Choosing to be attentive to others takes the sting out of frustrating everyday experiences.
Imagine you’re sitting in your car at an intersection. You’re late for work and the traffic is hell today. Then, just as the light turns green, another car suddenly dashes in front of you and cuts you off. How do you react? Chances are, you’re going to focus on your own experience – in this case, the inconvenience caused by someone else’s reckless selfishness. But say you learned that the other driver was rushing their injured child to the hospital – you’d probably look at the situation differently, right?
In most cases, it’s impossible to know what really motivates other people’s actions, but considering the possibilities can improve your experience of the world.
The key message here is: Choosing to be attentive to others takes the sting out of frustrating everyday experiences.
In 2005, the American novelist David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College, Ohio. In it, he offered graduating students a bleak sketch of what adult life had in store for them. Time and again, he said, they would find themselves in hideously, fluorescently lit supermarkets at the end of long days at work and terrible traffic jams. When this happened, they would have two choices.
The first was to see the world only from their own point of view. When you do this, everything is about your own hunger, tiredness, and desire to get home. From this perspective, other people – whether it’s other road users, fellow shoppers, or sales clerks – appear simply as obstacles. This, Wallace suggested, is a surefire recipe for irritation and misery.
But there is an alternative. When you pause to pay attention and think through other people’s possible motivations, you begin to see that their lived realities are just as complex and deep as your own. The woman in front of you who just snapped at you, for example, might not always be like this. She might just be having a rough day. Maybe her dad just died, or an unexpected bill left her short for the month.
It doesn’t really matter whether this is true. The point, Wallace argued, is that this kind of attention to possibilities transforms the way you perceive others. Rather than seeing them as things in your way, you begin to see them as fellow inhabitants of a shared space in which your interests are no more or less important than anyone else’s. This ultimately makes it possible to experience even a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as meaningful.
