On social camouflage

Suppose three people are chatting. A asks a question, B (an expert) answers correctly, and C immediately parrots that exact answer a fraction of a second later, wanting to show they know it too. You could give C the benefit of the doubt, but when the same person does this across different settings, it becomes this weird pattern. I think we all know someone like this.

Person C probably doesn’t know what’s going on and just wants to seem informed. It’s almost reflexive for them. It’s so natural they might not even notice they’re doing it, or be open to hearing about it (I admit it’s kinda a ragebait-y thing for me).

This got me thinking a bit more: what exactly goes through someone’s head in the fraction of a second they decide to parrot someone else’s response to a question they know nothing about? Here’s my guess on what such a “chain of thought” could look like:

1. I feel threatend by my not knowing what these people are talking about. It directly affects how I am perceived (as unaware or not-well-read), and my level of psychological “safety” in this environment might take a hit1.

2. I think the best way to make myself feel safe is by giving the impression that I also know what’s going on.

3. By parroting the answer a fraction of a second after someone else says something, I can claim to also know the answer to the question.

4. Once the parroting is done, I can look around to see if people are approvingly nodding their head. I now have given the impression that I’m aware of what’s going on, and can be at ease knowing that people think I belong in this conversation.

5. I have now unknowingly/accidentally given – what I call – pseudo-evidence to myself and my subconscious that I am safe and there is no threat to my wellbeing or others’ perception of me.

Maybe the REAL kicker is that they subconsciously do this without realising it because it’s so instantaneous. It’s really not that serious (lol), just annoying sometimes, because it’s usually the people who’ve shown they have some track record for not knowing things. I used to be like this in middle school, and looking back, it’s funny to see how much it actually pisses me off when someone does that to me (who knows, I might’ve been projecting all along 👀).

Jokes aside, if I had to intentionally deep this and generalise a bit more:

What are things people/I do in a fraction of a second to provide pseudo-evidence to their/my subconscious?

I’m not actually gonna answer this because the list is endless, but I do want to understand the mechanics of such pseudo-evidence better?

On pseudo-evidence

I’d like to think pseudo-evidence is when you do something to specifically feel a certain way about yourself, and then use that action as proof that you ARE that way without the action actually showcasing some upstanding underlying quality. In the case of repeating stuff to look knowledgeable, it doesn’t prove knowledge. It only proves you can hear and repeat. But your subconscious accepts “I said the right answer” as evidence that you’re knowledgeable. Your subconscious can concoct any situation to tell yourself what you want to hear about yourself in a fraction of a second.

Self-safety-maxxing

It’s pretty lame that your own subconscious will pull a fast one on you just to give itself any semblence of safety even if society says that makes you a bad person – fair enough, that’s kinda its evolutionary role, but you can’t really use “oops, I’m being fake right now because of my evolutionary tendency to make myself feel safe, hehe” as an excuse after a certain age. This sometimes means foregoing any (strong) values or ideals you think you have. You could be the noblest nobley noble man ever but if awareness doesn’t come with control, you’re kinda cooked.

It’s a shame that even a false sense of preservation is still better than looking dumb, incapable, incompetent, or unreliable.

Ultimately, I think it boils down to things that make you look stupid – the stuff that makes you feel threatened and triggers some wound or insecurity. Stupid is a subjective term but tbh, it’s whatever makes you feel like you’re not living up to a grand standard set by someone else (or more often than not, yourself) or feel like your inferiority complex has been struck because you’re not “good enough”. This includes pretending like you know something, saying white lies to cover up something (no matter how small), acting clueless when you really do know something, or putting someone down to make yourself feel better (ie, you are less stupid compared to them now). They all have this similar flavour of wanting to seem powerful, to give yourself some vantage point on which to feel “safe”.

Your “fraction of a second”

I can’t find the tweet anymore but it went something along the lines of “you usually feel regret only when you realise you were just a little bit off from doing the most optimal thing. When you were “almost” about to do it, but didn’t or could not”. I think about this a lot.

And this notion of “almost” boils down to the fraction of a second you have before doing something. Doing something that gives you evidence or pseudo-evidence that you’re safe and everything is fine. It seems as though life is pointing you in the direction of SLOWING DOWN, ie, to get increasingly better at splitting that fraction of a second into finer and finer bits, and to reason out the whole chain-of-thought to eventually convince yourself to do the optimal thing at the end of that fraction.

Having access to your optimal policy is cool and all, but it is only effective IF you are able to slow down time in your mind adequately; I’ve become a strong believer of that. In that fraction of a second between giving yourself evidence or pseudo-evidence, you need to place stopgap upon stopgap, constantly asking yourself if what you’re about to do is optimal or whether your action is geared towards evidence or pseudo-evidence.

