Having the realization of what could have been is the sneakiness of hindsight. The tragic truth about hindsight is that it is that lightbulb that flickers above our heads later on down the road. I wish I would have realized it when it happened. There’s some usefulness of hindsight we just need to be open enough to take the value from each situation.
hindsight: understanding of a situation or event only after it has happened or developed
Hindsight is the clarity of situations that most times we needed early on. We are more able to analyze and truly understand situations when we are looking back on them in the past. This of course relates to more recent events instead of those long ago and far away. Over time the recollection of our memories fades and the facts get skewed. Basically, it can become unreliable. Like for real, we suck at recalling memories.
Every time we delve into the past our brains edit the information to suit our current views and emotions. Hindsight can be a great learning tool, but it’s best to take it with a grain of salt the further back in time we go. When things are pretty fresh in our brains we can analyze them more efficiently. The great part of it is that we can mentally take an objective look at the situation and take a snapshot of lots of details that we may have missed.
This is kinda like the woulda, shoulda, coulda type thing. But don’t beat yourself up about it. Instead, take the good useful parts out and put them in your memory bank for later use. We adapt and grow. It is important to constantly evolve ourselves for the purposes of progressing. Keep moving that needle forward and keep a good mindset!
This is where we can learn from the mistakes we’ve made so as to not make them again. Believe it or not, hindsight is a very important memory enhancer. Even better yet it is part of the efficient memory system in our brains. They say that hindsight is 20-20, which in short means that we can end up seeing the situation that has just recently passed more clearly. The 20-20 relates of course to the industry standard “perfect vision.”
Once we are able to recognize what has transpired we then can better handle issues in the future. Don’t touch the hot stove, because remember the time we put our hands on it. We got burnt once but hopefully, we learned from it.
We also have the ability to have hindsight bias, which is when you look back on an event and you feel that you could have predicted the outcome easily. We’ve all done this because afterwards we sum up all of what happened as if we predicted it. I knew it all along!
Conclusion
Hindsight always seems to be that last-minute slap-in-the-face realization on how things could have gone if we had done things differently. Instead of reflecting on it in a negative way, take the pieces of information for later use. We got clarity now it’s time to move on.
