I do sometimes wonder if it’s a skill issue, but that feels like a really dangerously self serving position to take, that people that disagree with me are just too dumb.

I like to think that I’m a relatively smart person, I have a very technical job and there’s very few situations where I don’t understand what’s going on (although there’s definitely plenty). Sometime though I’ll be out and about in my life and meet people that just don’t seem to have any idea how extremely basic, to me at least, things work. How does compounding interest work, how does insurance work, why should I put money into a retirement account. Not fresh adults either, people in their 30s / 40s / 50s who just seem content not understanding relatively basic things.

The world preys on these people, if someone doesn’t understand compound interest then you can really bamboozle them. If you don’t see the value of having insurance because you work out and are “healthy” and then suddenly get cancer or some other disease that doesn’t give a shit about how much you can bench, you are fucked.

There is a part of me that thinks that for a lot of people the world is a confusing and unknowable mystery. I mean, it’s not really, but the amount of effort to figure those things out is just too high for them to give a shit. And I think about how weird it would be to go through life like that. At the mercy of forces you don’t understand, and then some guy comes up and says “everything’s fucked up but I can make it great” and because you already don’t know how shit works you think “awesome, because I’m drowning in medical debt because I didn’t think I needed insurance and got screwed over”

I think about this person I met once, I was building planning and projection software and their job was to perform projection calculations for inventory ordering. I watched, in horror, as they tabbed away from excel to manually add up some figures. This is excel, what are you doing?! I showed them the sum function thinking that they would be happy. Then they looked at me and said “that’s too complicated, I’ll just do it myself”

Wild, that was too complicated. It taught me an important lesson though about how everyone’s bar for complicated is different. I think for a lot of people “how does insurance work” is too complicated. “What’s a tariff and how does it work” is too complicated. So it just comes down to “do I trust the person talking”