From a friend of mine on how history nerds and non-history nerds look at the world

I explain it to people like this: 

Imagine waking up in a room with 20 other people. It is a somewhat strange room, with outlandish paintings and tapestries covering the walls, and foreign words engraved into the space around them. In the room itself, there is some strange looking furniture, a few chairs and a couple of tables. On these tables are games - Checkers, monopoly, and maybe some playing cards. 

Now you have no idea how you got into this room or how long you are going to be there. There are no doors or windows, and nobody seems able to get in or out. So what do you do? 

Well most of those twenty people sit down and start playing the table games. Since there is not much else to occupy their time, they end up getting really, really good at those games, and soon the room is filled with the buzz of high competition. The best players are exalted by others, the worst are spit on. People begin to form their identities and generate self-esteem based on their gameplay. 

Meanwhile you are still there in the room thinking and wondering. The games the others are playing may serve to occaisionally entertain you, but for the most part you have bigger things on your mind. Like, how did we end up in this room in the first place? What do all these paintings and tapestries on the wall represent? Why are their tables and chairs but no couches ? Why are there 20 people in the room and not 10 or 30? What language are the engravings on the walls, and what do they mean? 

Eventually you start thinking about the other people in the room. Why are they so obsessed with their gameplay? Don’t they want to know how and why we are here? Why are they getting so hierarchical? Why do they feel this need to dominate the others? Eventually the others start to think you are a bit strange, as you never seem to care about who wins at the games, and you spend most of your time in contemplation and analysis. 

And that’s my metaphor for history and historians. Most people are obsessed at excelling within the paradigm that they find themselves in, the “games”, while we (the historically minded) are obsessed with finding out why those paradigms exist in the first place and how they developed. 

It’s simply a different personality type and a different mindset - one that has never been and probably never will be the norm, but which offers every society an important alternative perspective.