It's hard not to take things at face value. Whether you throw yourself into the world or you live inside your own head, you can't help but perceive the world around you as it appears to be.
It is, of course, impossible to separate our perception of people from those people's attempts to be perceived. Everyone you see has some relationship to the way they want to be seen, whether that means they're constantly putting up a front or they're trying hard not to be seen at all. Even apathy has a valence: it says as much when someone doesn't care about what you make of them as it says when they care a great deal.
So it's a mistake to take people as they appear to be. It's far more interesting to ask: what does it say about this person that they choose to make this of themselves? What does it say about how they think of themselves? What does it say about how they think about others? What do they have an eye for, and an awareness of? What don't they notice about themselves, or about what other people might notice? What are their tastes? What are their skills? Where does their imagination run? What do they fancy their "identity" to be—both their sense of themselves and their sense of other people?
The real story of someone is their internal story. It's the stuff they think and feel, but don't share. It's not the reality you experience of them: it's the reality that they experience, day in and day out. Who are we, ultimately, if not the world that we take in? Our reflection of the world is our reflection of ourselves; if that lends us a semblance of substance, a sense of genuine self, that's because the world we live in is never quite the world that anybody else lives in, either. Often the world we experience is drastically different from the world as seen by the stranger standing next to us.
You might think of that as reality's second layer: the world of reflection and interpretation. It's a world that's hinted at by what we see on the surface, in little ripples here and there that suggest the shadowy, distorted personae swimming through the waters below.
The surface world becomes more interesting when it's treated as an intentional space for play and playacting, for storytelling and mythmaking, for games of identity that treat our senses of self, not as fixed, but as opportunities. To let go of your need to define yourself—either for others or for yourself—is to turn your external self, your projected identity, into a communicative tool. The what at the end begins to matter less than the why: the message you're hinting at as you decide how to perform, how to present, what to project, and who to be.
This kind of theatricality is not necessarily more honest, mind you. It isn't inherently more vulnerable or more revealing. Awareness of this performative aspect of identity isn't the same as self-awareness. But it's still a kind of awareness, and that's valuable in and of itself. It lets you see through people, sometimes, and spot those hints of who they really are. It frees you from taking them at face value, and gives you a way to search for those stranger, more elusive questions about who lies underneath.
But there's a third layer to be found to reality, which is: on some level, no matter how hard we try, we do wind up believing in what we see. No matter how savvy we might fancy ourselves, no matter how cynical and jaded we believe ourselves to be, it's impossible not to be at least somewhat persuaded by the reality we perceive. Reality, after all, is awfully persuasive: it's bombastic and sensual and all-encompassing in a way that all those abstract ideas about who people "really" are just can't match.
It's the tricky thing about sticking to your convictions: it's one thing to form beliefs in a vacuum, and another thing to hold onto them when the world around you is pressing into you from all directions, overwhelmingly, claustrophobically, smotheringly. Reality has a way of making all those theories in your head seem paltry and small. It can be enormously tempting to start to take things at face value—it feels rude, even, to disbelieve what's staring you right in the face. It's just like how we imagine ourselves to be one kind of person when we're on our own, only to find ourselves contorting into something quite different the moment we're in a group. Do you really trust your version of the world over every other one? Do you know how to hold onto it, and onto who you want to be within that story of the world, when you're confronted with a collective story that everybody else seems to believe?
And if this is true of you, this is true of everybody else as well. Sometimes you'll see it happen, because it'll be your version of reality that you spot other people conforming to: they shrink themselves to fit your narrative, twist and fold their expression of themselves to match what you seem to be seeing. Other times, you'll be able to spot the person, or the people, who everybody else seems to reshape themselves around: the focal point may be individual, or it might be a particular cultural more, but you can watch everything reframe itself to match this new, peculiar language.
This might be the most interesting layer of them all—and the most genuine layer, too. What happens when we try to assert ourselves against the world around us, and it turns into more of a struggle than we expected? What becomes of us when we attempt to hold our "truer" version of reality in mind, but succumb to the world as it appears to be? How do we reconcile our efforts and our failures? Do we notice the stories that we start believing despite ourselves, or are we persuaded into abandoning our own beliefs, our own interpretations, in favor of the ones that appear most obvious and visceral and real?
