What are some of the most interesting things you've learned since starting Wait But Why? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Tim Urban, writer for Wait But Why - join their email list here to get new posts in your inbox, on Quora.
The future is going to be far, far crazier than anyone realizes. This was really, really, really not a normal time to be born.
Every problem in each of our lives, and in humanity as a whole, boils down to the fact that a human is a node of rational higher consciousness stuck inside a primitive animal. Every issue we have is rooted in that struggle.
My procrastination/perfectionism problems are no joke. And also a symptom of the above struggle.
Every wise person is humble and searching, and arrogance is a sure sign of someone who's not that psychologically developed.
Creating something original is ninety times harder than creating something that's mostly an iteration on what already exists.
There are a ton of smart, curious, searching people out there. In every country in the world, there are a lot of these people.
We're in a period of super rapid social change--so rapid that I can feel a real difference as a blogger in what's considered by society to be an acceptable opinion when it comes to topics like gender, just in the three years since I started writing WBW posts.
I might not die in the 21st century.
I might not die in the 21st or 22nd centuries.
I still might die when planned though since the arrow of medical progress is always fighting against a bunch of arrows going in the opposite direction. See item two of this list for more details.
Historians of the year 3000 (if there still are historians in the year 3000) will probably view The Dark Ages as a period extending well past today. Do you think people in the year 1200 thought they were living in The Dark Ages? Of course not. No one thinks they're living in the Dark Ages, even when they are. We think of the World Wars and of ISIS and of the Fossil Fuels Era and of dictators and of religious conflict and of poverty and of today's growing wave of nationalism as normal things because it's the world we were born into, but to people of the future, all of those things might be highly primitive and clearly the work of a species still very much in their medieval stage.
I'll probably go to Mars sometime.
Everything you think is black and white isn't. Every Jafar is just Aladdin through a different lens.
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