It’s rather amazing that we continue to use the words “good” and “bad.” Can you think of any words that are less precise than these? Do these words even have valid or reliable meanings? “Good” and “bad” often seem to serve only as hazy placeholders for shots in the dark or ineffable emotions. Philosophers have struggled to define good and bad things for millennia with very little of practical use to show for all of their labor. Except for such fundamental things as having food and shelter and avoiding unwanted physical pain and death, people constantly disagree about what is good and bad. The subjects of these disagreements are everywhere. They include such things as good and bad food, cities, politicians, cars, jobs, art, children, pets, technology, habits, websites, books, moral choices, friends and romantic partners.

But let’s set aside our ubiquitous disagreements for a moment. Let’s assume that within our own particular comfy community we can somehow find a general consensus that something is a “good” thing. If that were possible, it would reveal an equally big problem that is the focus of this article: Good things often only seem good only until they play out in real in the real world. To our dismay, good things often turn out to be bad things with the passage of time. And things that seem bad today often turn out to be good.

• You got fired from your job (bad), which opened up a better opportunity (good).

• You got that job you always wanted (good), but two months after beginning that job, you hated it (bad).

• WWII caused terrible suffering for millions of people (bad), but that hellacious war inspired countless acts of heroism and resulted in the defeat of tyranny (good things).

• You were late to the airport and missed the plane (bad), but the plane crashed (good for you that you weren’t on it).

• You discovered that your spouse was being unfaithful (bad) and your marriage then failed miserably (bad), but that failure allowed you to meet someone much more compatible (good).

• Your favorite baseball team had an extremely talented team in spring training (good), but the team sucked during the regular season (bad).

• An elderly family member died (bad), but it brought the family much more closely together (good).

• You lost your keys (bad), but a kind stranger came up to you and that stranger became a good friend.

What sort of dark magic causes good and bad to reverse themselves? It’s the passage of time. All of us are cursed with temporal myopia. We can barely see into next week, much less the next year, and that’s because our world is a complex adaptive system. Even a “perfect” understanding of the individual parts of our world does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the behavior of the whole system. When our butterflies flap their wings, we cannot foresee the hurricanes that will result years or decades later. Life never ceases to surprise, delight and demoralize us. “It seemed like such a good idea to go get that tattoo!” “While driving to the birthday party, running ten minutes late, I was being courteous pull out my phone and text the host, but I ended up paralyzed.”

The only way to determine long term consequences of most things is to watch them play out. Life often proves us wrong, no matter how carefully we plan things, no matter how carefully we plot out our Life Valence Map, no matter how carefully we try to navigate homeostasis. Apparently, the fundamental purpose of Life is to humble us, to knock our confidence down several notches.

After we live a few dozen years on this planet, it would seem that when we announce that something is good or bad, we would always keep in mind that our confidence level should be low and we would thus always speak with hesitance. At a minimum, it seems like we would learn to attach expiration dates to our judgments that something is good or bad. “This is a good thing, it seems, probably until at least next Thursday.” Or it seems that we would learn to attach asterisks to our judgments of good and bad, warning others that we have almost no idea what the future has in store.

This well-documented common reversal of fortune never seems to deter intrepid beings like us. Most of the time, we are quite willing to say that something is good or bad, regardless of the fact that Fate is so often capricious, seemingly mischievous. When we announce that something is a “good” thing or a “bad” thing, we are making naive educated guesses, yet we tend to utter these things with absolute certitude. How is that possible that we sound so confident when we are so often proven wrong?

Daniel Kahneman’s principle of substitution sheds light on this issue. When we answer a question of whether something is good or bad, we seem to be substituting the simple question of whether we currently like something for the much more difficult question of whether we can meaningfully predict whether something is good or bad in the long run. Here are a few excerpts from Kahneman’s extraordinary book: Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).

When the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available, intuition still has a shot: an answer may come to mind quickly—but it is not an answer to the original question. The question that the executive faced (should I invest in Ford stock?) was difficult, but the answer to an easier and related question (do I like Ford cars?) came readily to his mind and determined his choice. This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

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We asked ourselves how people manage to make judgments of probability without knowing precisely what probability is. We concluded that people must somehow simplify that impossible task, and we set out to find how they do it. Our answer was that when called upon to judge probability, people actually judge something else and believe they have judged probability. System 1 often makes this move when faced with difficult target questions, if the answer to a related and easier heuristic question comes readily to mind. . . . You will not be stumped, you will not have to work very hard, and you may not even notice that you did not answer the question you were asked. Furthermore, you may not realize that the target question was difficult, because an intuitive answer to it came readily to mind.

Kahneman offered some sample substituted questions illustrating how we unwittingly substitute simple questions for difficult questions:

Target Question: How much would you contribute to save an endangered species?
Heuristic Question: How much emotion do I feel when I think of dying dolphins?

Target Question: This woman is running for the primary. How far will she go in politics?
Heuristic Question: Does this woman look like a political winner?

In the case of judgments of good and bad, I would suggest that the heuristic slips in something like this:

Target Question: Is this a good thing [indefinitely]?
Heuristic Question: Do this make me happy at the moment?

What is the take home? My gut feeling is that it often worthwhile to remind ourselves of our cognitive limitations, even though doing this might humble us. But, of course, we only get one chance to live life so we shouldn’t allow fears of limitations paralyze us from making the most of our situation. Even though categorical judgments of whether something is good or bad are beyond our reach, I’m not suggesting that we should substitute “that seems good from my limited perspective” or “that seems bad from my limited perspective” for “that’s good” or “that’s bad.”

Perhaps the expression “so far, so good” best captures both the judgment of the moment as well as a touch of humility looking to the future.

And that’s a good thing, right?