We’re All Unique Snowflakes and Why That Matters
Why understanding individuality helps us cultivate compassion for everyone we interact with
Understanding others is hard. We’re not equipped for it. Whilst evolution has endowed us with enviable interpretation skills, other people’s minds remain a black box. We can infer what others are feeling, but we’re fundamentally blind to their experience. We only know how we see the world and extrapolate that to everyone else.
It took me a while to realise this. In the past, like many people, I could find it difficult to accept that people thought differently to me. I used to see things so clearly I couldn’t comprehend how anyone could disagree. They were simply wrong. Things were black and white. My experience was the only experience.
The author and investor Morgan Housel perfectly encapsulated the trap I fell into:
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
Of course, it’s easy to know this intellectually, but extremely hard to think any differently. After all, we’re disconnected brains floating in a dark, bone coffin. We construct our reality from electric patterns that dance from our nerves to our brains. It’s as if we’re all living in different simulations, so no wonder it’s hard to bridge the gap.
Why We’re Unique
Humans are compounding uniqueness. Each one of us is a unique combination of more than 1 billion nucleotides in a tightly wound string of DNA more than 40x longer than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. No one like any of us has ever lived, or will ever live. Our individuality is inherent.
Then we layer on our idiosyncratic lives. Experience and DNA interact in a cascade of gene-environment interactions. Experience marks DNA and DNA shapes experience. We start different, individuals from the beginning, and life just widens the gap. Difference begets difference.
This makes divergent thinking inevitable. In fact, it’s a wonder we agree on anything. But if you look at most of the world, this doesn’t really hold. People, generally, conform. Individuality and conformity are constantly in tension, and conformity often wins¹. The pressure to fit in can be overwhelming, as anyone who’s been a teenager can attest to. Countries and cultures vary widely, but even in the most atomized countries, the conforming groups are just smaller. Few people are true contrarians.
The urge to confirm imposes an artificial similarity across the breadth of humanity. It smooths the natural variation in personality and experience, as people temper their edges to fit the mould. This confounds our intuitions on how people think because it provides a group that from the outside really does seem to think the same us. They’re the counterpoint to the rest of the world that don’t.
We shouldn’t let this mislead us. Perhaps these coherent groups do think the same, but it’s difficult to know. Given what we know about the combinatorial powers of DNA and the power of conformity, it’s more likely a trick of human sociality. Underneath the layers and constraints that keep society cohesive are a collection of individuals who see the world in their own unique way, constructed from their idiosyncratic combination of genetics and life experience.
The Emergence of Compassion
Our diversity is beautiful but it’s the source of so much conflict. The world is an orgy of misunderstandings and their consequences. We willfully and inevitably misinterpret the motives, actions, and words of the people around us, deeming them villains as we cast ourselves the heroes of our own story. A lot of our anger and frustration stems from this inability to understand one another. It manifests in a bias so ubiquitous and pervasive that it has its own name — the Fundamental Attribution Error².
The knot at the core of this skein of misunderstanding is a naive assumption that others think as we do. We forget the individuality at the heart of the human condition. If we can hold this at the forefront of our minds instead, we can treat those who do things we don’t understand with compassion rather than anger. Rather than hastily attributing those inexplicable acts to malice, we can meet them with understanding.
This is a funny type of understanding. It’s being understanding in our inability to understand; understanding that we can’t understand and accepting it. Fundamentally, it’s about giving others the benefit of the doubt and recognizing the unique point of view behind the inexplicable.
To take this realization and apply it to our lives we can use ancient tactics honed in the fires of antiquity. In the classical period, hundreds of years Before the Common Era, philosophers in Greece tried to live in ways contrary to human instinct. The Cynics practised an asceticism so extreme, their most famous exponent, Diogenes, was famous for living in a ceramic pot on the streets of Athens. The Stoics embraced their fate to such an extent the philosopher Epictetus recommended whispering to yourself “they may be dead in the morning” as you kiss your child goodnight.
The philosophies were unforgiving and demanding, and time and time again the philosophers failed to embody the values they espoused. As they strove to live the good life, they would repeatedly remind themselves of aspects of their philosophy until it became instinct. They internalized the concepts through meditation, mantras and writing. They wielded repetition and consistency as their weapon, as should we. By continuously reminding ourselves of the inscrutable individuality of everyone we meet we can internalize it, and by doing that we can find our compassion.
The directive is simple. Remind yourself, repeatedly, day after day, that everyone sees the world differently and is, for the most part, trying to do the right thing. You’re not meant to understand everything they do, and why they do it. As you go through life inundated by the inexplicable, unintelligible actions of others cling to the mantra like a life raft. Slowly, painstakingly it will become part of you.
Final Thoughts
This essay is primarily a way of taking my own advice. It’s a 1000-word reminder about individuality, part of the process to internalize the message.
But more broadly, in an increasingly polarized and politicized world, anyone who can meet opposition with compassion is improving the culture in a small but meaningful way. Sharing this concept more widely is my small contribution to the zeitgeist.
Nietzche, the master of aphorisms, deeply understood the extent of our differing perspectives and the challenges it poses. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he wrote:
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
[1] The Asch Conformity Experiments are an interesting insight into how strong the urge to conform can be.
[2] There are actually a collection of similar biases that describe different aspects of the same phenomenon, including the Actor-Observer Bias and the Correspondence Bias.
