The history that was never written down, the thoughts that were never spoken, the beliefs too controversial to share. We have so much information, and we know so much about the world. But no matter how much we ever know it will always be dwarfed by what we’re blind to.

History knows three things:

1. What’s been photographed,
2. what someone wrote down or recorded,
3. words spoken by people who historians and journalists wanted to interview and who agreed to be interviewed.

What percentage of everything important that’s ever happened falls into one of those three? No one knows. But it’s tiny. And all three suffer from misinterpretation, incompleteness, embellishment, lying, and selective memories.

I read something recently that said the definition of misery is: on your deathbed, meeting the version of yourself that you could have become. You’d realize how fragile the direction of your life was, which would make you less judgemental of other people’s lives.

From: Morgan Housel