A powerful technique for caring less about what other people think and for deepening friendships: the relativity of fairness
I want to talk about one important tool that can serve as a lever for general empathy. Let’s start with why empathy is desirable for mental health and societal reasons.
Empathy improves the lives of those around you
Empathy is the ability to understand the experience from another instance’s perspective. You can be empathetic towards humans, animals, or even other beings, let’s focus on humans for now.
A society composed of individuals with more empathy will arguably be more connected and in more abundance of compassion than one with less empathy. It’s a desirable skill from other people’s perspectives. This is not the primary reason you should be interested, though:
Most importantly, empathy will actually impact your personal well-being
Empathy directly impacts your own mental wealth, even though it’s about the inner ongoings of another person.
Well, factually your empathy is about your perception. You experience “the empathy” first before anyone else does. Other people observe your behavior that might or might not follow, since you will or will not act on it. But you create your reality out of the input you get, interpreted through the filters that were formed throughout your entire experience as a human. The creation of reality happens often unconsciously through a little narrator in your head.
This narrator sometimes thinks it knows everything, including the future or what others think, and is therefore allowed to judge everyone, in particular, yourself. And it has a lot of power over your emotions.
Hence, this narration can be hurtful — you know it if you’ve ever felt pain, sadness, or anxiety as a response to the voice telling you
- what you could’ve done differently,
- that this person that just offended you is right, or
- all the potential negative implications your actions can have.
The latter can draw a lot from our authenticity, aka. being yourself.
The content and tone of this background voice is often more cruel than you would ever dare to say it out loud to anyone else. Even if we’re not really hearing this narration in the background, subconsciously our body and our emotions react. It can bring misery and make us feel overwhelmed.
The practice of becoming aware of this voice, putting it into a more rational and friendly context, and benefiting from increased mental well-being is called cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt). A mental model for coping with a large class of mental distortions, aka. misleading destructive narrations, can be very helpful for this.
Training a mental model for understanding others and getting happier as a result
Empathy can be a powerful cbt tool by internalizing the following technique. Let’s first introduce some metaphors.
Personal filter layers
As briefly mentioned before, you digest every datapoint you get through your layers of filters that accumulated through your experiences. These create your reality. All your successes, failures, childhood experiences, any encounters, disappointments, no matter if consciously or unconsciously contribute to that reality. Consequently, your reality is subjective and unique.
These filters basically dictate your reactions, internally (emotions, thoughts, & mood) and externally (explicit actions). I say “basically” since there is a bit of responsibility you can take. It will be useful to develop self-awareness to change your cognitions so that you can act easier out of self-responsibility.
Note that this knowledge alone can help you. Typically, people are not aware that they are permanently experiencing and acting in a historically shaped way, just like the fish doesn’t recognize the water around it. Our unconscious prevents us from seeing other realities through inner narrators and lingering feelings. We confuse our reality with actual reality.
A world made out of worlds
Now, imagine yourself carrying these filter layers around you at all times. They’re like a bubble constantly surrounding you. They guard all your sensory input to have a word to say whenever new data arises to shape your reality.
But you’re not the only human. Now, imagine every person running around with such a shield around them. This is basically what makes up a society: a lot of these “worlds” put together. Every world, i.e. every collection of filters, processes data differently. This brings a mindblowing corollary: every reaction of a human is of relative quality, hence, in their current world, fair.
A person’s inner worlds literally force them to react in a certain way. It becomes obvious how this can create separation between people.
Look at verbal communication: data is created in one person’s reality, verbalized, heard by another person, and finally entering the other person’s reality through their filter layers (and consequently shaping that reality). Misunderstandings are one example of sufficiently distinct realities in a certain context.
Something completely harmless in one reality can suddenly have a rude and destructive interpretation for another person.
In today’s world, where we often communicate with additional data loss (e.g. through texts) and data distortions (e.g. through algorithms) there’s even more potential for separation.
Putting the concept into practice
Well, if this relativity phenomenon creates separation aren’t we pretty fucked? Luckily, we can influence how incoming data impacts us and we can learn how to communicate our reality to create and deepen connections through tools like honesty and consent. This fosters freedom, empathy, and self-responsibility in a community.
What can you do today to profit from this mental model?
Focus on and be aware of how you react to a certain input. Next time someone does or says something that upsets you, take a deep breath and remind yourself of the immensity of filter layers of that poor human. Whatever they said or did, was completely fair in their world.
If they said something mean or judged you, realize how it could be e.g. a fear or insecurity which makes their inner narrator painfully shout at them.
For example, a traumatic event might have created a filter that unconsciously tries to protect that other person. You could feel sorry and sad for them, or just realize that everyone has parts in their personality they want to improve, maybe they’re already aware of these parts or not.
Based on this more empathetic perspective, it becomes easier to self-responsibly choose your next thoughts and actions to treat yourself friendly. Is it to leave the situation? To talk about your feelings? To continue hearing them? To not feel bad? Depending on your relationship, you decide your response to them, and how you want to instantiate kindness and compassion.
Corollary: Give less about what other people think of you
Often we care about what other people might think of us. If we assume, that at the end of the day you’re not responsible for other people being happy all the time, we get another corollary. Free yourself from taking superficial judgments personally. Be authentic. It’s natural beauty. It feels great. You will love it. Others will love it. Those who judge have some related negativity going on in themselves.
But in general, it’s their responsibility, not yours, to feel good.
