Understanding yourself is an easy task, much easier than understanding another person, or other beings – animals, artificial intelligent entities etc.
Not so, there are times you cannot control your emotion. As your physical self relates to the physical world around you, as you process information internal and external to you, you might react much less than what you expected of yourself.
You took a second glance at the fruit seller when he did not wait for the weighing machine to settle and told you the price, seemingly rounded up. You paid anyway thinking it’s much less fuss doing so, over what seems like a 2% “instant inflation”. You can’t always reason why you tend to go back to this stall even at times price can be higher, quality of product is not always the best; but probably because usually there’s a ‘good feel’ with people chatting in friendly terms. You don’t feel your physical presence there makes yourself feel too uneasy, nor they about you, nor your presence makes them uneasy, nor they to you. Social status relevant but it’s the ambiguity therein, of which you could contribute to in the way you cloth yourself, that could make this social engineering a less burdensome task.
Compared that to an occasion when a guy came to my car at a parking area in a train station, I was alone at the driving seat, and he showed his upper arm tattoo to me. The tattoo is small, showing Chinese characters that when I realised it was a rude message, he had already walked away.
I wasn’t able to then capture his emotional intent. I reacted by not reacting. He might not realize the exact language script (the fact it was the right way up is a consolation, but then he might not know that), nor the fact that it meant to convey a rude message.
What is slightly astonishing is that the guy wandered around the front of the train station, which is right in my line of sight and less than 5 metres away at the furthest point, for a few minutes, appearing to look for something or wait for someone to arrive at the station.
I wasn’t able to then capture his emotional intent. I reacted by not reacting. He might not realize the exact language script (the fact it was the right way up is a consolation, but then he might not know that), nor the fact that it meant to convey a rude message.
I wasn’t able to then capture his emotional intent. I reacted by not reacting. He might not realize the exact language script (the fact it was the right way up is a consolation, but then he might not know that), nor the fact that it meant to convey a rude message.
If he had intended to communicate a rude message to me, doing that in very close proximity so that he made sure I could read the tattoo writing, much closer than uttering or acting out a rude message which one can do even over say 10 metres, and then staying in the area for another few minutes, is a rather bad plan. He had to bear my grudge. It’s mysterious why he acted on something to cause another person to fume, and then immediately stay in close proximity thinking the person had fumed but also not fumed. Don’t you think it’s bizarre?
It’s out of character to show a tattoo to me to say, for example, ‘have a good day’. It’s extremely rare to find vehicles that convey rude (even otherwise) message (e.g. “you are over speed limit”, “turn off your bass” etc.) to drivers at close proximity. It’s highly unpredictable how other drivers will react. There is too much uncertainty and variety in the way people drive, and therefore the same kind of uncertainty with the intended or unintended but certainly perceived intention, to match up with the message your bear on your car.
- In the scenario of driving, you will always find “blind spots”. You are at a blind spot to another driver, and vice versa.
- Many drivers resort to hooting at every possible moment.
- But it’s impossible to tell whether the hoot is to convey information, appreciation or warning.
- Any gesture from the driver remains in the body of the vehicle.
Did the tattoo guy blind spott himself on another person’s emotional capacity?
There’s certainly a case of he wanted me to react one way (to fume) on one occasion, and then another way (being indifferent) on the second occasion. Since the body of my car bore no “message”, perhaps the size, colour or general condition of cleanliness cause him to react in a particular manner where he just happened to have what he thought to be an appropriate message tattooed on his arm to show to me, literally at the driver window.
And then, obviously, the colour, since his is different to mine, and vice versa, perhaps he took it that my presence there is in itself an impetus for his action. He could not see me apart from my head and shoulder; I could see his full body. Apart from a very effective weapon he can executed at a distance (if he had a weapon – I didn’t see any, so this is figurative speech), I don’t think at that moment in time he had thought that if this resulted in a close encounter of the physical kind there would very likely to be one out of two who claimed it unfair, the one who lost. But the point is he didn’t think it through, or didn’t think it more than to cause another person to fume, not what could happen beyond that.
