Don't Compare Your Inside to Other People's Outside

In a recent John Water's interview in the Guardian he is quoted as saying, "My policy is 'unless you know the full story, don't judge', and you never know the full story." He said this as a plea for tolerance, people are quick to feel superior to others when confronted with conspicuous difference. But I would expand this belief to the way we perceive others full stop. Don't judge other people's projected identities based on what you perceive those projected identities to mean based on your own perceptions, you may be, and most probably will be, very wrong.

When we go around comparing our inside feeling to other peoples outward appearance. What else can we do? We have no way of knowing what is happening in someones mind. I always tend to think other people are happier than they are, rationally I know they are not, and time and again people shock me with tiny revelations as to the real complexity of their inner, personal lives. But the myth persists. I have to keep telling myself not to judge my inside feelings against the illusory outsides of others.

I often feel confused about myself and my identity. I wonder whether I'm doing the right thing, living the right life. I wonder whether people like me, or secretly gossip when I leave a room, whether I'm intelligent enough to hold an opinion on anything, or whether I'm just a chancer or bore, a half baked ponderer. Everyone has problems with their relationships, with their sense of identity, with their jobs. But most people's outward face has a similar expression, mostly brave. We smile at each other and make small talk; whilst our inward dialogue is a mass of contradictory statements, negative and positive, banal and entertaining, paranoid and confident. 

We see a smiling couple and we assume that this simple outward appearance is all the information that we need. 'Look, they're happy. I wish I was that happy. Why am I not that happy?' But what people say, and especially how they look, is never the whole story. People talk themselves up, both to present a confident face to the world and also to prevent others from having to feel responsible for their problems. I am often amazed by how bad I am at judging other people's inner lives. I will always assume the best in others and the worst in myself.

What We Fail to Notice

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

R. D. Laing

Our life is not our life

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Julian Baggini: Is there a real you?

MasterChef, Stein, Foodies and the idea of quality food

If we set up a food taste scale, with one being soil and 100 being manna, a terrible custard might rank as taste 10; inedible as it tastes like dog sick and has mould on it.  An average custard would rank at 65, a work a day custard, custard is delicious anyway. A great custard would rank at 75, slightly more delicious, but only a slight difference from the average custard. Foodie-ism is the incredible bourgeois obsession with the minute taste differences between these slightly different variations of custard.  


Custard A has been made using rinsed Andalusian cream, this custard tastes mildly bland.  Custard B has been made with slightly too much Dominican sugar syrup,  this custard is middlingly plain. Custard C has exactly the right ingredients, in the right combination and quantities, for this particular custard loving judge's entirely subjective taste receptors. The judge is thus able to judge that C is definitely the best custard and, because his entirely subjective senses are thought of as being better at judging the taste of custard than yours or mine, we go along with his decision. 


Sometimes the judge's knowledge is so respected that he gets to bring out his own range of eggy custard tarts.  We eat the over priced tarts with the knowledge that they contain custard sanctioned by a nationally televised custard expert, and feel superior to the other plebeian tart eaters in that they don't have the custard knowledge that we have attained, by proxy, through imbibing the products endorsed, but not made by, the said expert.

Stein - Cold dead eyes

The king of these fuckers is Rick Stein.  A man with barely a sliver of humanity floating on a ocean of vacuity. You can tell Rick Stein is a monster by looking closely at his eyes.  Whenever he stops patronising people with his random inconsequential musings there is a kind of barely concealed anger that begins to creep its way in to his blank face.  An anger and a sadness.  He's constantly on the verge of being short with people.  Telling them what's what, setting the world to rights. Of course he is also famous for getting demonstratively angry at the standard of British cooking; over and over and over again. Episode after episode. Lionising "authentic peasant food" and belittling the lack of British "flair and imagination".  All we need is "authentic British ingredients, simply cooked".

