Why We Misjudge People | Seeing Yourself and Others More Broadly

AVAlexander Volchek

Are you sure you see another person, rather than your own version of them? Often, a single detail is enough: appearance, clothing, a role, an action, or a state of mind, and we decide what kind of person is before us. Then we interact with the image we have created inside ourselves, without noticing how much remains outside our perception. How does this limited perception affect our relationships? Why do we begin demanding that someone close to us return to a role we understand and find comfortable? How many conflicts arise simply because we mistake one expression of a person for the whole person? In this video, we will explore what it means to broaden our perception of others, how that helps us understand the causes of their states and actions more deeply, and why without it we cannot truly understand either other people or ourselves.

I will begin with a very simple example. Today I had an interesting thought: women who wear makeup do not like it when they ask their husband, “Do you like me without makeup?” and he says, “Well, you are a little different.” I probably thought of this because I ran into my wife in the bathroom this morning. School has started, so she has begun getting up very early too, and we have started crossing paths in the morning. She did not ask me that question. We did not discuss it. I simply thought afterward that she sees me looking the same every day. I am talking about appearance here. My wife, though, always wears makeup. She may skip anything else, but not putting on makeup. That never happens. There probably has not been a single day in her life—I do not know.

She always puts on makeup. Obviously, then, I perceive her in one state and later in another. The world sees her in both states. Society has added a third: social media gave us filters. My wife never takes pictures with filters, but recently she showed me something: “Sasha, did you know you can see on Instagram that a woman has used a particular filter? Often they leave it visible rather than hiding it.” Filters have added another way of perceiving someone. There is also nonvisual perception, perception through memory. We are shown the same photograph of an aunt or grandmother and told, “This is what she was like.” Another perception is added: “She was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.” Or, “She was ugly, ugly, ugly.”

You build your perception of that person from one photograph. Sometimes there is no photograph; someone tells you about a person and a perception forms. What is our task here? If a woman changes herself over the course of the day, what does she want from others, from a man or other people? What does she want when she starts worrying about how people perceive her? She herself is constantly changing what others see of her, their perception of her. I am not saying she should not do this. Olya, and everyone watching, I am certainly not saying you should not do it. But you need to understand that if you do it, energy will arise automatically, because you have taken an action with a closely connected, predictable effect. You are not doing it for no reason.

A woman puts on makeup for a reason; she has a goal. The system involved is psychophysical. Incidentally, the actual application of makeup is a psychophysical phenomenon, not an energetic one. The desire to change yourself, of course, is already a particular energy, just as when people want to wear something, get a tattoo, change their skin color, add earrings, jewelry, or other details. You are definitely presenting yourself differently. So when someone perceives you, you need to be comfortable with your own husband, boyfriend, or wife—well, mainly husbands and boyfriends here, since it is mostly women who wear makeup—or your children or acquaintances saying, “Have you changed?”

Usually, people dislike that very much. The natural answer would be, “Of course I have changed. I had makeup on then; now I do not.” Given the idea of beauty that is instilled everywhere, if someone uses the right makeup properly, it will obviously make their appearance more even and make them more beautiful within that basic social, psychophysical framework. Obviously. So asking that question is pointless. But who, when perceiving another person, wants to see them naturally and completely, in their full scope? This is only a small example. There is an enormous amount hidden in a person besides where they applied makeup.

People live behind many masks and in many states. Society lives in the roles of husband and wife; people live as “the wife.” A person plays the role of wife or husband, a particular role. Sometimes I say something during a conflict at home, and my wife says, “Stop acting like the boss. Behave that way at work.” I say, “But this is simply how I am. What does work have to do with it?” It is easy to shift the focus. She is saying, “Please go back to the role I like, the place where I like you.” This concerns men and women, absolutely everyone. On one side is how much you alter yourself and present yourself differently in society, constantly constructing another version of yourself.

On the other side is how much you do not want to get to know the other person. When we discuss constructing a different self, we encounter something interesting. To stop pretending to be someone, you first have to understand who you actually are. The problem is that people today do not know themselves. They are already some constructed, reconstructed structure of ego and personality. They do not understand the mass of masks and states they carry. They do not perceive their spiritual being or which energies are their own and which belong to others. With appearance, I can at least tell whether I am wearing makeup or a jacket, or how long my hair is.

I can remember getting a haircut two weeks or a month ago. There are things I can at least perceive, such as whether I brushed my teeth. But what can I perceive in terms of energy? Is this energy mine? When did I put it on? Can I leave it in the closet, or can I not? Even if we start drawing parallels—and believe me, the spiritual world is far more fundamental and expansive than any physical reality or material world—can I begin perceiving it through those parallels? Did I simply take this energy with me today? Did I take it consciously or unconsciously? Am I doing this authentically or not? It would be like a woman having makeup applied at night through some process, without knowing what she actually looks like.

She would be sure that the blue stripes here are her skin color, her own structure. Or that this brightness or these circles drawn here are natural reality. Then it is all washed off and she is shown, “No, here is another natural reality, the completely real one, what is actually there.” There are an incredible number of practices, techniques, approaches, and teachings about working with different psychophysical blocks, masks, structures in the face, and so on.

I think there are many examples showing a person with one face and, thirty seconds later, a completely different one, as though their whole face had relaxed, without any external intervention. Different states can have very different effects. So that thought I had this morning, about how we perceive one another with and without makeup, is something to consider. A woman might ask herself, “If I put on makeup, do I understand that people see me differently?” Or, more generally, how natural am I in the way I live, even in what I wear?

