Carry It Forward: Hindsight Bias

Last night, I sat awake at 3:30 AM studying for my AP Psych quiz by reading Myers' Psychology for AP, by David G. Meyers. At 3:30 in the morning, you can imagine the thought process is barely functioning, but when studying psychology you almost need to forget your original thought process and fall into that of a psychologist's. One of the terms that sat with me for the longest is hindsight bias. Hindsight Bias as defined by Myers' Psychology for AP, written by David G. Myers, is the tendency to believe, after learning an outcome, that one would have for seen it.  An I-know-it-all phenomenon. I can't even explain how fast the light bulb hovering above my head lit up when I came across this term. It just makes so much sense and has brought clarity to my life. The value of this term in my life is to bring me down to reality and realize I don't know what the future will bring, but when it happens I know I couldn't have done anything about it. When I saw my Uncle Jon in the hospital diagnosed with Lung Cancer, I truly believed he wasn't going to die, but when he passed away everyone kept saying that they knew it was going to happen and with those comments a fire brewed inside of me. If they really "knew it was going to happen" why didn't they do something? The reason why they didn't do something is because of hindsight bias, they never really knew what was going to happen until an outcome prevailed. How I will use hindsight bias in my present and future life is to never judge someone on their past actions. If someone knew something bad was going to happen based on that one choice do you really think they would have done it? No. It's hard to ease up and accept things for as they are or to admit you were wrong, but to pretend like I knew it was going to happen is even more insulting to others about their choices. No one knows what the future holds and if they did what would be the point of living? We will all live our own lives and let fate take us to where it believes we belong, without any hindsight bias commentary afterwards.