I don’t seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn’t help me. Precedents don’t inform my experience.

In this self-deprecating remark, Nighy presents himself as someone who remains stubbornly unteachable—unable to convert lived experience into practical wisdom. By adding that “history” and “precedents” don’t help, he widens the complaint beyond personal lessons to collective ones: even the accumulated record of what has happened to others fails to guide his choices. The humor lies in the exaggerated frankness, but it also gestures toward a serious modern anxiety: that knowledge (personal or historical) does not automatically translate into better judgment. The line reads as a wry confession of fallibility and a critique of the comforting idea that experience reliably produces insight.