I've got news for Stein and every other patronising cook that considers themselves to be a serious gastronomic ethnographer and an arbiter of British tastes. It's only fucking food.  It functions as a symbol of good taste only because people like you set apart the "good" and "bad", the "quality" and the "trash" with meaningless ad hoc associations.  "Hilariously" prawn cocktail (snigger) and black forest gateaux (snort) were the height of middle class taste in 1977, but we know better now.  Those foodstuffs were eaten by people who didn't understand food the way we do in the sophisticated 21st century.  The best food to eat is obviously LBISC (local British ingredients, simply cooked). 

MasterChef takes the concept of infinitesimally small differences between "good" and "bad" food to it's logical conclusion.  Hundreds and hundreds of slight variations on the same glossy, cloying ingredients, presented to elicit the deliberately pointed responses of two fat faced nobodies, one of whom only got the job because he can distinguish between different types of vegetables. After a while every plate looks the same.  But the opinions of the experts are always consistent in their banality.

Jonty Road: Her tart was delicious, the filling was perfect but the crust didn't have enough salt in it.  

Veg expert: That's the second time she's left an ingredient out that, in my opinion, should be in a meal. She's out of the competition.  

How much difference did that salt make?  We buy into the myth of gastronomic perfection.  That there exists somewhere an uber-tart. The tart that all other tarts that are created have to be measured against. But such a tart doesn't exist.  All tarts are measured against each other on a subjective internal bank of tart memories.  MasterChef is essentially a program about what Veg Man and Jonty Road like eating. It should be called Line Up to Please the Randomly Chosen Men that have something to do with Food.

Keith Floyd had the right idea. Show people a place, show them how to cook a food item, tell them it's easy to do and to enjoy it, eating the food with some delicious wine. End of story.  What's not good is patronisingly lecturing people on what they should be eating, constantly harking back to a non existent British peasant food culture and obsessing about what the average family (for average family read the working classes) cooks for their tea. Chicken nuggets exist and people really really like eating them, it may make you feel slightly queasy, but do you know what? Hard shit.  No matter how many times you call chicken nuggets tasteless cardboard processed rubbish, it won't change the fact that their popularity kind of proves that they taste nice and lots of people prefer eating them to food that you consider to be more worthwhile.

Subjective Reality: Where is the real New York?

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are" Anais Nin .

"The map is not the territory" Alfred Korzybski.

For months before I visit a new place, I hold within me a sense of what the place will be like like. I imagine what the people will be like and what sights, sounds and smells that I will experience when I arrive. If I visit a new city I might study maps of the road layouts around the hotel where I am going to be staying, watch video reportage from it's streets and imagine the different types of food I will eat. For all of my in depth research, these pre-experience activities can never come close to describing the experience of actually being in the place, it is never the same.  In one hour in New York you will know as much about the "New Yorkness" of New York than you could in a lifetime of study.  I desperately wanted to visit New York when I was a teenager.  The city as it existed in my mind was constructed from a hugely detailed database of images and sounds, friends descriptions, food tastes, films, graphic art, television shows and a hundred other secondary sources.  But a construct is all that it was, and such is all pre-experience understanding in life.  

But which is more real, the visceral sense experience of being alive in New York at that particular minute? Or the extensive knowledge of history and culture that a lifetime of learning about a place can bring? Are they as real as each other?  Is my experience of standing on a New York street any more real that my ad-hoc collection of a priori New York knowledge? I say this because no matter how many times I am waiting to travel, no matter how much i think I know what to expect, experiencing a place first hand has always blown my previous perceptions out of the water. I will always end up saying to myself, "This place is nothing like I expected it to be."

Of course an obvious answer is to say that in order to "know", or to have more authentic understanding of a place or thing it is always better to have both prior knowledge and also direct experience of it.  The trouble with this answer for me is that even though i have now been to New York a number of times, the thing that reminds me of the place the most, that gives me the Proustian rush of a whole body memory of New Yorkness, is listening to this piece of music, Angela by Bob James.  





I heard this song every week whilst growing up in Coventry, years before I ever went to the States, and yet listening to it reminds me of the New York I visited 25 years later.  The theme from Taxi is as much a part of my experience of New York as central park zoo and the smell of side-walk hot dogs. I consciously know that this facet of my New York knowledge relates to a vision of the place that is romanticised and created entirely for TV, but my subconscious doesn't care, it treats the experience of primary source material and secondary fictional source material as being of equal value; In fact it selects the secondary material as being more representative of the thing itself!

