On Understanding
“No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This wasn’t some random loner, but a social German poet who was surrounded by friends on his deathbed. If someone this established still feels this way, it’s only natural to feel this way in our own lives. I know I talked about this before, but in this post I want to talk about one solution to this.
If you think about people as vectors, it puts things in perspective for me. If one dimension represents how much they like dogs, another represents their willingness to change, etc. we end up with an incredibly high dimensional vector. Now given a new person, even though they aren’t completely random from each other, how likely is it that 70%+ of the dimensions are within some tolerance?
The point I’m getting at is it’s incredibly unrealistic to think that you can meet someone that is that much of a match to you, solely due to how little people you get the chance to meet. However, the cool thing of being in this time in society is we have access to generations of information at our fingertips. Who cares if Todd from class doesn’t share your view on an ideal life, since turns out some ancient Chinese poet has just the poem for you! Maybe friends don’t understand struggles you go through, a potential new favorite artist may have encapsulated their pain in a song that makes you feel less alone. You can think about it as either sad, or as empowering: but you aren’t alone as long as you have access to all the work of humanity. I guarantee you someone out there has felt the same things you’ve felt, and documented it in some beautiful way for a person like you to discover.