Why We Misjudge People

Are you sure you see another person, and not your own version of that person? Often a single detail is enough for us — appearance, clothing, a role, some action or state — to decide what kind of person is in front of us. And from then on we interact with the image we have created inside ourselves, without noticing how much has remained outside our perception.

In this episode, I look at why we draw conclusions about people so quickly and get them wrong so often, how our ideas and habitual roles affect relationships, and why we begin demanding that someone close to us return to a role that is understandable and comfortable for us. How many conflicts arise only because we take one expression of a person for the whole person? What does it mean to broaden our perception of another, how does it help us understand the causes of their states and actions more deeply — and why, without such broadening, is it impossible to truly come to know either people or ourselves?

How appearance affects our perception of a person

I’ll start with a very simple example. Today I thought about a very interesting thing. Women — those who wear makeup — don’t like it when they ask their husband: “Do you like me without makeup?” — and the husband answers: “Actually, you look a little different.” I probably thought about this because this morning I ran into my wife in the bathroom: school has started, she has also begun getting up very early, and we started crossing paths precisely in the morning. She didn’t ask me that question; we didn’t discuss it. I simply thought afterwards that she sees me looking the same every day — I am talking specifically about appearance now. But my wife always wears makeup. She may skip anything at all, but not putting on makeup — that never happens. There probably hasn’t been a single day in her life, I don’t know. She always wears makeup.

Obviously, there is a zone where I perceive her in one state, and later in another. And the world perceives her in both. And society has added a third perception: social media gave us filters. My wife never takes photos with filters, but recently she showed me: “Sasha, did you know that on Instagram you can see which particular filter a girl, for example, has used? People often leave it visible and don’t hide it.” Filters appeared — that is, yet another perception appeared.

There is perception that is not visual — perception through memory. We are shown one and the same photograph, told about an aunt or a grandmother: “This is what she was like.” And some other perception is added to it: “She was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Or: “She was ugly, ugly, ugly.” And from this one photograph you build your perception of that person. And sometimes there is no photograph — someone just tells you about a person, and a perception forms in you.

How we create different versions of ourselves for others

So what is our task? In essence, if a woman changes herself over the course of the day, what does she want from others — from a man or from other people? What does she want when worries arise inside her about how people perceive her? After all, she herself constantly changes herself for people, changes their perception of her. She does it. I am not saying it shouldn’t be done. Look, Olya — and here I am addressing our viewers — I am by no means suggesting it shouldn’t be done. But you must understand: if you do it, energy will arise in you, automatic energy, because you have an action — a very connected action, one that follows a pattern. You are not doing it for nothing.

A woman doesn’t wear makeup for nothing — she has a goal. By the way, putting on makeup itself is a psychophysical phenomenon, not an energetic one. Clearly, the desire to change yourself is already a certain energy, just as further on, when people want to wear something, get a tattoo, change their skin color, add earrings, some jewelry, details. That is, you are definitely presenting yourself differently.

How masks and roles become part of our personality

So when you are perceived, you need to be calm about your own husband or boyfriend — or wife, though here it’s more husbands and boyfriends, since it’s mostly women who wear makeup — or your children, or someone you know saying to you: “Have you changed?” Even though people usually dislike that very much. And the natural answer, of course, is: “Of course I’ve changed. Here I had makeup on, and here I don’t.” And it is obvious that, given the concept of beauty that is instilled and embedded everywhere in an absolutely fundamental way, if a person has properly applied the right makeup and is properly made up, it will even out their effect, and they will be more beautiful in terms of the basic social, psychophysical construct. Obviously. So asking about it is pointless.

But who is capable, when perceiving another person, of wanting to perceive them naturally, completely, in their full contour? This is just a small example, because besides the makeup applied, a person hides an enormous amount. There is an enormous number of masks in which they live, an enormous number of states in which we live.

Society lives in a “husband — wife” state: people live in the state of a wife. A person plays the role of a wife or the role of a husband — a particular role. Sometimes I say something, and if there is some conflict situation at home, my wife says: “Stop acting like the boss; behave like that at work.” I say: “But actually, this is simply who I am. What does work have to do with it?” But it is easy to shift the focus. She is telling me: “Please go back to the role I like. Go back to the zone where I like you.”

