Lessons Learned? Really?

"Learn from the mistakes of others- you can never live long enough to make them all yourself."

John Luther

Throughout centuries, we humans have evolved in so many ways: physically, emotionally, socially, technically, etc. We have done so to meet our needs and handle natural disasters. We have managed to travel long distances, supply food to the most remote places, and collaborate for the exchange of services. We have learned a lot to get to this point, about ourselves, our relationships with others, our planet, our universe, and mainly how to preserve and communicate what we have learned before. For example, after Newton discovered gravity and his results were accepted in the scientific community, next generations' physicists, continued working from his premises. It does not mean that they took the results and theories of the past as the whole unquestionable truth. Rather they did not cycle through the same old thought processes that failed over and over. They identified when a theory of the past would fail, or provided proofs in support of them. Physicists after Newton kept finding pitfalls of his theories and tried to find better ones that addressed those shortcomings. Or, Copernicus gave a theory that Sun is the center of our planetary system not the Earth. Later, Galileo was punished for making observations that proved this theory and he had to live in house arrest because he did not agree with the Church's idea on the subject. Physicists today do not start from scratch and prove all the theorems that were proven before or find away to prove the ones that were refuted in the past. Of course having an understanding of the methodology and the thinking process that led them to those results is helpful for making future discoveries, but we simply cannot afford to learn everything from scratch for ourselves.

What puzzles me is that while the fact that we have to benefit from our past generations' knowledge and experiences in physics, math, medicine, etc, is widely practiced and accepted among humans, when it comes to our personal lives, choices we make to lead our day to day activities, we question and experience every different way of having a quality life. For example, it has taken generations to establish and institutionalize service providers for health care in hospitals or education in schools and universities. Now, many parents question all the past experiences and humans progress for developing good educational systems; they home school their kids during the times that we are more than ever connected to other humans across the globe. Similarly, many people go through a lengthy trial and error process to determine what is the best way to earn a living, spend the hours in a day, etc. It is as if one day, they become like Thales, thinking maybe he was right and everything is made of water. The next day, they become Anaximenes thinking everything is made of air, then they make their way through earth and fire, and eventually to atoms, quarks, and the string theory, and later M-theory. They question the concept of exchanging goods and services via a monetary system that was created and practiced since the early civilizations thousands of years ago. They end up having all sorts of revolutionary ideas about how they think would be the best way to live their lives, forgetting that through out the history, people advanced in making things, establishing organizations and institutions, to be at their service, to facilitate satisfying those needs, and thus free up more of our time and resources instead of wasting them on doing the most basic and simple things because we have to learn the lessons by ourselves. Why do we ignore all the lessons that have been passed to us through generations? Do we go back to make a phone call to a central system and ask an operator to dial it for us instead of using our wireless phones? Why do we have to go back thinking we can live without schools, enough money, social interactions, cultural exchanges; without good nutrition, sleep, giving and receiving emotions? So often, people spend so much time, effort, and energy trying to fight or ignore the outcomes of civilizations and humanity, that they forget why they chose to do so to begin with. Years may pass and then they may come to the conclusion that it would have been nice to have a stable shelter or the ability to obtain one, have the ability and freedom to travel, have insurance, etc. Why do we tend to ignore all the past experiences and lessons learned of our ancestors when it comes to conducting our personal ways of life?