More history
We should pay more attention to history. I'm a history nerd, yes, but I do think it has a lot to offer. Not even specifics, but generally. Soft skills and the like. But also, I think things would go better if we respected the ancestors and studied our history more.
I do think every discipline needs to have a 'history of'. My wife did art at university - she had to do art history modules. I did history at university - I had to do historiography modules. I actually love historiography, at times more than I have loved history. I was kind of surprised to find not everyone did this.
Some disciplines have it fully baked in - philosophy is very much a 'history of'. No one is studying philosophy without knowing Plato. Only knowing about Judith Butler or Martha Nussbaum.
Is this an 'arts' thing? It feels like it might be done less in STEM?
Because I don't understand how we can move forward if we don't know how we got here. The giants we stand on the shoulders of. And not just the people but the context.
Also related to thinking about big ideas. There's so much reinventing of the wheel. Every new government's big innovations, every management consultancy, tech bros, the youngsters wearing our late 90s early 00s fashions - we already did baggy jeans! You're forever tripping over them, ripping them, and they soak up water! Learn from the mistakes of your Millennial siblings!
More history can help us avoid so much Discourse. It's been done before. Like, we can skip it. These conversations have already happened.
History is one of the reasons I don't follow breaking news, the twenty-four hour news cycle style. Constant short term perspective is unhelpful to my brain and way of thinking. I'm not going to say things would be better if we cut out this form of entertainment disguising itself as news... but... Yeah.
A big part of this is my imposter syndrome. How dare I have anything to say that might already have been said! This is clearly a problem because it's not possible to read every book, play every game, and so on. That is a great way to never get anything done, to expect yourself to have researched every other thing ever. Wrote about this recently in Two cakes.
I'm always training myself to try to take a longer term view. Explore things before leaping to conclusions. More context, more history.