One way I’ve been trying this is purposely stopping myself from doing or saying things immediately, and introducing a delay where possible. That’s been pretty nifty. I spoke about somatic stuff in another post, which I think is super relevant here too: if something you’re about to say or do affects you physically (eg: tightness in the chest), you should probably not do it. In many low-stakes situations, you’ll still feel it, which is great. It allows you to slowly build up to situations where this sorta stuff has crazy implications or dire consequences. I’m a pretty visual person so I find myself imagining a ton of scenarios in my head and preparing beforehand (kinda funny admitting it, ngl). That’s also one way I’ve tried to slow down time before something happens, so that I can rely on “mental muscle memory”2. I think doing all this also minimises regret in many ways and allows you to not act from poor instinct but with some agency.

What it says about you

I’ve come to realise the same areas in which you allow yourself to slip in the fractions of a second to give yourself pseudo-evidence are EXACTLY the areas you’d allow others to slip up in. While you may think of yourself as flexible or chill for doing that (eg: “ah, you said a white lie to me, that’s fine!”), it’s a sign of latent leakage: it seems like it’ll have you chasing a life of being “good” instead of being honorable. And when the definition of “good” changes depending on the circumstance, you play the optics, tell people what they want to hear, and NGL, it just makes you look slimy. And sure, you could actually be a “good person”, but without a moral backbone that slows down your fraction of a second, you’re moving towards mental minimalism, becuase you’re not expressing yourself in a way you know is inherently beneficial to you, ie, acting with honor. You should be able to MAKE yourself feel safe without hinging it on how you’re perceived. I think that’s a pretty graceful way of living life without the crutches that come with (desperately) wanting to blend in or give others the impression that everything is OK.

This probably means shifting the framing of “safety” from not wanting to feel threatended in front of others to sticking to your guns even when your own subconscious is telling you it’s OK to slip up. True safety comes from knowing that you stuck to those ideals and values you set for yourself the moment you did one thing the way you do everything. It’s lowkey crazy how much angst this immediately chops off, because you know, ultimately, you’re not doing things in regards to others around you or from wanting to show something, but instead, you’re doing things because they are honorable.

Slowing down time allows you to stop yourself from tripping over your own leg. This is you taking back control from your subconscious with all its weird, over-protective, little-bitch’y tendencies, essentially making “life” a foreground process instead of background process driven by your insecurities, biases, and lame habits from your childhood. I think that comes with its own feeling of agency, which is great.

Here’s how I see it: real evidence of safety comes from doing things that showcase a quality through mechanics, and not through appearance. It really is a great way to ensure you’re doing one thing the way you do everything. This sorta stuff is harder to fake but it goes a long way in living life withou accidentally pissing people off – where you can say you live with some integrity at the end of the day.

From a drawing-boundaries perspective (which I found to be difficult growing up because it always seemed like people always needed you to BE something for them), I now strongly believe that the inability to draw boundaries is another form of pseudo-evidence that by making yourself available to the whims of others, you are keeping them happy, and thus, will feel wanted and safe around them. If you are able to draw and exercise boundaries or stand up for yourself, you learn to provide real evidence of safety to yourself, because you’ve now detached it from what others think of you. And this is powerful – it lets you live in a way that is agnostic to what’s considered good, convenient, or easy at any given time. In the words of Raleigh Becket from Pacific Rim (2013), “you get to fight the hurricane”.

On the infinite splitting of time

If you overdo the whole slowing down time thing, you essentially break down every single thing you do, think, and say into infinitesimally small sub-actions, which makes living pretty difficult. Being highly aware of all this makes you unnatural and almost calculative. I don’t know what a healthy version of this looks like but as long as it doesn’t seem like everything you do is fake, that’s good enough? Who knows, really?

Am I authentic about this???

If I’m only learning how to slow down time and essentially “think for longer”, how do I address the real underlying subconscious tendency of doing the suboptimal thing because of my bias/insecurities? If I’m one stopgap short from preventing myself from giving myself pseudo-evidence and go ahead do the suboptimal thing, am I really addressing the core issue? How can I escape from my own tendencies?

That’s irreleavant.

You achieve the optimal regardless. This goes back to what I mentioned about the absence of an “authentic state of being” in another post. As long as you find ways of slowing down time further to prevent yourself from giving yourself pseudo-evidence and concocting situations to tell yourself cool things about yourself that aren’t true, I think it’s enough to address the issue one way or the other3. It might feel indirect, but it really does not matter.