Perception of Perception
A few years ago I was in southern Indiana taking a motorcycle course. One of the other riders was a Hoosier farm boy who was strangely identical to a friend I knew in northern Indiana. They wore the same clothes, talked the same way about the same things, and even their movements and gestures were identical. I was fascinated that two people who lived a hundred miles away and had never met could be such perfect clones.
All around the world there is enormous diversity, but looking closer, there is great uniformity within groups. Middle class suburban, New York homeless, Australian aborigine, Parisian intellectual, goth, jock, burnout – we adapt the values, lifestyle, and aesthetic of whatever group we are born into or identify with. Except for a few eccentrics, we do not choose our own persona, but attach ourselves to a collective.
Salvador Dali said, “I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualized; why they should behave with such great collective uniformity.”
Maybe for some this conformity is rooted in a desire for belonging or security. But I conform because of how deeply I care about what other people think of me. Depending on what’s expected by a situation, my clothes and mannerisms change drastically. I only bring the professional part of myself to work, because that’s the person who is wanted, rather than my whole self who would be quickly unemployed. I play the interested listener, the raconteur, the amiable gentleman. I have been affirmed in these roles since I was a child and I continue to play them, not because I believe in them, but because I want to be loved. And that is as pathetic as it sounds. It is also dissatisfying because even when I am affirmed and appreciated, it is not me who’s being loved, but rather the role behind which I hide.
When I do this, I think I’m being controlled by what other people think of me, but most of the time they’re not thinking about me at all. I am actually being controlled by my perception of other people’s perception of me. This is an absurdly inaccurate scale. I have often projected judgement on myself from other people and responded in shame or anger, only to learn they were not judging me at all; it was just in my head. But even if other people were thinking of me, and even if I could know their thoughts, it shouldn’t affect me as much as it does. It doesn’t matter what people think. It’s strange we have to keep reminding ourselves of such an obvious truth.
How would we live differently if we only had a month to live? I like to think we would become more true. We would stop pretending to be friends with that person and start loving on this person more. Our clothes would be weirder, our behavior less compliant, and our vision clearer. We might even walk our anteater through the New York subway like Salvador Dali. We would become less like clones and more committed and sincere individuals. As we cease to care what other humans think of us, maybe we would start to care more what God thinks of us.
The reality, of course, is we are all terminal. We don’t have time to care what other people might think if we were true. They are all going to die, too. In a few short years, we will all be gone and it couldn’t matter less who thought what about whom. It doesn’t matter what dead people think and we’re all dead. Let’s live like it.
J.
July 27, 2021