Today is one of the most important lessons I have learned, at least when it comes to how to handle myself and how to see other people.
Difficulty is subjective, not objective.
Just to review, a concepts objective if it's true or false regardless of who believes it, talks about it, experiences it, etc. The existence of the Sun is objective, it either exists or doesn't regardless of what you or I think. A concept is subjective if it changes from person to person. Things like opinions and personal experiences tend to be subjective. For example, what a person's favorite flavor of ice cream might be is subjective, because it changes depending on the subject of that sentence (person).
When I say difficulty is subjective, I'm talking about severity. The existence of difficulty is generally objective, but how one experiences it changes from person to person, and even when looking at the experiences of one person, it changes over time. What is easy for one person may be very difficult for another person, and what was easy once is not easy now. We've all run across these situations, but we rarely take the idea that difficulty is subjective to its natural conclusion.
If difficulty is subjective, then any experience that has any level of difficulty may be vastly different from person to person, or from time to time. One great example of this is those with anxiety disorders often will be able to recite at least one instance where a very simple, easy task was so difficult that they still failed it, and it felt like everything was coming to an end. I'm speaking from personal experience when I say that spilling just a little water can be the final straw in an anxiety attack and leave you out of commission for days if you're dealing with an anxiety disorder or mood disorder.
Since we know that experiences can be vastly different based on the subjective nature of difficulty, we naturally ask the question as to whether we can perceive the difficulty, so we can act accordingly. For our own situations, yes, we're generally able to understand how difficult something is for us. For others, however, it's not possible to simply see or measure the difficulty. Difficulty isn't really quantifiable, it can't be measured objectively, only aspects that can increase or decrease the difficulty. In short, no, we can't perceive the difficulty of what others are going through.
That's a key takeaway here: you can never fully know how difficult a situation is for another person. You can sometimes guess, or even be told and therefore understand better, but there's something missing in how we perceive difficulty. Since we can't really compare it to our own concept of difficulty, we're never going to quite get it right. Since we cannot know how difficult something is for someone, aside from situations that require it, judgment of others in regards to how they handle the difficulty of a situation is ill-advised at best.
I run by a rule of thumb every day, and although I have failed to live up to it multiple times, it's proven to be helpful for both my own sanity and in defining how I interact with others. That rule of thumb is as follows:
For your average person, unless they prove otherwise, they're generally doing their best. Some days, their best doesn't look great, but they're still putting forth the effort.
I didn't fully understand how to apply this until I ended up psychologically disabled. The long and short of it is that for almost everything, the difficulty is exponentially higher for me now than it was before my decline, and for many things that almost anyone can, and should, do daily, I can't. I can't hold down a job, I can't maintain even contract employment, I can't even control my sleep schedule. I lacked the experience before to fully understand how much one's best can be limited. My best on any given day looks like shit compared to my best from several years ago, even on my best days.
Now, take this rule of thumb with a grain of salt. It works well for me because it reminds me to treat other people with basic respect until they prove they don't deserve it, and to give people the basic benefit of the doubt. I've found if you apply it to most people you interact with, those you'll not likely interact with again or who's interactions are limited, you get along much better. Sometimes people make bad decisions in traffic that irk me, but if I remember that maybe something else is going on that I just don't get, I can take a breath and let it go, rather than seething for hours. Sometimes people put their desires before my needs, but they likely don't understand what my needs are, so I can accept that they're acting not out of sheer malice, but simple ego-centrism, a trait that I have to be aware of constantly in my own reactions. For every interaction that's small, it doesn't really cost me anything significant to grand the other people involved the benefit of the doubt, to treat them as if they're trying their hardest, but it makes the burden of that interaction much lighter in my mind. For interactions with people I've known for a long time, like coworkers (back when I was working), family members, friends, and other loved ones, giving them that simple benefit of the doubt often helps me learn to control my own impulses without getting upset, making my reactions more reasonable, and my day a little easier. But I can't say I have objective evidence for those claims, they're just extensions of the reasoning I put into the original conclusion that we shouldn't judge others too harshly without knowing all the facts. Try it out, see if it helps you feel better throughout the day.
Alright, that's enough on this topic. As I've said before, if you've been following along I'll "see" you in the next post, and have a great day! Goodbye!
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