Why people judge you before they actually know you…
“So you came here to expand your activities?” a young Japanese man asks, almost rhetorically. (Starbucks, Landmark, Hong Kong.)
“No, that’s not my goal — I’m just traveling,” I answer.
“You know, she’s very young…” a confident, openly self-assured woman from Indonesia explains on my behalf, seeing the confusion on his face.
We’re all members of an international non-profit organization. Truthfully — he was seeing me for the first time in his life. With her I’d had a few conversations before, but I hadn’t gone deep into her role inside the organization. In Hong Kong I keep things low-key — I don’t dive too much into what I’m involved in, I’m mostly an observer, but I don’t want my presence to carry expectations. Anyway — that’s not the point right now. I’m just setting the scene.
So wow. We love building an image of another person.
We often construct it first — and only afterward ask questions designed to confirm it. To a greater or lesser degree, we end up steering toward our own opinion being right.
And those questions say so much about what our map of reality actually looks like.
But — do we actually get to know people? Do we actually want to see something new, something different from the simplified world we already believe in?
Back to the opening scene. None of the people there had it right about me. For them, ruling out option A meant it had to be option B. The rest of the alphabet didn’t exist. If I wasn’t there to expand my involvement — then something must be lacking in me, or maybe I hadn’t matured enough yet to commit to it.
I don’t hold that against them at all. It’s extremely common among people who spend most of their time within one environment or one narrative.
It’s simply easier to live inside your own frame.
The more I travel, the more people I talk to from different countries, backgrounds, statuses, and cultures — and despite noticing nuance very quickly — what’s interesting is that I’m becoming less and less inclined to construct an image of someone’s life or decisions.
I simply accept that I don’t know enough yet to be certain — or even to make a strong assumption.
And I also know there are far more ways to live a life than there are letters in the alphabet.
But I’ll admit — it’s easier to live in a world where A always equals B. Reality, though, is layered.
Interestingly, a close friend of mine — someone remarkably skilled at reading people, who has an incredible accuracy in sensing intentions and behavior, who has surprised me more than once with insight about a person from a short conversation that later turned out to be exactly right — is precisely the kind of person who assumes nothing going in.
And that’s mastery. Someone who could, in theory, assume plenty right from the start — walks into a conversation with such a clean slate that he actually starts seeing the truth.
People who have seen and lived through a lot — they’re usually the ones who don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.
And here’s the truth: the more you’ve seen, the more openly you’ve been willing to get to know people, the wider your map of reality becomes. And then you know just how many options are actually in play. You know how many motivations, intentions, and life circumstances lead people to wildly different places. You know how little what people are willing to show on the surface actually reflects reality.
You know that making quick assumptions is simply unwise. You know those assumptions say far more about you — about how your own subjective world is built — than they say about reality itself.
So what do you actually see in the people around you? What intentions, what motivations? How often do you ask questions to genuinely get to know someone — rather than slotting them into a fixed spot on your map of reality?
I took that step myself. I let people form their own opinion about my life without flooding them with details beforehand. But they needed something to orient themselves around — so they filled in the rest. Each of them according to the worldview they’d already built.
So — are you actually ready to get to know someone? Or are you just going to file them under something you’ve already seen before?