One reason why it's so hard is that, at the end of the day, what people believe in does matter, even if we don't share those beliefs ourselves. It's one thing to form a theory, in isolation, of what's "objectively" true and false, and of which beliefs and attitudes are delusional or misinformed or skewed. It's another to engage with other people and have to deal with their worldviews, and with their beliefs, and to realize that, one way or another, the reality of them is shaped by however they perceive the world—and by how they perceive you.
Belief, however subjective, has an objective reality all its own. There is a reality to perception, to interpretation, to judgment. You can't simply shrug that part of people off. Even in the hypothetical world where you were able to perfectly discern a person's worldview and beliefs and intentions—their secret, hidden self—you still wouldn't be able to convince them to shrug off all those layers of themselves, all those layers and layers of perceived reality, and engage with them on only the terms of your choosing.
And you are not, of course, the only person with this sneaking suspicion that a deeper, truer reality lies underneath this surface. Most people you meet have at least an inkling that there's more to others than meets the eye—or they at least know that they have hidden depths, even if they're unwilling to extend that good faith to others. These people, too, harbor beliefs that they and they alone might know how to engage with others in a way that feels real or meaningful or true. And they too have to contend with this obstacle, this dilemma, which is that they can't tell others how to see or how to think or what to believe.
They have to reconcile the person they want to be, the reality they want others to believe in, with the ways they know they'll be perceived within the realities that everybody else lives in. Then (and only then) come the layers of theatre and identity and performance on top of that, the attempts to shape perception, the attempts to project a self that others will believe too.
It's shaky enough to think that everybody's constructing an identity for others based on their own worldview and their own systems of belief. It gets all the more unreliable when you realize that people are constructing those identities based on the realities that they think others will see and interpret and buy into. Reality is a show that we put on, not for others as we perceive them, but for others as we believe them to perceive themselves. It's a game of telephone that's all the harder to correctly decipher because each of us is distorting what we're saying, in the hopes that it'll correctly line up with how we think the next person along is bound to distort what they hear anyway.
It would be one thing to try and discern the truth behind the performances if we thought that other people knew exactly what kinds of performance they were putting on, and why. That would be a fairly simple exercise in decoding and translation. Instead, what we see is a tangled muddle of different layers of interpretation and translation and hypothesis and performance. It's impossible to tell which bits belong to which layers, and precisely which layers transformed which bits in which ways. It's like perceiving the world through a series of warped lenses, each of which bulges and pinches in different ways at different points. On top of that, everyone's playing a different series of interpretive games, based on a different set of hypothetical interpretations, and everyone's adjusting their performances to everyone else's performances.
It's no wonder so many people wind up without a strong sense of self, let alone a strong sense of other people. How are you supposed to pause and think of yourself while you're busy trying to figure out every other person? The better and more instinctively you learn how to juggle these layers of reality, the harder it can get to take a step back and what remains of you when all the layers fall away—and once you start looking at that, it can be strangely hard to remember how exactly you juggled all those layers to begin with.
Some would ask: does any of this matter, in the face of how compelling and seductive reality is on the face of it? Why bother with any of these intricacies when you could be taking the lushness of everything in at face value?
Others ask the opposite, of course: why bother with the surface of things, and with these games of performance and interpretation, when you could instead strive for something closer to honesty, or at least explicitness to the point of being blunt?
Both perspectives only run so far. It's hard to engage with things at face value without being at least somewhat aware of the shifting sands at the foundation of everything. And no matter how hard you try to be earnest or sincere, no matter how unfiltered you believe yourself to be, you are still subject to interpretation; you will still find yourself looking for the right balance of expressiveness and social awareness that brings you closer to your idea of the truth. We can't choose the parts of this that we like and cut out all the rest. We can tell ourselves that we can, sure, but that just becomes another delusion that we've chosen to believe.
Besides, it's far more compelling to engage with this dilemma as a whole. On the one hand, you have the impossibility of interpretation, as filtered through this ever-shifting multilayered prism. On the other, you have the sheer charisma of reality as it presents itself to us, at once impossible to deny and impossible to believe. What's interesting is what we make of all this: what we embrace and what we struggle with; where we find ourselves at ease, and where we feel the most discomfort. And, of course, the layers on top of that: the comforting lies we tell ourselves to handle our unease, or the niggling disturbances we feel in the places we should be most comfortable. The stories, in other words, of how we feel about people at face value, and who we believe they are underneath, and how we reconcile the ways in which belief becomes reality, and reality becomes performance, and performance becomes belief.