Unravelling the spaghetti-like network of thoughts that one has about where our understanding of any particular thing, idea or moral value comes from is practically impossible.  Our views are made up of such a huge web of learning, experience and myth that the best we can hope to do is have an inkling of the stereotypes and predudices that we hold in our minds.    But we don't need to understand where our prejudices and beliefs come from in absolute detail, we only need to know that our views are pretty likely to be best guess assumptions based on a limited number of the total facts available to us at any particular time.  Accept that some of the feelings and beliefs that you hold dear may very well be based on shaky foundations and whenever you feel yourself drifting into a certaintist position think of Ben Goldacre's brilliant phrase and tell yourself "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that". Taking an interest in this difficult area of self knowledge and identity forces us to ask some very tricky questions about who we are and exactly what it is that we believe to be true.  What is quality? What is moral? What tastes nice? Which music is the best? Is TV bad for kids? What is the best way to bring up my children? Is Israel justified in its policy towards Gaza? Does Homoeopathy work? What is truth?

I believe that Robert Anton Wilson had a sensible idea.  He described himself as a "model agnostic" and believed that one should never regard "one model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial."  He also said, in Cosmic Trigger, that "belief is the death of intelligence".  Sage advice I think.

Depression, self perception and subjective reality

When I was a teenager, I would sometimes feel when I woke up in the morning that someone had opened my skull and blanketed my brain with a thick layer of cotton wool. This  brain fog felt like I was peering out of my own eyes at a world that, although I definitely knew I had seen before, I could not quite remember where.  I now know that this experience has a name, depersonalization disorder, but at the time I had no idea what the hell was going on.  I experienced depersonalization disorder on and off for a couple of years.  It mostly stayed for an hour or two but when I was about 15 the feeling came and stayed with me for about a week.  It felt a little like the opposite of deja vu. I knew everyone's names, and recognized their faces, but something intangible was missing, as if the world had been replaced overnight by an exact copy of the world that had  existed the day before.  I knew that I had seen the objects, places and people that made up my life before, but they elicited in my brain the wrong kind of responses; as if a particular part of me was seeing them for the first time.  These feelings were the first time my perception of reality, and my perception of what it was that made "me", was altered.

In my experience depression is primarily a disorder of perception.  We can live our whole lives without asking basic questions of ourselves, without beginning to perceive and challenge the constructs and fixed modes of thinking that make up our personalities.  Understanding that our opinions are as much a product of our  upbringing, the random accidents of our birth, our geographical location, our health, our family wealth etc. as of our continued conscious engagement with the world.  Depression, very quickly, destroys any illusion that your "PERSONALITY” is something that lives in your head, a true reflection of "you".  It does this by taking away the "who" of you very quickly indeed.  Your personality is voided; removed.  It seems like you have to start again from scratch.  Now although this void is an horrendous experience in one very important way I found it enlightening.  When you sink down into the rabbit hole the blinkers are off. Your perception is flipped.  This new mode of perception is of course as much a construct as that which it replaced, but the important thing is the fact that you have experienced two separate personality states.  You have stepped out of the box. When I was severely depressed I no longer remembered who I was before the slow slide downward.  I was a essentially a different person.

Nothing has been the same since this experience.   After my first, and only, major depressive episode in my teens, I lived in constant fear of that person coming back. I did not fear being "unhappy", but of feeling like, and to all intents and purposes being, a completely different person; of being haunted by something that I could not control, that destroyed the "me" and replaced it with a different, darker, "me".  When I was depressed I knew that things seemed profoundly different to the way they were before the depressive event, but my memories of who I was then were no longer accessible. To ask me to recall being "happy" was like asking me to recall what it might be like for someone else to be happy. I knew what happy meant, I could imagine it, I could give it substance through associated signs, a couple hand in hand in a corn field, a smiling father, a happy baby etc but the essence of what was signified by "happy" was completely gone.

