Who really knows anyone?
As the warrior-poet Shan Yu said, “Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano’s edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man.”
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I frequently greet people I think I probably know by making a joke at my own expense regarding being facial blind.
Once I realized that my brain actually has legit issues recognizing people using facial cues, and that the people I do recognize, I’m recognizing by hair style, or subconscious identifiers such as clothing style, posture, gait, often combined with their voice… Then things got a lot easier.
Sometimes people laugh and say “Yes, you warned me you wouldn’t recognize me next time.” In other cases, I just broke the ice with a stranger. My partner and close friends help me by greeting people by name in front of me, or if they feel like a chance to publicly rib me a little, reintroduce people I’ve met multiple times. It makes me easy for everyone else to remember…
On the other hand, I might be one of a very few people who is more likely to recognize returning customers because of the brooch on their winter coat.
I’ve confused at least one of my favourite regular customers when I made no attempt to chat with them; they were wearing a long sleeve shirt and none of their tattoos were visible. I was all business until the asked about a prior conversation.
Then there was the time I was at a temp job, and a strange man 20 years my senior was very insistent that since it was raining, it would be no problem for him to give me, and my bike, a ride home. I refused, repeatedly. Two weeks later I was chatting to one of my tenants, and she mentioned that it was really no trouble for her husband to give me a ride home from work… So that’s why this guy acted like he knew where I lived. We’d lived across the hall for 2 years and that couple were some of my nicest, and chattiest, tenants. I happily took him up on the offer a few times after that.
Prosopagnosia, aka facial blindness, is when the inability to recognize faces is more than kinda awkward, it’s a challenge. It comes in various forms and degrees of severity, but if you regularly can’t tell characters apart in movies, recognize your current coworkers at the grocery store, or have trouble recognizing friends or loved ones if they change hair styles, this could be enlightening:
https://prosopagnosiaresearch.org/index/information
https://www.faceblind.org/research/
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That - whoever you are - is a very good question! XD
That’s an interesting meditation, but I mostly disagree with it. When one’s life is at risk over a volcano, you usually don’t meet them - you meet their survival instinct, which is essentially a pre-programmed set of behaviors. The actual personality, so much as anybody can be said to have one, is what is left once both deep instincts and ephemeral desires are stripped away. But that is precisely the “self” which most avoid cultivating. The same instincts to preserve the body also work to preserve the ego. This makes self-realization seem like an existential crisis. And with the ego dissolved, differences between selves, between self and other, seem to be fluid.
So, socially, the question then is do we try to meet and connect with each other’s indescribable, almost alien selves? Or only our artificial self-constructed personae - our limited “individual identities”?
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“Hey, weren’t you the driver on the Western Avenue job?”
Good Grief!
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While I appreciate your pedantry, it can be either.
I was going along with the
Not sociable or wanting the company of others.
definition (as many of us would likely assume) as opposed to the “sociopath” one.
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I’d just say it’s sadistic crap legitimized by florid prose.
And also just a quote from a TV show.
That definition is rarely used in Britain, although if you are unsocial then saying you are antisocial wound be a very effective way of getting people to leave you alone.
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But, but, I’m in America and I speak American.
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