Who's Wise?

            Yesterday, my sister showed me a Ted Talks entitled “Barry Schwartz: Our loss of wisdom”. I found this particular speech to be both eye-opening and inspirational and I encourage all of you to watch it. However, I understand that most of you don’t have 20 minutes of your life to spare on a daily basis, so I am only going to recommend you to watch from the first minute to around 5:47. For the insanely busy bunch, I’ll give you the cliff-notes.

            In the time block I’m talking about, Barry Schwartz shows the list of things that a hospital janitor is responsible for, none of which involve human contact. Despite this, the other people in the hospital dictate how these janitors chose to do their jobs. One item on their list is to vacuum, but Schwartz explains how one janitor chose to avoid vacuuming a communal room when they usually would because a family who spends most of their time at the hospital was napping in that room. Another janitor cleaned the floors of a room where one of the hospital’s patients who was in a coma was staying in twice in one day. Obviously his job description didn’t require this, but he did it anyway because the patient’s father didn’t see him do it the first time. Schwartz defines these janitors as wise because they know how to improvise, how to use their moral skills for the right causes, and how to make the exception to every rule.

 

I think this picture from Humans of New York captures what Barry Schwartz is trying to say. Both the bus driver and the janitors are improvising to go beyond what their job requires. This bus driver calls his bus “The Party Bus” and tells jokes, sings happy birthday to his passengers, and encourages everyone to smile at the person to their left. All of these things, I’m sure aren’t included in his job description, but that doesn’t stop him. He, like the janitors, is trying to do whatever is in his power to make the lives slightly better for the people who are benefiting from his services.

            This made me wonder why when you ask someone who the wisest person they know is, their answer usually isn’t a janitor or a bus driver. Instead the answer is typically more along the lines of a lawyer or a doctor. As Barry Schwartz said, “Wisdom depends on experience”, so why do we consider certain people wise when we don’t know the experiences others have had?