Everything You Think is Wrong Day

What the day is

Everything You Think is Wrong Day is observed on March 15, paired with its opposite on the sixteenth. It describes the day where every judgment turns out badly.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. What makes such days feel worse than they were is reasonably well understood.

Hindsight bias is the tendency, once an outcome is known, to believe it was predictable all along. Experiments repeatedly find that people asked to recall their own earlier predictions misremember them as having been closer to what actually happened, and the effect is strong enough that participants cannot correct for it even when warned. A decision that was reasonable given what you knew at the time becomes, in memory, an obvious error you should have avoided. That is what makes a run of bad outcomes feel like a run of stupidity.

The honest correction is to judge decisions by the information available when they were made rather than by how they turned out. Poker players and clinicians both use versions of this distinction, separating a bad decision from a bad result, because the two come apart constantly in any domain with real uncertainty.

A second effect compounds it. Negative events attract more attention and are remembered more readily than positive ones of the same size, so a day containing one clear failure and several quiet successes is filed under the failure.

Being wrong is also considerably more useful than being right, since it is the only condition under which anything gets updated. The uncomfortable part is that the feeling of being wrong is indistinguishable from the feeling of being right, right up until the moment it collapses.

How to take part

• Write down a prediction with a date, then check it later against what you actually wrote.
• Judge a decision by what you knew then, not by how it turned out.
• Say you were wrong about something, out loud, to the person concerned.
• Count the quiet successes a bad day also contained.
• Notice that certainty feels the same whether or not you are right.