The Story

Mon Feb 16 2026

Every person has a story. A backpack full of artefacts, mementos and seemingly random keepsakes from their journey through life. That person in the train opposite you, with their weird hairstyle and the facemask and unruly hair.

The old lady in the queue at the supermarket, very slowly counting out her coins, holding up the entire line.

The seemingly prudish middle-aged woman waiting in line to pay her accounts at the bank, not really looking at anyone specifically, consciously not making eye contact with anyone around her.

The teenage boy staring out the window of the bus while the world fleets by, with his scuffed shoes and his fingernails bitten down to where there is no nail anymore for his teeth to grip onto, fidgeting almost obsessively with his fingers, waiting for his stop.

Everyone has a story. Everyone. And sitting there, looking at these people, the only story you can make is one founded in your own lived experience of this world. Your own associations to specific displays of humanity, your own biases coded into you since childhood, your own understandings of events, already filtered by a reality you never really chose.

And most of those stories we make up about people are utterly wrong. Even if we get some of the facts right, we don’t have the context and that changes everything. And reacting into people’s reality thinking that you know who they are almost never goes well. We cannot really meet people where they’re at, because where we think they’re at is inaccurate, uninformed and, frankly, risks arrogance, insistence and conceit.

That guy in the bus, sitting next to you right at the back, with the large black bomber-jacket? The one with the jet black hair, full of gel, combed backwards to look slick and neat, with the oversized silver chain hanging outside his shirt, and a matching ring that he keeps spinning around and around on his thumb? The one clenching his jaw as his gaze moves around the bus, looking but not seeing? He may seem like someone that will pick a fight just for the sake of it, that will headbutt someone that insults his mother. But that’s not necessarily the truth.

He grew up in a strict religious household, controlled by ethics he never chose for, by parents who never saw his internal world, or even cared to. He plays the guitar, late at night in his room, classical compositions from the olden days. He has posters of composers and great painters on his wall. He has books like “Lord of the Flies” and “To Kill A Mockingbird” on his bookshelf. His bed is always neatly made and there’s no dirty clothes on his floor. There is no Bible on his desk. But there is a book full of love letters he wrote to a girl he once loved, that has since died. And he doesn’t seem older than 19. Maybe 25. What a misunderstood soul.

There’s a rather big scar in his neck…looks like it was a gnarly wound. Wonder what happened. Hm. Maybe that’s not it. Maybe he grew up in an abusive household, subject to daily violence, victim to at least weekly beatings by his drunken father. Maybe his world is really ‘survival of the fittest’ and he fights his way through every day just to survive. To be tough enough to handle what is inevitably coming his way, either tonight, or tomorrow. He seems tense, and ready to pounce if he needs to. Yes. That has to be what it is, he is a fighter because he has to be, that is his normal, his world. The thug life, because it was never any other way.

Oh wait. There’s something else. He just took out his phone. A message from someone named Claire, with three pink hearts behind the name. A stolen glance reveals a single message, ‘i love you dad, good luck with your interview today’. What? What the fuck? He stands up, quite abruptly. And off he goes, off the bus, hitching his collar up as he walks speedily down the street in the opposite direction of where the bus is heading. And he’s gone.

That Moment

But we ‘know’ in that instant “who we’re dealing with”. Instinct. Reading the room. Paying attention. These things happen within seconds, even quicker sometimes. Most of the time we barely notice it. And as counter-intuitive as it is, we believe that we know, at least at a baseline.

Our own associations, interpretations, assumptions, validations, values, principles and experiences literally ‘build’ other people for us. And that in itself is magic. Our minds are unimaginably powerful prediction engines, constructing a baseline image of every person that we can interact with. The danger is not this invention, this projection. The danger is believing that it is at all true.

Because once you share that meal with bomber-jacket guy, every conceivable version created in your head is shattered completely, because you have actual information. And that information can replace the hologram in your head with something a little more solid, swapping out the invented pieces of the picture with something closer to the actual truth, in what at that point seems like high definition.

We cannot live without interpreting the world through our own translation of reality. It is just how we are.

How open are we to new information? How willing are really to replace our preconceptions with their non-narrative counterparts? Even if we do sit down with bomber-jacket guy, everything we learn there, in that moment is still subject to our own interpretation. He mentions his daughter’s school play, and we hear ‘devoted father.’ He describes losing his temper last week, and we hear ‘anger issues.’

The same words, filtered through different lenses, build completely different people. What he may explain as matter of fact may land as highly emotional to us. And that tints our mental image of him with that emotion, which we felt.

This is unavoidable. The issue is not that we misread people, grossly misread them most of the time. The issue is that we treat them according to our misreadings.

Perhaps we should let people surprise us before we decide who they are. Because they almost always will.

And if that is true for strangers, perhaps it is just as true for ourselves.