We naturally model other people's minds on our own -- it is the only template we have. That works remarkably well, until the moment it does not, and then the gap can feel like the other person's failure rather than our model's limitation.
| That uneasy moment when you realize someone genuinely experiences the world differently from you, and it is not because they are wrong |
| The quiet pull of wanting something to be true so badly that the wanting starts to feel like evidence |
| A growing awareness of the difference between what people do and what you imagine they are thinking while they do it |
There is a deep, almost invisible assumption most of us carry around: that other people's inner worlds basically work like ours. We assume they see what we see, want what we want, and find obvious what we find obvious. It is not a lazy assumption -- it is the only starting model we have. But when we forget that it is a model and start treating it as fact, we misread people in ways that feel like their problem rather than ours.
There is a particular kind of warmth that comes from believing something you badly want to be true. The desire is so strong that it starts to feel like evidence -- as if wanting it hard enough makes it more likely. We are not being foolish when this happens. Wanting and believing are tangled together deep in how our minds work, and untangling them takes deliberate effort that nothing in the moment is prompting us to make.
We all do a version of this: someone says or does something, and instead of responding to what they actually said or did, we respond to what we think they were really thinking. We reach past the surface and into their head, and then we hold them accountable for the thoughts we found there -- thoughts we assigned, not thoughts they expressed. It feels like insight, but it is usually projection wearing the mask of perception.