Am I playing along with the society shaping things around me, or am I naturally being who I really am? I live in Silicon Valley. There are many sharp dividing lines in the social world here. Extremely wealthy companies worth four or five trillion dollars are here, the richest companies. At the same time, there are often very old shops, services, restaurants, or a bench that has stood in the same place for sixty years. Very different worlds coexist. Many people make a great deal of the idea that clothing does not matter.

“Look at how rich people dress, what they wear.” I read a post about a private community in the technology world that has been meeting for forty years. Different people are invited; you cannot get in except by invitation. Journalists have practically no access. Someone compared the gathering with Davos: unlike Davos, where everyone comes in ties and jackets, this is a different kind of meeting. People arrive in flip-flops, slides, shorts, and so on. I still would not go to such a meeting in shorts, because I do not go anywhere in shorts. I wear them to go downstairs at a hotel and jump in the pool, or to a pool at home or anywhere else. I wear shorts into town one time in a thousand.

Of course I can wear them, perhaps one time in five hundred, but it is rare. Comments like that limit people's perception. Imagine I did that and someone photographed me and said, “He is just some fool trying to stand out and show he is different.” No, I simply have energies flowing in me through which I behave naturally, as myself. If they establish a dress code that specifically requires flip-flops, of course I will wear them. But there has to be a dress code. Something like that happened to me in business, and I think it says a great deal about the business environment. We had a deal involving Megaplan and 1C, when I was Megaplan's CEO.

The deal went through, and the board of directors met. There was Boris Georgievich Nuraliev, the head of 1C; people from Baring Vostok Capital, a large investment fund in Russia—I do not know, it probably still exists—and people from the other fund that was selling its stake. That was Ulvi Kasimov's fund, which held a stake in Megaplan and was selling it. Megaplan's senior management was there too. There were tables, one with food, caviar and sandwiches with caviar. A sort of country-bumpkin chic. It all took place in 1C's office, which looked like an office from the 1990s.

That is how it looked in those days, although it was already 2012. Boris Georgievich Nuraliev came in wearing sandals. I do not think he was wearing shorts, but he had sandals and some kind of T-shirt. Everyone else was sitting in suits and jackets. He said, “One new thing I would like…” Everyone sat down at the table. That day, they were approving a document describing how the board would operate. One clause required a dress code. He said, “The first thing I want to strike out is this clause about the dress code.” It is a rule people can choose to accept or not. He did not want to play some other role.

When other people describe this as something extremely positive or extremely negative, they are not looking at the whole picture. Why does someone perceive the world in a way that means they cannot put on a jacket? What is going on in them that they cannot wear a nice suit or understand the differences in its cut or fabric? Why can they not do that? The question is why that energy does not arise in them. It is about understanding and perceiving that person, the energy inside them, rather than labeling a woman sitting in a restaurant in a cap as someone who cannot take care of herself and did not wash her hair that morning.

Someone else would certainly never wear a cap that way. Why is that? What state is the person in, and what energies are moving in them? Or perhaps it was simply their style that day and has nothing to do with the presence or absence of a particular energy. How do you relate to the outward appearance of your physical body? Someone will ask, “Alexander, in terms of a person's energetic development, their movement toward sunlight and an understanding of life, do you think it matters whether they know how to take care of their appearance? Whether they have an aptitude for design or mathematics?” It really does not matter.

It is not a measure of how high or low a person is in terms of the presence of particular energies or the development of their spiritual system or spiritual bodies. But their ability to describe it and understand which energies are or are not present in them is a useful indication of their awareness. I consciously know that I am not a woman. That does not make me a better or worse person. Agree, Olya? People want to be everything. You want to be men and women at the same time, a child and an adult at the same time. You want to be everything simultaneously, to sleep and run at the same time. A person wants to be everything at once.

People in the modern era, over the past hundred and fifty years or so, have this structure of the soul and this degree of development of the ego, ego-computer systems, and various dark forces. They want to be everything at once. But in fact, you are a man or a woman. That settles the argument. If you lack a particular state or energy—for example, the ability to properly feel what an artist conveyed in a painting, to see that energy of that world—there is nothing terrible about that. But you need to accept calmly that another person feels something you do not, can do something you cannot. Do not immediately say, “Well, he is good at programming, but this other person is good at drawing.” Drop those comparisons, because that person might be good at programming, drawing, music, parenting, social life, and a whole lot more.

But she is not a man; she is a woman, for example. Or she is not the president and is not a politician. Again, this is all relative in terms of the range and development of energies. You also need to know whether it is developed energy or simply circumstances. Circumstances exist, and that is important. If someone thinks having a billion dollars in their account rather than a million necessarily means they are developed and have particular energies, that is a big question. It may be circumstances unrelated to their spiritual system or its development. Of course, every person's task is to broaden their perception as they get to know other people.

To expand perception purposefully and tirelessly, every day. You can expand your perception of others when you expand your understanding and perception of the world as a whole. Be clear about this: if you take certain pills because a doctor told you to, and do not want to read, study, or learn anything about them, you need to know that this is a black box to you. There is a truth about what is inside it. If someone else wants to understand it, do not argue that there is no need, that it is complicated, or say, “I live a peaceful life, so I do not want to investigate this.” A peaceful life does not mean doing less to learn things. Nor does it mean endless activity, rereading every book or watching every YouTube or TikTok video.

That is not where peace in life lies. If a person does not perceive themselves or study themselves, the world, the spiritual world, and real spaces, it is very hard to say that they will engage with other people and perceive them easily. Of course, they may see some areas in others quite deeply and strongly. But the first steps—and not just the first steps, but throughout life—must still involve studying yourself, your own movement, and observing what is happening around you.

That comes first. It is a fundamentally important task. It might seem that when someone has a fairly serious degree of expanded perception, studying other people becomes their proper task and goal. In reality, that is a social, egoistic construct. You should not even think that way, and certainly should not make it your first priority.