February 3rd | Reversed Empathy

From The Psychology of Money, page 93:

“When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, wow, the guy driving that car is so cool. Instead, you think, wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.”

The saying goes: before you judge me, walk a mile in my shoes. When in reality, most of us spend most waking hours running in anybody’s shoes but our own.

(It mostly comes down to the quality of the shoes).

When we see particularly nice things—a car, a house, some crazy limited release Jordans—we immediately use our minds to rip the person who owns them out of them. This fantasy is for us. We imagine how cool we would be if we owned the nice car or lived in the nice house.

Conversely, when we see someone else in a rough spot—snapping at their kid at the grocery store, honking in traffic, posting wildly out of touch comments on Facebook, we avoid their metaphorical shoes at all costs.

In effect, it seems our brains are hardwired to project ourselves into everything positive we see and avoid everything negative like the bubonic plague.

It’s easy to moralize this about how we treat the less fortunate and people making mistakes—which we can and should do. But what if instead, we focused on those more fortunate. It brings us a lesson and a question.

The lesson is: even if you get the thing you think will make you cool, most people around you will only imagine it as their own.

The question is: what would happen if we celebrated the success of our friends without projecting ourselves into it?… Read the rest