We are caught in a cycle of forgetting, then rediscovering, society’s most obvious lessons.

E arlier this week, the New York Times published a glossy feature on Laurie Cooper, a seasoned socialite and “influencer” who is urging women to engage in a risky strategy to meet potential mates. She is telling them to go to bars.

Cooper dubbed this month “Sit at the Bar September,” figuring it would be a better alternative for women than endlessly scrolling through men on dating apps.

“A vast majority of us just haven’t had the confidence to execute it,” Mikaela Phillips, 28, a producer in Los Angeles, told the Times. “Now it’s become acceptable: Head out and give this a shot. Hopefully the men are catching on and open to it just as much.”

Of course, for many men, “Sit at the Bar September” is known by its more common name, “September.” It is impossible to contemplate the fortunes bars have spent over the past few decades trying to lure women to their stools. Owners know promotions like “ladies’ night” bring the women to their establishments. And yet it took a recommendation by a veteran bar-goer to actually (reportedly) make it happen. (The article doesn’t say how many trips around the sun Cooper has experienced, but it is clear she would have been more Team Robert Redford than Team Harry Styles.)

The Times’ story is newsworthy only because in silly eras, common sense passes for innovation. Over the past 25 years, the online world has promised to simplify the dating process, with algorithms linking like-minded people without requiring them to do oppressive things such as leaving the house.

But even with today’s artificial intelligence, nobody really knows what attracts people to each other. Not everyone wants to date someone exactly like themselves. The heart wants what it wants; the world needs to be open to such unlikely matches as, say, a loudmouthed, philandering, chubby, spray-tanned real estate developer and an aloof, high-cheek-boned, Slovenian supermodel decades his junior. Miracles do happen!

Yet, on an almost daily basis, we are having to relearn lessons forged by humans over centuries of interaction and experience. Example: For years now, students have been outsourcing their essays to ChatGPT or its AI cousins, producing immaculate five-paragraph manifestos on topics they barely understand. Teachers are catching on, and some schools are reemphasizing the radical idea of writing things down on paper with a pencil. This, too, is something we used to know — that learning isn’t just about the final product but about the messy process of thinking, erasing, rewriting, and getting a hand cramp. (And should be done in school without the constant distraction of cellphones, another obvious lesson we are still only beginning to process.)

During the Covid era — itself a lesson in relearning our powerlessness in the face of nature — Americans immediately resorted to old-timey, tried-and-true hobbies to kill time. People were clandestinely buying yeast from dealers on street corners in order to make sourdough bread. Sales of books spiked. More people started writing journals and working on puzzles. (I even bought a bicycle, which a major national publication decided should be worldwide news.)

Even today, though, America remains very much in the “FO” part of the “FAFO” formulation, despite centuries of experience that should have helped us avoid our current plight. No “FA” was necessary to contemplate the consequences, for instance, of the government pumping trillions of dollars into the economy just as it was roaring back from the Covid downturn. The simplest of analyses and centuries of examples taught us that dousing the economy with cash, as if it were a World Series winner being sprayed with Champagne, would overheat the markets and lead to inflation.

We knew that escalating tariffs would keep that inflation high, as already overstretched American consumers would be saddled with paying the new import taxes. And yet President Kool-Aid Man decided to ignore virtually every economic analysis and crashed through the tariff wall, using it as a bargaining chip, which few trade partners have decided to cash in on. As an economist who specializes in red, sugary, powdered drinks might say, OH, NOOOOOO!

The Trump era has compelled us to reexamine a significant number of ideas and concepts we once believed to be settled. For instance, the Founding Fathers implemented a First Amendment for a reason — to prevent government retaliation for speech a thin-skinned president may not like. We have had to reassert the plainly spelled-out right to birthright citizenship found in the 14th Amendment. For some reason, we have had to convince people all over again that vaccines save lives and that pregnant women can safely take Tylenol, as their doctors have long told them.

This is what makes the modern era of conservatism so disappointing. We are the ones who have learned the lessons from history and demand that courts apply the law as it was meant when written. We are the ones who believe in a society formed by tradition. We are the ones who have demanded serious presidents who didn’t behave like a drumming Muppet. Republicans were once the reflective and resolute ones, but the party of small government is now shepherded by a leader who will enthusiastically use powers he does not actually possess to meddle in matters large and small, from the military to Taylor Swift’s hotness.

In the past, the need to relearn fundamental lessons has been the bailiwick of progressivism, whose charge has been to straighten Immanuel Kant’s “crooked timber of humanity,” whether humanity asks for it or not. Progressives believe that human nature can be suppressed to create a new version of women and men who identify themselves in terms of groups rather than as individuals, in contradiction of virtually every uprising staged by freedom-loving people looking to escape the boot heel of government.

Consequently, the progressive experience has taken a beating in recent years. Leftists are learning that people want to live in cities that haven’t been overrun by homeless drug addicts. They are figuring out that using taxpayer money for prisoner “gender-reassignment” surgeries and allowing surgeons to mutilate the bodies of children who’ve been told they can change genders might not be a big political winner. They are beginning to realize that handing the Democratic Party over to their most virulent culture warriors has repelled middle America. In Donald Rumsfeldian nomenclature, these have always been “known knowns.”

So what’s going on here? Partly it’s arrogance. Every new generation believes that it’s smarter than the ones before it. Partly it’s convenience: apps are easier than awkward conversations, and having AI write papers for you is a real time-saver. And partly it’s just human nature. Forgetting and relearning is how we stumble forward, mistaking rediscovery for progress.

So as we watch young men and women nervously attempt eye contact at bars again, or students scratch out essays with pencils, or a president run up against the First Amendment, maybe we should take comfort. Yes, it’s frustrating to keep relearning the obvious. But it also means the cycle works: we do remember, eventually. Civilization survives on these little rediscoveries.