that such men wouldn’t have taken chances (unless absence of it implied sure death) and that trait stretches till today. And it’s not to do with the socio-economic spin that some people might want to give it concluding that some societies would be less conservative than others when it comes to taking chances. Even in developed economies such as the USA (land of opportunities, as they say), where one would expect opportunities galore (and hence a license to be more adventurous), majority would be still playing it safe and doing what people around them would be doing - day in, day out.

A few learnings have stood test of time. And they have become the मुहावरे or idioms of the day. They won’t make you the torch bearer of change in society but would mostly ensure that you would remain safe and not fail in life. But from where do we get such learnings?

There is a reason why we love our mothers at an early age. And there is a reason why we love our fathers as we grow older. When we are young, love moves us, and most of our decisions are taken from heart (if at all that is possible). We want to change the world, morality dictates our decisions, and we want to help people around. But that is not how the world operates. Life has the potential to be beautiful whereas the world remains brutal.

As you try to pursue certain endeavours, your parents (more so father in most cases) would stop you in your tracks because they would be concerned. Most of the examples around them would've been of failures in such-as-such pursuits, and they would’ve heard something on the same lines from their parents as well and so on so forth. Generations of learning is difficult to cast away. In my case, whenever my father stopped me in my tracks, I felt that he was wrong, I even felt at times that he was being conservative in his approach. One instance when he wasn’t very happy with me and my mother was when we were trying to help one of our relatives during their tough times. Later in life, I realized he was actually right. He had read the situation much better than rest of his family combined. Discerning reader might think that it's an example of a person reading a situation better than others and not exactly an example of conventional wisdom. Possibly, possibly not. I never discussed it with him, but I could sense he was simply trying to avert good money going after bad. Some potent conventional wisdom!

To take another example, running a venture of one’s own would always be a tricky proposition. From an early age, we all hear how doing a good job is always the thing to do. Well, why? Because of the conventional wisdom. And to think of it, it is not a bad advice. A job can give one a good life style. One can grow beat inflation most of her life, and can expect to have a decent retirement corpus if one plays her cards decently well. And most of the ventures anyways actually fail. Right? As goes the famous hindi line: जितनी चद्दर उतना पैर फ़ैलाओ (what it basically means: stay within your limits – mostly used in terms of managing finance). Might make sense to some, might not to others.

As a side note, not sure whether some strange superstitions fall under the realm of conventional wisdom but no harm in discussing them as well right here. For e.g., eccentricities like – not to cut nails or hair on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays or not to sleep under a beam in a room. And for the uninitiated, such superstitions are not germane to only Indian culture but can be found in other cultures as well. Japanese consider whistling at night or killing a spider during morning hours inauspicious. A Japanese grandmother could ask her son to not cut nails at night (which I think my nani also used to tell me. Thankfully, my mother never harped over it). A lot of these eccentricities/superstitions would’ve its genesis in the times when they would’ve been created. A lot of things which were considered Acts of God even a few centuries ago have now been explained by science.

Coming back to the beam. Probably during older times, construction quality would’ve been such that it would’ve been dangerous to sleep under that. That time onwards, the angle of being inauspicious would’ve stayed on. Nobody revisited the eccentricity but certainly, the logic doesn’t hold water in this day and age.

So, when should one listen to conventional wisdom/do’s/dont’s and when not?

IMHO, everything that is verifiable should be followed, and others discarded.

Do your own research, try it out yourself, and statistically, if discarding a notion makes sense, throw it out of the window. If cutting nails on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday is working fine with you, go for it. One can even try sleeping under a beam just to verify the veracity of the dreaded claim. Break the myths one by one.

Talking about ventures - it is true that most of them fail. Numbers would also corroborate that. So, should they be discarded? Nicholas Naasim Taleb’s brilliant book The Black Swan talks about black swan events and though I can’t exactly recollect whether he explicitly stated the following point, one of my takeaways has been the following: It’s ultimately the black swan events (events with low probability of occurrence but with deep impact) in one’s life that have the potential of changing one’s course in life. And hence there is a reason why taking risks might not be a bad option after all.

Why think of beating inflation year on year when you could completely kill it.

But yes, at the end of the day, it has to be an informed decision. A litmus test would be the ability to reduce the probability of being in a position - once a business venture or endeavour has failed in life – to say guilty statements such as Well, it failed because I didn’t know… such and such... beforehand. Try to reduce the number of unknowns, as much as possible. I know a few might still sneak in, but try. Rather than making presumptuous statements such as See, I told you this would happen post facto, the idea should be to reduce the guilty statements in one’s own life. This would also make the world a less violent place to live in.

But then, what about God? Would belief in God’s existence fall under the umbrella of conventional wisdom. Is God verifiable? That’s a million-dollar question and beyond the scope of this blog. Possibly, someday, we would talk it up.

So, what do I do? Whenever I play with my 5-year-old and realize that my nails have started scratching her, I cut them to size (!) - be it any day of the week. While, in a temple as I mumble my wishes and surreptitiously place some money near the idol, I ensure that the amount is always an odd number.

The struggle is always on.