This applies to both men and women — absolutely all people. On the one hand — how much you change yourself and show yourself differently in society, constantly, endlessly building another version of yourself. On the other hand — how much you don’t want to get to know another person.

Why people do not know themselves

When we come to the question of building another version of ourselves, we run into a very interesting aspect.

The problem is that a modern person does not know themselves: they are already an egoistically, personally constructed, somehow reconstructed construct. They do not understand how many different masks and different states they carry. They neither understand nor perceive their spiritual being. They do not perceive which energies are theirs and which belong to others.

Here I can at least perceive whether I am wearing makeup or not, whether I have a jacket on or not, how long my hair is. I can remember that I had a haircut two weeks or a month ago. There are things I can at least perceive: whether I brushed my teeth or not. But what can I perceive in terms of energy? Is this energy mine at all? When did I put it on, this energy? Can I leave it in the closet, or can I not?

Even if we start drawing some parallels — and believe me, the spiritual world is far more fundamental and broad than any physical reality, any material world — if I start perceiving the spiritual world at least through parallels: did I simply take this energy with me today? Did I take it consciously or unconsciously? Am I doing this for real or not?

It is as if a woman had makeup put on her at night by some process and didn’t know what she really looks like. She would be sure that these blue stripes are her skin color, her structure. Or that this brightness here, these drawn circles, are natural reality. And then it was all washed off and she was shown: “No, no, no, here is another natural reality — absolutely real, the one that actually exists.”

By the way, there is an incredible number of practices, techniques, schools and teachings describing work with various psychophysical tensions, with masks, with some constructs on the face. And, it seems to me, there are a huge number of examples showing a person with one face right now and, exactly thirty seconds later, with a completely different one, as if their whole face had fully relaxed. Even though they seemingly used no external intervention. That is, different effects of absolutely different states are possible.

Are you being yourself or playing the role society expects?

So, this thought that came to me this morning — about how people perceive each other with and without makeup. It would be worth thinking about. A woman might say to herself: “If I wear makeup, do I understand at all that I am perceived differently visually?” Or: how natural am I in the way I live — even in terms of clothing?

Am I playing along with this society that shapes something around me, or am I in a natural position — that of who I really am?

After all, I live in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of, you know, such red lines dividing the social world here. Very rich companies worth four or five trillion dollars are here — the richest companies. And on the other hand — often absolutely ancient shops, services, restaurants, or some bench that has been standing in the same place for sixty years. The world is very diverse and divided. And there is a lot here that people try to exalt, saying: clothing doesn’t matter — look at how rich people dress, what they wear.

Clothing and status: how they narrow our perception of a person

I read a post here: in the technology world there is a closed community that has been meeting for forty years. Different people are invited; you can only get in by invitation, and journalists have practically no access. Someone drew a direct comparison: this meeting isn’t like Davos, where everyone comes in ties and jackets — on the contrary, people come in flip-flops, slides, shorts. But I still wouldn’t come to such a meeting in shorts, because I don’t go anywhere in shorts. I go down in shorts at a hotel to jump into the pool, or I put them on where there is a pool — at home or somewhere else. I wear shorts into town in one case out of a thousand. Of course I can wear them — maybe in one case out of five hundred — but it’s rare.

Comments like that limit human perception. Imagine if I did that, someone photographed me and said: “He’s just some silly goose who decided to stand out and show he’s different.” Not at all — energies simply flow in me in which I behave naturally, as who I am. If they introduce a dress code there and write that flip-flops are mandatory, of course I’ll put them on. But that requires a dress code.

I had a case like this in business, and I think it shows the business environment very strongly. We had a deal between Megaplan and 1C, and I was the CEO of Megaplan. The deal went through, and the board of directors convenes. There sits the head of 1C, Boris Georgievich Nuraliev; there sit people from Baring Vostok Capital — that was a large investment fund in Russia, it probably still exists. There sit people from another, managing fund that was selling its stake — that was Ulvi Kasimov’s fund, which owned a stake in Megaplan. And Megaplan’s top management is sitting there.

The meeting is like this: tables stand, on one there is some food — caviar style, some caviar sandwiches lying there. A kind of semi-country-bumpkin chic. And all this is happening in the 1C office, and the 1C office looks the way an office looked in the nineties. Although, I note, it was already 2012.

