perception

I want to talk about perceptions of other people’s states of being, or to put it more simply, how when a reason you are given for something doesn’t appear to make sense, it actually might, and it’s your own expectation of what a reason ought to be that causes you to think something isn’t right. More simply?! Good job, John…

This point could be made more coherent by way of an example. Say you’ve arranged to meet someone; the time and place are agreed upon, and at the eleventh hour, the person texts you (because that’s what we do these days for fear of actually using our voices) to cancel. They tell you that they have to attend a family event that totally slipped their mind when you made the plans and they won’t be able to meet you.

You digest this. You take it in, mull it over and eventually decide in your own head that you’ve been flaked on. Ditched. Like a hay field in spring time, your friend has bailed… Or maybe, just maybe, they actually have to attend a family event that totally slipped their mind when you made the plans and they genuinely won’t be able to meet you.

It’s sometimes very hard to see this, because it’s not something we would do. We’ve fallen foul of the fallacy of not understanding that people are different. People act in different ways. People process things in different ways.

Why is it so hard for us to see the wood for the trees? Because:

we would never let a family event slip our mind,
we would never doublebook a certain time,
we would never cancel so ingenuously, leaving the other person unsure of where they stand.
But that doesn’t mean that everyone is the same.

That’s just an example, based on something that happened to me this week. I got bailed on, and I sat there, moping, convinced it was a bullshit excuse, because it was an excuse I would never make. But then it hit me: I am not the other person. Maybe it is a legitimate excuse that they would make.

Lex parsimoniae, Occam’s razor – the simplest explanation is often the one which is most correct.

All that is to say that sometimes, it’s better to just take people at their word. It’s counterproductive to think of another person’s reasoning and state of being in terms of how you would do things, because people are inherently different.

Next time you get bailed on, maybe that person’s doctor’s appointment was real, or maybe they just don’t like you. Concocting your own story won’t change whichever one is true, so just be stoic about it.