While checking out at Trader Joe’s I picked up a candy bar. It had the ingredients on the front, enticing the buyer with chocolate and nougat. I flipped over the bar to look at the actual ingredients. The bar had everything you’d expect in a candy bar. What piqued my interest was the ingredients that weren’t in the candy bar. Although the producer decided on the 15 or-so ingredients for that bar, there were definitely other ingredients that could’ve been added.
The Seen
In this example the mass-produced candy bar is in the checkout line of Trader Joe’s all over the country, the ingredients are on each wrapper, and the marketing trying to sell the bar to individuals. But that’s what we see, the seen. The seen is the end product. It is the culmination of many different trials without including the countless other “prototype” candy bars.
The Unseen
The trials and errors, the prototype candy bars, are the unseen. Although Trader Joe’s only chose to produce one bar, there were probably many other attempts of creating the bar. There were ingredients that were added, and there were ingredients that were taken away. Each trial helped create the final product, but only one “prototype” became the finished good.
The unseen can be applied to many different aspects in life. The poet who spent years writing five lines will be studied by literary students 100 years from now. Professional athletes spending their childhood, and early adult years, only play a game every so often. There are millions of entrepreneurs who work tirelessly to improve daily life, but many end up failing, or scraping by to make their business a success.
Appreciating the Unseen
It is really hard to appreciate the unseen. The work that goes into every aspect of our daily lives. The amount of practice professional athletes put their minds and bodies through in order to play a sport for the fans. How many tries it took the master baker of Trader Joe’s to make the candy bars in the checkout line? The unseen isn’t usually appreciated.
Our society appreciates the end result, the winning football play, the perfect poem, or anything else deemed successful to the outsider. But the people building the seen have gone through countless iterations creating what’s in front of you today. Next time you think about the products around you, think about the hours, days, and years that have been spent creating what you are seeing. The unseen is something to be appreciated and allows us to live in an amazing world.