I often hear people talking about how human beings are very prone to remembering the bad things and not remembering the things that went smoothly etc. This can relate to many aspects of life, not least social situations I am sure many will agree.
There is not a significant amount of point to this post, but last week there was a wasp sitting on one of the oven knobs, and as I reached down to turn on a topside hob, I almost grabbed this pesky wasp who decided to fly off at the last few milliseconds – a near sting incident.
And since that incident, I have been very careful to look out for any wasps or other nasty insects hiding on the oven knobs. Now I must have turned on a hob without any hitch whatsoever literally thousands of times on that oven, yet the only one of those thousands of times I actually remember is the one which wasn’t a pleasant experience.
This is my first hand proof for me that the first statement of this post is true – and shows that just one negative experience can undo a very large amount of positive experiences.
So applying this to social situations makes me think about the amount of work that needs to be done for me to start to feel comfortable in said situations, something I wonder if I’ll ever be able to achieve. And if this is ever achieved, it doesn’t seem unlikely at all that a mountain of good work could be undone in an instant.
