Skip to content
Pathfinding
Blog

Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time | Psychology | The Guardian

Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time | Psychology | The Guardian

Section titled “Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time | Psychology | The Guardian”

Metadata

Section titled “Metadata”

Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • We’re similarly shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they’re doing make it plain that they don’t, President Obama’s healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We shouldn’t really be shocked, though. Because all these stories illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.
  • This realisation is alarming at first, but it’s ultimately deeply reassuring. As the UK organisation Action for Happiness likes to point out, one of the biggest causes of misery is the way we chronically “compare our insides with other people’s outsides”. We’re all mini-New York Timeses or White Houses, energetically projecting an image of calm proficiency, while inside we’re improvising in a mad panic. Yet we forget (especially in an era of carefully curated Facebook profiles and suchlike) that everyone else is doing the same thing. The only difference is that they think it’s you who’s truly competent.