You Are Central to Your Experience, Not to Everyone Else

Every person experiences life from the center of one private world.

I see through my eyes. I hear my thoughts. My memories arrive with more detail than anyone else’s. My worries feel close because they are happening inside the only mind I can directly access.

That creates a predictable distortion.

Because I am central to my experience, I can begin to feel central to events that have very little to do with me.

A message goes unanswered and I search my own behavior for the cause.

A colleague looks distant and I wonder whether I offended them.

Someone leaves a room quietly and I begin constructing a story in which I am part of the explanation.

Sometimes I am.

Often I am not.

This is not only vanity. It is a limitation of perspective.

I have enormous amounts of information about my own intentions and almost none about the private circumstances of the stranger, friend, colleague, or family member in front of me.

So the mind explains missing information with the most available character: itself.

My own story is the easiest one for me to consult. That availability does not make it the best explanation for what someone else is doing.

The goal is not to make myself insignificant.

It is to distinguish being central to my experience from being central to the situation.

Other people are carrying entire stories that continue when I leave the room.

The person who did not answer may be tired, distracted, worried, busy, ill, in love, grieving, or simply uninterested in the conversation. Most of those possibilities contain no role for me at all.

Remembering this reduces two opposite errors.

The first is self-importance: assuming other people’s behavior is constantly about us.

The second is self-consciousness: assuming other people are constantly evaluating us.

Both place the self at the center.

In reality, most people are occupied with the same thing I am occupied with, their own unfinished life.

I find that liberating.

I can take responsibility when evidence points toward me without volunteering myself as the cause of every silence, mood, delay, or awkward moment.

Other people are not supporting characters in my story.

And I am not automatically a major character in theirs.