I've written here and here about the seemingly very human inability to empathize, to put oneself in another's shoes and see or experience the world from his or her point of view. We seem to easily forget the world in our own heads is not the world as others see it.
I had a little dopey -- but real-world -- epiphany about this earlier today. Dopey because it's the kind of thing we all intuitively know but don't realize, or just forget. I prepared to take a photo of my face with my iPhone -- I made sure the lighting was okay, I sat up straight, tried not to scowl and, it seemed to me I looked fairly decent on the screen, at least to my overly self-critical eyes. So I clicked. But when I called up the photo I just took from the phone's photo album I looked terrible, completely different.
How could this be? I'd just seen myself on-screen and I looked fine. But after taking the picture, I looked different. Had the act of pressing a button changed how I looked? Impossible. Was I imagining things? Not exactly.
Then it hit me. If you have in iPhone, try this right now. Turn on the camera and look at yourself, in other words the live image of you on the screen. You'll notice that it's a mirror image of yourself. In fact, it's exactly how you look in the mirror. Now take a photo of yourself and pull it up. It's no longer the same mirror image from a moment ago; it's a photo of you from the iPhone's perspective, from another person's perspective.
In other words, the first image you saw (or me screencapped on the left above) was you the way you're used to seeing yourself anytime you look in the mirror. The photographed image of you (the image of me on the right) is not the same image, it's how you look to other people. This seeming no brainer jarringly revealed to me why I hate photos of myself -- in my world, most of the time, I see a reflection of myself, and when I'm not focused on the bags under my eyes or the wrinkles, I like that me. The photo version of me is not the me I'm used to seeing, but perhaps more unsettling, I realize it is how others see me. Every day.
Another good example of this are voice recordings. We all hate when we hear our voices played back but, like it or not, that's actually a more faithful representation of how we really sound to others. How we sound to ourselves when we're speaking is probably distorted by the fact our ears are picking up the sound of our voices from outside and inside our heads.
All this to say, unless you sometimes make a point of actively stepping out of your point of view, your frame of reference, and into someone else's, you may really never quite appreciate how things truly are. It can be a humbling experience.
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