Why Do People Seem So “Weird”?
Do you really know them?
You’ve all heard the John Donne phrase, “No man is an island.” A friend of mine disputes this. He asserts the contrary: “Everyone is an island.” What does he mean?
Our inquiry here has two starting points:
(1) We (in the West, anyway***) are existentially isolated persons — even if we are married, have children, are gainfully employed, in leadership positions, involved in our communities, and so on.
(2) As persons our experiences of the world are both unique and limited: all that any one of us has seen, heard, lived through, read, studied, learned, is an infinitesimally tiny fraction of what’s out there.
The first just says that no one is inside another person’s head or living another’s experiences.
The second: we probably don’t know as much as we think we do, especially about other people and what might be going on in their lives.
All that we know is what they reveal, verbally or nonverbally, or what their physical appearance tells us. That will vary from case to case. It will give us clues. We’ll learn what group the person belongs to, and perhaps what lifestyle they identify with. But not much more about what’s going on inside.
