Musing 51

While I had a fairly normal childhood, one of the things that has stuck with me was the constant lies from my mother, which from an early age meant I started tracking even small details and committing them to memory. Mostly so I could clap back with facts, if I’m honest.

But because of that, I learned early on that people are spectacularly awful at details. Sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not. The tradeoff is that people don’t realize that they’re bad at details.

Which makes people really susceptible to things like the mandela effect. Because we are awful (yes, you too) at remembering details, it becomes easy for us to muddle things and our environment can bias us into erring in specific directions. Which is how everyone gets to think the same thing.

Of course, as a kid, it was so much cooler to think about things like hopping parallel timelines than the boring reality, but the crazy part is how much more fun reality turned out to be.

Like with Star Wars - Lucas’ (and then Disney’s) constant tinkering with the edits of the original trilogy make any notion of a mandela effect reasonable, if only because there probably is some edit of the movie with said change.

On the other side, you have the loss of institutional knowledge, like with Fruit of the Loom, where employees most likely simply forgot the history of their own logo because of attrition and employee migration over decades.

To be clear, there probably are some of these mandela effects that were intentional, but the more boring reality is just “we suck at details, me included, so deal with it.”