And in comes Boris Georgievich Nuraliev — he used to walk around in sandals like that; I think he wasn’t in shorts, but he was in sandals and some T-shirt. And everyone is sitting in suits, in jackets. Everyone sat down at the table — that day they were approving a document describing the work of this board of directors, and one of the clauses said there must be a dress code. And he says: “The first thing I want to strike out is this clause about the dress code.” Because it is a rule that people may accept for themselves, or may not. He did not want to play some other role.

But when other people start describing this as something super positive or super negative, it turns out they are not looking at the whole picture holistically. Why does a person perceive the world in such a way that they can’t put on a jacket? What is happening to them that they can’t wear a suit nicely? Or understand that there is actually a difference between suits, in their cut, in the fabric? Why can’t they do it? That is, to understand why such an energy does not arise in them.

This is a question of understanding, of perceiving this person — what energy they have inside — and not a reason to hang a label on them: if a girl is sitting in a restaurant in a cap, it means she simply doesn’t know how to take care of herself and didn’t wash her hair this morning.

And someone else would certainly never in their life wear a cap like that. And why did that happen? What state is this person in, what energies are at work in them? Or perhaps the person simply had that style that day, and it has nothing to do with the presence or absence of the energy of a certain state — of how you are able to relate to your physical body on the outside.

How to stop labeling people

Someone here will ask: “Alexander, from the standpoint of a person’s energetic development, their movement toward sunlight and toward understanding life — do you think it matters whether a person knows how to take care of themselves or not? Whether they have a talent for design or not, a talent for mathematics or not?” It really doesn’t matter. It is not any kind of parameter of how high or low a person is in terms of having certain energies or the development of their spiritual system, their spiritual bodies.

After all, I consciously know that I am not a woman. That doesn’t make me any worse or any better in the world. Agree, Olya? And what about people? People all want to be everything. Then you want to be both men and women at the same time. Both a child and an adult at the same time. You want to be everything at once, you understand? To sleep and to run at the same time. A person wants to be everything at once.

A modern person of the last hundred and fifty years has such a structure of the soul and such a development of the ego, of ego computer systems and various dark forces, that they want to be everything at once. But actually, you are a man or a woman — and the argument seems to fall away. Then, if you lack some state or some energies — for example, the ability to properly feel the state the author conveyed in a particular painting, to see the energy of that world — there is nothing terrible in that.

But you need to be calm about the fact that another person feels something and you don’t, another person can do something and you can’t.

And don’t immediately say: “Listen, he’s just good at programming, but this one can draw well.” Remove these aspects of comparison, because this person may be good at programming, and at drawing, and at music, and at raising children, and in society, and in lots of other places.

But at the same time she, for example, is not a man, she is only a woman. Or, for example, she is still not a president and not a politician. Again, by the way, this is very relative — relative to the spectrum of energy and the spectrum of its development. You also need to know: is this developed energy or simply some circumstances? Because there is the notion of circumstances — this is very important. And if someone thinks that since not a million but a billion dollars has appeared in their account, they must be developed and have some particular energies — that is a big question. These may be particular circumstances that have nothing to do with your spiritual system, with its development.

What it means to broaden our perception of another person

Ask yourself very clearly: if you take certain pills because a doctor told you to, and you don’t want to find out, read or study anything about them — you must know that for you this is a black box, and there is a truth inside it. And if someone wants to get to the bottom of it, don’t argue with them that it shouldn’t be done, that it is complicated to figure out: “Well, I live a peaceful life, so I don’t want to dig into this.”

A peaceful life is not about doing fewer things in order to find something out. Nor is it about doing an endless number of things, rereading every book, rewatching every video on YouTube or TikTok. That is not where peace in life lies.

How to learn to see another person more broadly

Of course, if a person does not perceive themselves, is not in a state of studying themselves at all, of studying the world, the spiritual world and real spaces, then it is extremely hard to say that this same person will engage with other people and perceive them with ease. At the same time, they may see some areas in other people quite seriously and strongly. But truly — in the first steps, and not even only in the first steps, but throughout life — a person must still be in a state of studying themselves, of their own movement, of observing what is happening around them. This comes first.

This is a fundamentally important task. It may seem that when a person is in a state of more or less serious expanded perception, studying other people becomes the right task and the right goal for them. In reality, this is a social, egoistic construct. You shouldn’t even think that way. And by no means, of course, should you make this task your first priority.

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