People often form erroneous conclusions about me, typically because some superficial manifestation of my traits correlates with some others in their experience. It's understandable, but frustrating.

This page is a stub, created on 2020-08-22 (last updated on 2021-05-03). Its contents are notes on the issues and angles I want to address about this topic.

Look-- I get it. I'm a weird guy, at least by the standard of what's prevalent in our culture. The intuition that people might have based on their experiences of which traits correlate with which others doesn't always work on me.

In a way, it's maddening, because I think of myself as being very consistent and rooting out compartmentalization wherever I find it. I develop traits and dispositions with thoughtful intent. Within the scope of things open to my influence/effort, there's very little that's accidental or a default based on being at the mercy of some environmental influence. I expect that consistency to make it really easy to understand me and to make me super predictable.

And yet, I find myself often feeling frustrated and defensive. It means that I have to be proactively defensive in that I have to pay extra attention to how things I say or do will land with people (and let me tell you, I'm far from perfect on this score, though I think I'm getting better with time). And it means that I end up getting reactively defensive when others assert their conclusions about me based on their inferences.

It's hard for me to fault others too much for it. At the end of the day, the human mind is an integrative mechanism, and it works based on heuristics and induction. It wouldn't be fair for me to expect people to know in advance that I'm an outlier that defies their models. But what I think is fair is for me to expect that people will exercise some amount of thoughtfulness and mindfulness and awareness about their cognitive and emotional processes, to think carefully about what their premises are and what kind of assumptions they're making in drawing conclusions about me, being willing to (re)evaluate based on the wealth of context I provide them.

Here's an inventory of some of the ways in which I'm commonly misunderstood:

Clearly, a lot of the conclusions that people draw are based on implicit assumptions. What's interesting to me about many of those assumptions is that they reflect traits or dispositions that are common in our culture...traits or dispositions that are begging for some work and growth. For example, to conclude that shirtlessness is a bid for attention depends on assuming something along the lines of "A person who lacks self-esteem will flaunt their accomplishments in order to solicit praise, to compensate for their feelings of unworthiness.". I have no doubt that that is operative for a great many people who are shirtless "all the time". And, frankly, that is something worth investing some effort into examining and working on.

I also wonder how much these assumptions are not merely reflective of inductive generalizations, but rather (or also) confessions of one's own traits. That kind of projection is certainly not a crime, and it's perfectly natural, but that too warrants a greater investment in mindfulness and careful thinking.