The Whispering Earring

> There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring’s advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.

> ...The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.

> Niderion-nomai’s commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.

The piece implies that

1. at least occasionally one should choose to do something one will regret.

2. not knowing what will make one happy is part of what makes one free.

I'm not sure I agree with these (it seems that 1. is a paradox) but it is an interesting thought experiment.

Not necessarily. My take was that the practice of choosing may well be more valuable than the harm of the occasional regretted choice.

However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks every good thing you can feel, by definition -- and assume the "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).

What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you would be the happiest, if only you were not wearing the earring.

The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)

Negative experience is crucial for learning, unfortunately. "If you never fail you don't try hard enough", etc. This is trivially understood in physical training: you have to get yourself exhausted to become stronger. It's much less of an accepted view in, so to say, mental training: doing thing that you later regret may teach you something valuable that always avoiding such decisions does not.

I do not necessarily support or reject this view, I'm just trying to clarify the point.

https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Crystal