Doesn’t have to be a thing you bought. Just some thing you didn’t have but then once you did it expanded your scope of actions.

The first obvious example that comes to mind is a car. Plenty of drawbacks to prevalence of cars, but being able to go where I want when I want, and far away, is very transformative.

I’m interested in other examples of things that aren’t just useful, but that open new possibilities.

  • TheInsane42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    4 months ago

    Relying on a basic understanding how things/situations work.

    At a new school, I really messed up a math test. I was studying like crazy, learned all formulas that I would need and managed to apply them all in each question on the test, combining all off them each question. Lowest score possible (1 out of 10), as I really messed up. Next test I didn’t study, I jusy flipped trough the book, checked 1 situation I didn’t understood and made the test. On handing out the teacher asked what I did different then the previous test. I told him I didn’t study, I just checked if it was logically to me and decided I understood as much as I could. He told me to do just that on all tests and I’d have no problems with education and gave me the result, a perfect score. (10 out of 10)

    That was 34y ago and still I want to understand things and see the logic behind it. Works perfectly on almost everything. (Humans behavious still mostly eludes me though, totally illogical 🤨)

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
      3·
      4 months ago

      (Humans behavious still mostly eludes me though, totally illogical 🤨)

      We’re not rational, but there are patterns. If you’re willing to do some reading Thinking: Fast and Slow is beefy, but helps to show some of the patterns of irrationality in a structured way, from one of the leading experts on human behavior. If that’s too much, Thinking in Bets is a nice taster that still is well backed by much of the same research, but is shorter and more accessible.