Lenses

You might have noticed that I’ve been doing an awful lot of introspective thinking and writing lately.

Sure, giving in to nostalgia can be fun. Who doesn’t enjoy thinking about the 80s, or remembering how it was to start a business? I want to write these stories down to preserve them, because I know that memories are malleable.

But there’s another reason I like to focus on my own past, and on the world I grew up in. It’s because I am the sum of all those experiences, and because I am the lens through which I interpret the world.

Think about this in the context of glasses you’re wearing that make everything look bigger than it actually is, or greener, or whatever. Ideally, you’d take those glasses off to see the world as it is, but you can’t take yourself off.

This means that the only way to get a clearer view of the world is to do the next best thing: to take these distortions into account. That’s why introspection is so important: if you don’t understand yourself, it’s going to be ve…