Your perception is flawed.

Before you get upset, you might want to consider that you might have misunderstood the situation.

I have been reading a book I grabbed from my father’s house. It’s called Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar (http://amzn.to/2cp3wnx)

The book is a way to teach philosophy using jokes to explain the concepts. If you want to learn about philosophy and don’t want to read an academic book – this is a great way to grasp basic concepts.

I obviously teach a Humanist approach to solving problems, meaning my philosophic approach is to be compassionate, ethical, and rational when trying to solve problems.

A large number of our problems are interpersonal, meaning they involve other people. We don’t like what they did or said. We are right and they are wrong. The problem is that our thinking is biased. We only know what we experience and how we personally experience interactions. We won’t know how the other person does. And their experience might be quite different than ours.

One of the jokes in the book is this:

A man is worried that his wife is losing her hearing, so he consults a doctor. The doctor suggests that he try a simple at home test on her: Stand behind her and ask her a question, first from twenty feet, next from ten feet, and finally right behind her.
So the man goes home and sees his wife in the kitchen facing the stove. He says from the door, “What’s for dinner tonight?”
No answer.
Ten feet behind her, he repeats, “What’s for dinner tonight?”
Still no answer.
Finally, right behind her he says, “What’s for dinner tonight?”
And his wife turns around and says, “For the third time – chicken!”

Don’t assume you know what the other person is experiencing. When you are tempted to get mad and upset and righteously angry. Pause, step back from your moral opining and consider whether or not you are the one at fault!

At the very least – try to approach these problems with compassion so that if it turns out that you were being the idiot – you don’t compound the problem by being an angry idiot.

You Assume Too Much

We all do it even though we know we shouldn’t. We make assumptions about other people.  

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk to some new college students  The talk was all about how we each have our own frame of reference that is unique to us and that we shouldn’t assume other people share our frame of reference, because they don’t.

And then, during a section where I was talking about how you can’t undo an action once done, I added in a bit about time travel from Dr Who remarking that even if you had a TARDIS you still couldn’t go back and undo things because, as we all know, some points are fixed in time. My really cool Dr Who reference resulted in blank stares.  Out of the 100 kids present, NONE of them knew Dr. Who. Which means, I gave them a perfect example of exactly how we all fall prey to assuming our frame of reference is shared by others when it really isn’t.

The point is that even those of us who are supposed to be really good at not assuming, make assumptions.  We can’t help ourselves. Our brains are wired to take these sorts of shortcuts. All we can do is be aware that our perception might not actually be truthful so that when we are confronted by the obvious, we don’t ignore it. The good news is that I learned from this and checked with them before making a Matrix reference later on.

Image from: http://www.entertainmentwallpaper.com/images/desktops/movie/tv_doctor_who24.jpg