The Incumbent Problem refers to the vast, but often overlooked and unfair advantage
that all new people, cities and jobs have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent
– ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street as we step off the bus, the
city visited for a few days of holiday, the job we read about in a few tantalising paragraphs
of a magazine; these have unwise tendencies to seem immediately and definitively superior
to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire
us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations.
5641625328_f50d7fbc77_bWhen we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular
bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realising that we are mistaking an
asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality; we are failing to see not that our
partner, home and job are especially awful, but that we know them especially well. Incumbents
are the victims of disproportionate knowledge. They are generally no worse than anyone or
anything else, but as they are familiar, their every failing has had a chance to be minutely
charted. The corrective to disproportionate knowledge is experience. We need to mine the
secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they
will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better
than the incumbents we already understand. The solution to the incumbent problem is to
extrapolate from what we already know and apply it to what we don’t yet. The most
plausible generalisation we can make about unknown things is that they are likely to
be closer to what we’ve already experienced than they are to being completely – and
bountifully – different. We should beware of the injustices we unthinkingly visit upon
all the incumbent features and relationships of our lives.
Our Wisdom Display cards explores what it really means to be wise and how we can strive to be more wise in our everyday lives.