It is, of course, impossible to separate our perception of people from those people's attempts to be perceived. Everyone you see has some relationship to the way they want to be seen, whether that means they're constantly putting up a front or they're trying hard not to be seen at all. Even apathy has a valence: it says as much when someone doesn't care about what you make of them as it says when they care a great deal.
So it's a mistake to take people as they appear to be. It's far more interesting to ask: what does it say about this person that they choose to make this of themselves? What does it say about how they think of themselves? What does it say about how they think about others? What do they have an eye for, and an awareness of? What don't they notice about themselves, or about what other people might notice? What are their tastes? What are their skills? Where does their imagination run? What do they fancy their "identity" to be—both their sense of themselves and their sense of other people?
The real story of someone is their internal story. It's the stuff they think and feel, but don't share. It's not the reality you experience of them: it's the reality that they experience, day in and day out. Who are we, ultimately, if not the world that we take in? Our reflection of the world is our reflection of ourselves; if that lends us a semblance of substance, a sense of genuine self, that's because the world we live in is never quite the world that anybody else lives in, either. Often the world we experience is drastically different from the world as seen by the stranger standing next to us.
You might think of that as reality's second layer: the world of reflection and interpretation. It's a world that's hinted at by what we see on the surface, in little ripples here and there that suggest the shadowy, distorted personae swimming through the waters below.
The surface world becomes more interesting when it's treated as an intentional space for play and playacting, for storytelling and mythmaking, for games of identity that treat our senses of self, not as fixed, but as opportunities. To let go of your need to define yourself—either for others or for yourself—is to turn your external self, your projected identity, into a communicative tool. The what at the end begins to matter less than the why: the message you're hinting at as you decide how to perform, how to present, what to project, and who to be.
This kind of theatricality is not necessarily more honest, mind you. It isn't inherently more vulnerable or more revealing. Awareness of this performative aspect of identity isn't the same as self-awareness. But it's still a kind of awareness, and that's valuable in and of itself. It lets you see through people, sometimes, and spot those hints of who they really are. It frees you from taking them at face value, and gives you a way to search for those stranger, more elusive questions about who lies underneath.
But there's a third layer to be found to reality, which is: on some level, no matter how hard we try, we do wind up believing in what we see. No matter how savvy we might fancy ourselves, no matter how cynical and jaded we believe ourselves to be, it's impossible not to be at least somewhat persuaded by the reality we perceive. Reality, after all, is awfully persuasive: it's bombastic and sensual and all-encompassing in a way that all those abstract ideas about who people "really" are just can't match.
It's the tricky thing about sticking to your convictions: it's one thing to form beliefs in a vacuum, and another thing to hold onto them when the world around you is pressing into you from all directions, overwhelmingly, claustrophobically, smotheringly. Reality has a way of making all those theories in your head seem paltry and small. It can be enormously tempting to start to take things at face value—it feels rude, even, to disbelieve what's staring you right in the face. It's just like how we imagine ourselves to be one kind of person when we're on our own, only to find ourselves contorting into something quite different the moment we're in a group. Do you really trust your version of the world over every other one? Do you know how to hold onto it, and onto who you want to be within that story of the world, when you're confronted with a collective story that everybody else seems to believe?
And if this is true of you, this is true of everybody else as well. Sometimes you'll see it happen, because it'll be your version of reality that you spot other people conforming to: they shrink themselves to fit your narrative, twist and fold their expression of themselves to match what you seem to be seeing. Other times, you'll be able to spot the person, or the people, who everybody else seems to reshape themselves around: the focal point may be individual, or it might be a particular cultural more, but you can watch everything reframe itself to match this new, peculiar language.
This might be the most interesting layer of them all—and the most genuine layer, too. What happens when we try to assert ourselves against the world around us, and it turns into more of a struggle than we expected? What becomes of us when we attempt to hold our "truer" version of reality in mind, but succumb to the world as it appears to be? How do we reconcile our efforts and our failures? Do we notice the stories that we start believing despite ourselves, or are we persuaded into abandoning our own beliefs, our own interpretations, in favor of the ones that appear most obvious and visceral and real?
