Discernment is so crucial in life because things are never explicit. This includes the value of discernment itself. For instance:
§1. If you're being abused, or taken advantage of, you wouldn't know immediately without prior experience, and of course never from the abuser themselves, because abusive power will never label itself as such. This is why childhood is so formative, since it completely dictates what you consider to be normal, acceptable, etc. And this is why having other points of view through traveling, meeting genuinely different people, running small experiments, is so valuable.
§2. The same thing applies to our current society, and the so-called normal, and it has been so successful at covering the globe and infiltrating minds that few people actually see what is fundamentally wrong with it. They might see important but isolated aspects of it, like environmental destruction, warfare, the unsustainable consumer culture, the soulless and deeply booooring "work" that people are forced into, etc. But to see the system itself as problematic, is quite rare because it has become so good at removing everything outside itself, or making those things appear non-existent, outdated, dumb, etc.
§3. Things only change if you decide to change, if you decide that you've had enough. Often life comes knocking at your door, telling you that you need to change. But even then, change only happens if you decide to pay attention to those knocks. Denial can be extended until death, unless you've got enough discernment to pay attention to problems before they grow too big, and enough care to move towards a better place.
§4. The worst mistakes in Life are done with utmost confidence. Because if someone isn't too confident in something, then they start considering possible problems, alternatives, and their own expectations and assumptions, which might be able to mitigate the worst scenarios or lead in simply not doing the thing. As a result, discernment is the acknowledgement that being confident in something is actually not a good indicator of how well it will succeed. Marriages and businesses are great examples of that, because no one marries a person they expect to divorce, and no one opens a business they expect to fail, yet the failure rates of both of those are pretty high.
How do you develop discernment though? As with the most important things in life, it is not straightforward. Life experience, pain, and learning from that pain—especially unrealistic expectations—seem to be the most reliable though. You can try to read so that you may learn from other people's pain, which is a big value of biographies and non-fiction I guess, but even then that can only go so far. There are many things that can only be truly learned from experience, in my opinion.
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2024-07-22