what it means to think of others.
I said I try to.
But then she asked:
What is being considerate, really?
Can you ever truly think from someone else’s point of view?
That stopped me.
Because the truth is, we only ever see the world through our own eyes.
We imagine what others might feel,
but it’s always filtered through our own emotional palette,
what sadness means to us, what joy feels like to us.
We don’t actually understand.
We simulate.
We interpret.
So then what is being considerate?
Is it empathy,
or is it a refined form of narcissism?
A polished projection of how we would like to be treated,
placed gently onto someone else’s circumstance.
"I wouldn’t want that done to me,"
we think,
and we call that compassion.
But isn’t that still about me?
It made me wonder
what exactly is the “self”?
what exactly is the “self”?
We say we “consider” others, but is that act grounded in their reality or simply in our own imagined version of it?
Maybe all our attempts at understanding are just disguised mirrors, reflections of ourselves dressed in the clothing of someone else.
Much like hemispheric thinking,
when the brain’s hemispheres process reality in a split way. The left side tends to seek structure, clarity, definitions; it wants order and logic. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, processes ambiguity, emotion, tone, context. But when we rely too heavily on one hemisphere, especially the left,
we begin to flatten complexity.
We categorize and label rather than perceive.
We categorize and label rather than perceive.
So perhaps what we call “understanding” is really a left-brained reconstruction of a person, an outline, a hypothesis, a controlled version of someone else’s inner world. Not their truth, but a digestible sketch of it.
And maybe everything we encounter in this world is just an imperfect copy of a perfect, abstract Form. A table isn’t the table, it’s a shadow of the ideal table, the Form of “tableness.”
Maybe empathy is like that too. What we practice, what we call kindness, care, or understanding, they’re not the things themselves, but approximations. A distorted echo of a pure, unreachable form. (Shout out to PLATO)
So maybe none of us are truly considerate.
Maybe we’re all just acting out fragments of what we think that should look like, trying to be kind in ways we hope feel kind, building each gesture out of projections, memories, and fragments of self.
If so, then maybe consideration is not a selfless act, but one of quiet self-reinforcement.
A performance for the self, by the self.
And that doesn’t necessarily make it fake.
Just… human, I guess?
Notes From Above-Ground