The taste of Olives

Ten years ago if you had put an olive anywhere near my food I would have felt offended and grossed out.  Today I quite like the taste, I occasionally have them on pizzas, and I have developed a hankering for Chocolate Olives which I had for the first time a few years ago on a trip to Paris.  It's fascinating to me how your tastes can evolve over time.  The things you love today, you might not even like in ten years time.  Likewise there will be things you don't like now which you might come to like or even love in the future.

Staying open to new experiences is important to getting the most out of life.  It's far too easy to let your past experiences dictate your future - far too easy to say no to something because of one bad experience.  This applies to so many areas of our lives, not just taste in food but music, movies, books, but even to a point our taste in politics (if you can call it a taste).  I know if you wound the clock back about fourteen years and put me in a room with my teenage self he'd probably not like me.  That's not a judgement on the person I have become, or the person I was at the time, it's just a fact of life - life changes us.

We often find people we have disagreements with, opposing views, and differing beliefs, but through it all one thing remains constant: for the most part the reason they hold their view is because of their life experience.  While some things you can look to psychology and argue whether they are inherent or environmental, "nature versus nurture" as the debate goes, there are other things that it is quite clear belong decidedly in one camp.  First impressions often leave a considerable impact on our views.  That first experience can lead to a cognitive bias resulting in a spiral of confirmation bias that causes you to focus on the points that reinforce what you believe and discard what you don't solidifying your perceptions.  In the extreme this can lead a person to live in a reality entirely different to everyone else where two people can see a fact and interpret it completely differently.

Staying open to new experiences lets you avoid this.  One area in particular which most people can probably relate to is customer service.  If you take your mobile phone for example you have probably at some point had a discussion about tariffs, reception, and cost with people.  You've likely also experienced that situation where you have had nothing but good experience with a particular service provider which other people then vehemently oppose because their experience was nothing but bad.  Reality is rarely this simple, most people will have good and bad experiences, it's just that the first or the most prominent experience causes you to form a cognitive bias and all other experiences after it are then subjected to confirmation bias.  Very few people are actually objective and consider all points of view, namely because people have a paralysing fear of being wrong.

What the argument over customer service can illustrate to us however is the fact that those companies continue to operate, and they continue to have customers, who continue to use their services.  If one given interpretation of that company proved to be true, either negative or positive, that company would go bust, or hold a monopoly.  The fact of the matter is they don't, and that's because everyone's experiences vary wildly.  The reason that company you hate so much and can't understand how anyone would use because your experience was so bad, is still going, is because other people have completely different experiences to you.  This is something we don't tend to stop and dwell on much in our day to day lives: other people have lives.  Other people live entire lives without us, have sets of friends, family, employers, schools, and experiences.  Sometimes they overlap with ours, sometimes they run parallel, and sometimes they cross our own.

It's easy to get caught in a downward, or indeed upward spiral.  The hard part is recognising when we have been caught in that spiral.  Sadly it's often years later that we gain the clarity, if at all, that our perceptions were warped.  Sometimes it takes years before you look at someone and see them for who they really are, not for how you imagined them.  Sometimes it takes years for us to lower our guard and take a chance on something again.  So try and keep an open mind.  Don't deny yourself olives.