that all new people, cities and jobs have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent

– ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street as we step off the bus, the

city visited for a few days of holiday, the job we read about in a few tantalising paragraphs

of a magazine; these have unwise tendencies to seem immediately and definitively superior

to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire

us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations.

5641625328_f50d7fbc77_bWhen we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular

bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realising that we are mistaking an

asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality; we are failing to see not that our

partner, home and job are especially awful, but that we know them especially well. Incumbents

are the victims of disproportionate knowledge. They are generally no worse than anyone or

anything else, but as they are familiar, their every failing has had a chance to be minutely

charted. The corrective to disproportionate knowledge is experience. We need to mine the

secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they

will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better

than the incumbents we already understand. The solution to the incumbent problem is to

extrapolate from what we already know and apply it to what we don’t yet. The most

plausible generalisation we can make about unknown things is that they are likely to

be closer to what we’ve already experienced than they are to being completely – and

bountifully – different. We should beware of the injustices we unthinkingly visit upon

all the incumbent features and relationships of our lives.

Our Wisdom Display cards explores what it really means to be wise and how we can strive to be more wise in our everyday lives.