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We all make mistakes—none excusable, and none undeserving of criticism.

We make them because there is no other way to explore the unknown, because it is inevitable, because it constitutes all things that we have done, have not done, and have not done right simultaneously.

Just because we learned from a mistake doesn’t necessarily mean that others need to learn from them as well, or that they shouldn’t make the same mistakes we’ve made. A perhaps disturbing theme of the human condition is that history repeats itself because we each need to write our own stories. We find it so difficult to extricate the things and activities within our lives from shortsighted calculations of convenience, from arbitrary valuations of time, and from an absurd quest to maximize our pleasure and minimize suffering, when what really matters to us is meaning, or merely the perception of meaning. Perhaps it doesn’t matter— or rather, perhaps it is the very point—if we make the same mistakes and create different solutions to the same central problems over and over again.