We have all heard it. Proactive is better than reactive. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
But, in the end, prevention is unsatisfying. Very Unsatisfying. We are pretty sure that prevention is the right thing, but it’s all about odds and calculations that we will never know for sure. We may believe, but there is no way to factually, numerically, know.
It certainly isn’t as satisfying as fixing a broken thing. It feels really good when we go and fix something broken. We see the evidence of our work. But we don’t see evidence of the problems our prevention, well, prevented.
The Y2K problem had a ton of work done to prevent problems. Since there weren’t problems, many think that was wasted effort. There is no database that, seeing a future that didn’t happen, lists the bad events that were prevented. Only a list of things we probably prevented.
Your car hits over 200,000 miles and we replace it before anything goes wrong. Get the most value for it. Avoid problems. All good reasons. But we will never know for sure that car wouldn’t have gone another 50,000 miles with no problem.
Vaccines. We know, but we will never know with data. Only odds and probabilities.
I had a wisdom tooth out recently because it was starting to mess with the tooth in front of it. It will prevent the wisdom tooth from doing damage in the future. Good call, right?
Probably. Prevention sometimes causes problems we can see. As a result of the surgery, I have numbness in a portion of my face. I prevented a (most likely) worse problem. Was it the right thing to do? Yes, but I have to be honest with myself that this is a belief, not knowledge backed with data.
These situations and hundreds more are ultimately unsatisfying because we have no concept of what was actually missed. Sure, we can read about it. We can talk to others. We may know people first-hand that went through it. But that is only in our hearts and guts. We don’t have numbers and data to know the counterfactual.
We will never know for sure if some of the actions we take were worth it. Because we are humans and we like to be right, we will convince ourselves it was for the best. I will tell myself that it was good I had the surgery. Even if the numbness never goes away.
We tell ourselves that the effort that went into Y2K was worth it because it would have been so much worse if we hadn’t. We tell ourselves that buying a new car was worth it because the old one would certainly cost more to maintain. We tell ourselves that getting a vaccine is worth it because getting the disease, whatever it is, would have been worse.
Prevention is ultimately unsatisfying because we can never know. We may strongly believe that it was the right thing, but we can never prove it with data.
But we still need to do it.