One reason why it's so hard is that, at the end of the day, what people believe in does matter, even if we don't share those beliefs ourselves. It's one thing to form a theory, in isolation, of what's "objectively" true and false, and of which beliefs and attitudes are delusional or misinformed or skewed. It's another to engage with other people and have to deal with their worldviews, and with their beliefs, and to realize that, one way or another, the reality of them is shaped by however they perceive the world—and by how they perceive you.
Belief, however subjective, has an objective reality all its own. There is a reality to perception, to interpretation, to judgment. You can't simply shrug that part of people off. Even in the hypothetical world where you were able to perfectly discern a person's worldview and beliefs and intentions—their secret, hidden self—you still wouldn't be able to convince them to shrug off all those layers of themselves, all those layers and layers of perceived reality, and engage with them on only the terms of your choosing.
And you are not, of course, the only person with this sneaking suspicion that a deeper, truer reality lies underneath this surface. Most people you meet have at least an inkling that there's more to others than meets the eye—or they at least know that they have hidden depths, even if they're unwilling to extend that good faith to others. These people, too, harbor beliefs that they and they alone might know how to engage with others in a way that feels real or meaningful or true. And they too have to contend with this obstacle, this dilemma, which is that they can't tell others how to see or how to think or what to believe.
They have to reconcile the person they want to be, the reality they want others to believe in, with the ways they know they'll be perceived within the realities that everybody else lives in. Then (and only then) come the layers of theatre and identity and performance on top of that, the attempts to shape perception, the attempts to project a self that others will believe too.
It's shaky enough to think that everybody's constructing an identity for others based on their own worldview and their own systems of belief. It gets all the more unreliable when you realize that people are constructing those identities based on the realities that they think others will see and interpret and buy into. Reality is a show that we put on, not for others as we perceive them, but for others as we believe them to perceive themselves. It's a game of telephone that's all the harder to correctly decipher because each of us is distorting what we're saying, in the hopes that it'll correctly line up with how we think the next person along is bound to distort what they hear anyway.
It would be one thing to try and discern the truth behind the performances if we thought that other people knew exactly what kinds of performance they were putting on, and why. That would be a fairly simple exercise in decoding and translation. Instead, what we see is a tangled muddle of different layers of interpretation and translation and hypothesis and performance. It's impossible to tell which bits belong to which layers, and precisely which layers transformed which bits in which ways. It's like perceiving the world through a series of warped lenses, each of which bulges and pinches in different ways at different points. On top of that, everyone's playing a different series of interpretive games, based on a different set of hypothetical interpretations, and everyone's adjusting their performances to everyone else's performances.
It's no wonder so many people wind up without a strong sense of self, let alone a strong sense of other people. How are you supposed to pause and think of yourself while you're busy trying to figure out every other person? The better and more instinctively you learn how to juggle these layers of reality, the harder it can get to take a step back and what remains of you when all the layers fall away—and once you start looking at that, it can be strangely hard to remember how exactly you juggled all those layers to begin with.
Some would ask: does any of this matter, in the face of how compelling and seductive reality is on the face of it? Why bother with any of these intricacies when you could be taking the lushness of everything in at face value?
Others ask the opposite, of course: why bother with the surface of things, and with these games of performance and interpretation, when you could instead strive for something closer to honesty, or at least explicitness to the point of being blunt?
Both perspectives only run so far. It's hard to engage with things at face value without being at least somewhat aware of the shifting sands at the foundation of everything. And no matter how hard you try to be earnest or sincere, no matter how unfiltered you believe yourself to be, you are still subject to interpretation; you will still find yourself looking for the right balance of expressiveness and social awareness that brings you closer to your idea of the truth. We can't choose the parts of this that we like and cut out all the rest. We can tell ourselves that we can, sure, but that just becomes another delusion that we've chosen to believe.
Besides, it's far more compelling to engage with this dilemma as a whole. On the one hand, you have the impossibility of interpretation, as filtered through this ever-shifting multilayered prism. On the other, you have the sheer charisma of reality as it presents itself to us, at once impossible to deny and impossible to believe. What's interesting is what we make of all this: what we embrace and what we struggle with; where we find ourselves at ease, and where we feel the most discomfort. And, of course, the layers on top of that: the comforting lies we tell ourselves to handle our unease, or the niggling disturbances we feel in the places we should be most comfortable. The stories, in other words, of how we feel about people at face value, and who we believe they are underneath, and how we reconcile the ways in which belief becomes reality, and reality becomes performance, and performance becomes belief.