How common is common sense?

Every day I find myself asking this question because every day I find only a handful of people with common sense, if I’m lucky. 

Today I was sitting in a meeting with professionals, academics, well-educated people and yet they kept making simple things more complicated than they had to be. Mountains out of molehills, if you will. 

I classify myself as a well-educated person. I have a bachelor’s degree in science and I’m half way through my second degree. I’m always reading and learning to expand my knowledge and horizons. I have an ability to find simple solutions to other people’s mind-boggling problems, using common sense alone. I can never quite understand why it is that others cannot find these solutions for themselves. To me they seem obvious, glaring in fact. In my mind, the more knowledge you have and the greater your intelligence the more common sense you should have, but it seems the world doesn’t really work like that. When I’m dealing with people who have been working in a field for 10+ years and I’m coming up with solutions having dabbled in that field for a mere 10 minutes, I start to worry. I question my faith in humanity and education. Are they too specialised? Have they been doing this too long? Would they have been able so solve this for themselves 10 years ago? Is my opinion the "fresh-eyes" opinion? So many questions and expectations. Maybe that’s the problem, maybe I’m expecting too much from people? 

If I look closer to home, I don’t come from a well-educated family. No one in my family went to university until my generation. My parents wanted us to improve upon their progress and make the most out of the opportunities they never had. I look at my parents and although they have no formal higher education they have common sense in buckets. Sometimes I feel like I was spoilt by having such logical parents and although I’m grateful to them for passing on their savviness, I also feel like they’ve set me up for disappointment. I constantly am the one coming up with the logical explanations in my everyday life and it can get tiresome being the one with the answers. 

So really, is common sense all that common? 



It seems nothing much has changed since Sean posted these posts 5 years ago which relate to mine: 

Uncommon Sense Pt. I
Uncommon Sense Pt. II