I have been driving for many years now. Nonetheless, I can't help myself but wonder every now and then what the fuck must be going inside people's heads when they are found in front of the wheel. The frustration hits me like electrocution even if the surge slowly fades away. The weird part is that in that very moment almost everybody around feels the same.
In order to understand why this is happening we would have to examine the nature of human perception. When we evaluate a given situation, our minds cannot properly deduct every possible history of association. Through hasty neurological hack, the brain sums up the situation and serves the dish cold. This is also the reason why sudden sensory stimuli scare us so much. When the mind fails to process complex information in a logical way it glitches in unexpected ways.
We expect everybody to think like we do. If only...right? The world would be such an awesome place if we could tune those around us into our own perceptual frequency. After all, we are the fair ones. Life has been unjust for us and everyone else acts like an asshole — or so we think. We are not entirely wrong to assume so. Much like being in the streets driving, our daily lives are filled with events that are unfathomably complex for us to understand so we resort into making hasty generalizations to appease our ego. It's common sense right?
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What happens in our mind cannot take place anywhere else. Every single person goes through a unique trail of sequential events that slowly sculpt a unique character, reactions and emotions. A careless driver might have ben rushing to the school because his daughter got in an accident. An old lady seems to be going off the lane because her new heart medicine is acting weird. Yourself might be angry judging them because your boss pissed you off and your car is acting weird. All three might be searching for common sense but it is nowhere to be found.
No matter how wish it, no single person is able to use common sense. Each and everyone of us uses a uniquely generated sensory code that can be applied only to specific instances and at specific times. Heck, not even our own self can use common sense for the same event throughout the day.
If we are so complex in understanding and controlling our own psyche, what makes us believe that we should expect others to act similarly? When 3 people can hardly decide over a few pizza toppings how unlikely would be to expect from them to connect over daily interactions that are based on thousands of unique possibilities?
This is also why you will notice that the ones getting frustrated the most are the ones being emotionally immature. Children suffer from this the most because they are used to everyone catering for them. Slowly, and as we age, we are giving less and less fucks because we start noticing that not everything is about us. In all likelihood rarely anybody even cares.
Perhaps the notion of common sense has been mutually propagated so people can be motivated to act upon a perceived sense of understanding. Romantic love, politics or even driving instructions from our partner operate on the same sense of illusion — hence the fact that misunderstandings are the rule rather than then exception.
We expect our peers to fulfill our own sense of understanding about the world — yet we get disappointed when they fail to do so. After all, why we should be the ones changing our views when everyone else is so obviously wrong? At the end, the way we expect others to understand us, reveals more about our person and less about them.
