I just found a spoon between my books.
Although this is a true fact, just as it is a fact that there are 31,556,926 seconds in a year, you most certainly don’t care. Every day we are being bombarded by information. So much information that it is hard to get away from it. But somehow we feel it is an obligation to know what is going on in our city/country and/or the world.
Most of us rather want to know how many stupid gym fail videos there are on YouTube and watch them all. Yes, that’s me and I simply assume most of you are just the same. (Sorry!)
But truth be told, I also have a weakness for pretty useless information.
For example: The majority of people think they are better than average drivers. Chew on that fact for a moment.
I placed the spoon beside my keyboard and now it seems to mock me. How on earth did this spoon end up on the bookshelf between my books? If someone said, “As a fact, ants brought it up there.” I’d call him an idiot. However, if he said, “You were probably sleepwalking and left it there the last time”. I’d probably still not believe him (I don’t sleepwalk), but at least that seems to be a reasonable answer. “No, I know, you were just done eating your soup and cleaning up, when you thought about this book you’d love to read again. You found it, left the spoon on the shelf and wandered off book in hand.”
Yes, that could be me. It may not be true either, but it’s probably close enough.
And there we are, we believe most “facts” because they are close enough (at least for us):
- We are losing our heat the fastest through our head
- Tomatoes are vegetables
- Touching a baby bird will cause its mother to reject it
- There are left brain skills and right brain skills
- The Great Wall of China is visible from space
- The water in a flushed toilet rotates a different direction on northern and southern hemisphere
- Slaves built the pyramids
- The fruit orange got its name from its color
- Redheads and blondes are going extinct
- There was a widespread panic after Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds
You probably knew those weren’t true all along…