You Don't Know What you Don't Know

Especially when it comes to someone else's story...

Photo by NIKITA SHIROKOV on Unsplash

Humans have a habit of seeing their own failures reflected back at them through what they perceive other people’s lives to be. This has always been interesting to me, and I also consider it pointless for a few reasons. The largest of which is that you probably don’t know a whole lot about their lives, what you are instead using as your standard of measurement is what you think their lives are like.

Nowhere is this more true than social media:

You are seeing the world through the lens that the other person wants you to. The only reason that you know that it isn’t real is that other people have cameras too, and there is a whole subreddit that is dedicated to showing the world how fake this stuff is. If you, as the person that peruses Instagram came across this image:

You might just believe that it is a candid image of a person with a bit of face tuning. From this picture, you might come to the conclusion that she is probably fun, and adventurous, you can see that she’s certainly pretty.

All of these things might lead you to believe that her life is pretty great. You might be a bit jealous of her, and wish that you were more like her if you are dissatisfied with your own life. Maybe her images bring to mind things that you wished you had done, but never got around to, and nor feel regret about that.

When you compare your life to other people, and assume that they have many advantages that you don’t have, or that being them must be awesome. Perhaps the person in the photos does have an awesome life, perhaps you should be a bit jealous of them, perhaps they have advantages that you never got, and perhaps they are somehow better than you.

Perhaps.

Or, perhaps it is a Japanese man that is pretty good at photo editing:

Yes indeed, that pretty young woman is a fifty-something Japanese man that pretended to be someone else. The photos are of him, and he edited them to create this girl for the internet fame. He wanted to increase his social media presence, but knew that people would rather see the pretty girl than an “uncle”.

How did people figure this out"? Well, because he spent so much time worrying about the face, he neglected to consider the difference in the hands and arms of a male compared to a female.

As you can see, the arm does not match the body. That is because he forgot to edit that aspect, or he didn’t think that it mattered. People caught onto this and started to look more in-depth at his photos and found his reflection in the side mirror of his Yamaha:

It is an excellent reminder that what we see has nothing to do with reality. Reality has its own slant that we often are unaware of. Why is this Japanese man’s story important? It is a visual representation of what humans do when observing other people’s lives. They see what they think is reality, and build an understanding based on that idea. Formulating an opinion on someone’s life based on your perception is often going to be very far from the truth.

I have spent a lot of time having people tell me their stories, and give me insight into their lives because for whatever reason they deem me to be safe. Sometimes I think people get trapped by the perception that others have of them, other times I think that they are very private and prefer to keep their own counsel. Sometimes they have no idea how others view them. All too often I hear people speak about someone that we mutually know, saying things like how that person has their life together, that they are so perfect, and how they wish that they were more like them.

This perception colors their reality to the point that they simply assume that it’s true when talking to the other person. However, when that same person talks to me they tell me that they are flying by the seat of their pants pretty much all the time. They have no idea why anyone would think that they have a perfect life, because they don’t. It is all an assumption that other people have when they see them.

In a way, it is you looking at yourself in that other person, not the person themselves. It is you looking at your life and where you see problems, and not seeing those same problems reflected back at you. It is you thinking that their life is perfect because you believe your life would be perfect if those things were absent.

If only I had…

Their money

Their partner

Their children

Their car

Their family

Their looks

Their personality

Their job

Their house

Whatever thing that you see as better, if you had that thing, your life would be grand, therefore their life must be grand because they have it. That is what you are envying, not their reality, but the ideal that you have constructed about their lives for them.

You don’t know what you don’t know, and that is especially true of people that you are thinking have it all, or that their lives are easy. They have that ingredient that you believe would make your life better, easier, and more enjoyable, but just because you value something doesn’t mean that it is a magic cure-all.

“Such a pretty girl, I wish I looked like her…”

This image is taken from an article written about regrowing your hair after breast cancer.

“What a lovely family. I wish mine looked like that…”

That young woman, unhappy with her parents disliking her boyfriend and refusing to fund her living with him, joined forces with said boyfriend and his brother, to murder both her parents, leaving her brother without his family.

When you wish to be someone else, you aren’t actually wishing to be that person/ You have no idea what is going on in their heads, and all of the things that you believe make that person perfect, or better than you in some regard, is a snippet of a picture that likely isn’t remotely accurate.

Being the best version of yourself is the best thing you can do for yourself. If you are preoccupied with exterior ideas, that if only you were like this other person in the way that you are wishing for, you are wasting time that you could be using to develop more wholly as an individual. That isn’t going to make your life better, or get you closer to who you could be if you weren’t otherwise focused.

What you think you know about someone rarely if ever is the truth about their existence. So long as you are focused on the pretty biker, you miss the hairy wrist and arm that belies the truth.