The four of you: perception, public, self

I keep trying to reach the real self of the people I love, and I keep meeting the interface instead. This is not a piece about how I solved that. I have not solved it. It is a piece about a way of thinking I built so that not solving it would stop tearing me apart.

Every person I know, I've come to treat as three at once. There is the public image they project, which is who they want you to know they are. There is the self image, which we never get access to, which is who they think they are, and it is gated. And there is the perception of who they are, which is a derivative of their public image and every further interaction with them. This one belongs to the observer, and the person does not get access to it.

But I said four, and the reason I left the last one out is that we all also carry an intent-voice, sitting even deeper, in the shadow of the self. It is adversarial at all times. It is the first responder to selfish wants and instant satisfaction. When I'm driving, it sometimes wants me to swerve into oncoming traffic. I don't do it, but sometimes, it does make me wonder if that is how people who lose all hope end up not coming back. That may not even be its purpose. What it fires seems to trigger extra caution, extra alertness, in every other component, resulting in being in check even more. But it's there. Every time you thought the unsayable thing in the meeting, every time you wanted to burn down something you had spent years building, every time an impulse arrived that you would not admit to anyone including yourself, that was the intent-voice.

There is a fifth, technically. Who the person really is, not who they think they are. But that one is fictional, because it would need to be measured against an absolute reference point, and no such point exists. Not for the person, not for the observer, not anywhere any of us has access to. The idea of a real self, sitting somewhere behind all the images and available if only we could reach it, is a comfort we invented. It probably isn't there.

Try to play back a meeting between two people, for a second. You shake hands. They give you their public image. You form their perception image. They form yours. The self images are back there in the background, each with their well-gated space, monitoring and censoring live, every millisecond, every word, every gesture. And then the intent-voice is dancing around the self, poking, throwing distracting remarks or impulses that the self has to spend energy suppressing. Two people, eight images between them, and the entire choreography completes inside a handshake. No one said we're trivial beings.

Is it worth getting to the self of a person? I found the answer to be a mix, and mostly disappointing.

Yes, there is intimacy on the other side. Yes, there is deeper connection. But the more complex the person, the less you will ever get to the self, and there is no way to be sure you got it even when you feel like you did. You also end up raising your own stakes and the fact that you can't verify them, makes for a bigger disappointment prediction. And here is the harder thing, the one I did not want to accept for a long time. Even if someone gave you their full self, even if you somehow verified it, you would eventually get bored. Because what we actually like, in the longer term, is novelty. Unpredictability. The unknown of the other person is part of what keeps us in the room. Full access might not be the gift we think it is. We come in with as precise a set of wants as we can articulate, we believe in them, we believe in what we're prepared to offer in return, and then time passes, we get bored, the circumstances change, and the self is once again pushing the adversarial intent-voice, trying to maintain, trying to keep forward as is.

And that is the friction I could not think my way out of. Not access, and not the absence of access, but the fact that access probably would not fix what I wanted fixed.

So I came to something that is not a solution. I stopped trying to trust anyone deeply. I stopped consuming myself around the question of who they really are outside the interface they gave me. Even a person whose four images somehow all pointed the same direction would still hit incompetence, ignorance, blind spots, natural limitations that reach us all routinely and require trust to be overridden again anyway. So I operate with what I was given as part of the interface. I don't spend too much time thinking about who they are outside our shared realm, what they do or say outside my sphere. I form a hypothetical set of scenarios for which I am ready, relying on my own intent-voice to imagine the sharper edges, but I don't try to be comprehensive. You cannot boil the ocean with every interaction. You take your chances. You focus on whether what they gave you is meaningfully of value to you. And even when it isn't, you assess whether it may be of value later, in a way you can't tell yet.

None of this prevents anything. Deception, betrayal, fraud, are not avoided by this, and we're all afraid of them and the act of living will make them present. They are just conceptualized as likely, so that when they arrive, I don't consume myself with the wrong questions. The randomness of outcomes remains at the top. The fifth self was fictive, and so is any system that would let you walk through people without being hurt by them. This is not that system. It is just a bit of navigational awareness. It does not solve anything.

It only makes the not-solving slightly more bearable.