This is where my struggle with "who" I am comes from; my current interest in perception, identity and involuntary memory and my on going distrust of my instincts and decision making capabilities.  I struggle with whether my words, and opinions, have any real meaning or weight.  I can never say for certain whether that which I proclaim to be true is really true, or simply what I believe at any given moment in time. I am swayed Daily by the Mail and The Guardian. I think one thing that depression has taught me is an awareness of the fragile nature of ideological positions and the ease at which people can fool themselves into thinking that their opinions are "common sense".  How quickly the unusual becomes normality in society; and the previously normal becomes sidelined and abnormal. Throughout our lives we encounter people who don't ever seem to have begun to truly engage with this concept.  The world is one way, their perception is correct, that is how it is.  The Certaintists.

Many people lack any empathy to perceive that other people are not just carbon copies ejected from the same mould but individuals with their own unique inner lives. Or the imagination to see that other people may  see the world entirely differently from themselves. Not just in that they prefer cricket to football or Tory to Labour, but in profound ways that defy description. That they themselves, and our current consensus reality, is in a constant state of change.

When I'm not in a down phase I can skip past negative thoughts as if they are barely there at all, but when I feel low they trip me up time and time again.  It is at these moments that the difference between my low and high states becomes most clear to me.  I cannot let the negative thoughts go.  I have no tools for doing so.  What is effortless for the up me is impossible for the down me and the gulf between the two personalities that exist within me seems immeasurably distant. One side cannot offer solace or help to the other because when one personality appears, the other is entirely subsumed.  My mind changes the world.

When a depressive episode begins to recede it sometimes feels like my knowledge of reality, or the un-knowable, subjective  nature of reality, is becoming less real and more blurred. I feel that my brief insight into "the truth" such as it is, is being de-realized and that somehow I am retreating back into the forest.  In that forest lies the entirely illusory comfort blanket of my un-depressed mind.  This is perhaps the reason behind the great irony of how the leaden paralysis of depression can inspire great art and provoke radical thought. Because along with all of the turbulence and misery can also come a new perception and a clarity of thought that can provide a deeper understanding of the subjective quality of conscious experience and give sufferers a glimpse of the world through another's eyes.

Our perspective on the past as we get older

Some people say that time appears to move faster as we get older because of the percentage of our life that we have lived. If you are a one year old, the  amount of time till your next birthday is the length of time you have already been alive, literally a lifetime in your perception.  If you are ninety nine the distance to your next birthday is just 1% of the time you have spent on Earth. This seems a feasible explanation to me.

Another thing, perhaps related to this, that I have noticed as I get older is the changes in my perception of the past.  When I first became aware of trends in fashion and music in the 1980's the fashions of just 4 years previously seemed incredibly, immeasurably outdated.  And the faces that I saw beaming at me from 50's and 60's news reels and ancient photographs and TV shows seemed to have not one thing in common with my existence. They were an alien race of people from a different world. I could not imagine they were like me, with the same feelings.  The same wants and needs. I looked at their odd clothes and the strange way they held themselves for photographs. I listened to the odd way they talked to each other on camera and i saw nothing that was like me or those I knew.  We had nothing in common.  The same went for "old" people.

But now, with half a lifetime's perspective on change, and just how similar things can be over time, I feel  an unexpected empathy with images of past generations.  Images of the 60's and 50's now have different connotations.  The clothes are unimportant, the music is unimportant, the style of deportment or language is unimportant. I see more similarities than differences.  The past contracts and rushes to meet me and 40 years seems like no time at all to be alive.

Are changes in fashion and music less great these days? Are trends gently sliding into each other more subtly than before or am i just too old now to perceive how different things are from five years ago? Are the trends and fashions of 2010 THAT different from 15 years ago? How can I really know?

Look at the two men in this image from the Cheers intro sequence. How different are they from the usual idea of the stiff faced Edwardian photography subject? They seem as real and as close to me now as anyone from 2010. Arrogantly posing, showing off for the camera. Where are these two ghosts now?