The Person You’re Talking to Might Not Exist

It took me about 90 seconds to decide who he was.

A new colleague, first meeting. Something in the way he ran the room—didn’t smile, answered a question a beat too fast, held eye contact a little too long. Arrogant, I thought, and the verdict closed before I’d heard him say anything that warranted it. For months afterward, I related to that version of him. Polite, guarded, faintly cold. I was careful around a man I had essentially invented.

He wasn’t arrogant. He was terrified. He’d walked into that job convinced everyone in the building was smarter than he was, and the things I’d read as arrogance—the speed, the unbroken eye contact—were the posture of someone bracing for exposure. I hadn’t been reading him at all. I’d been reading a character I cast in a role, and then quietly resenting him for playing it.

I only have language for what I did because of a film I saw far too young to understand.

The film is Being There. Peter Sellers, 1979. Subtle humor, almost no action, long pauses, a strange, gentle current moving underneath everything. Many people watch it now and shrug; it isn’t paced for us. It doesn’t shout or chase your attention. It asks you to sit still long enough to notice what’s happening inside you while you watch. I saw it as a kid and didn’t understand what I understood. I only knew it landed. It took me decades to name what it had done: it showed me, before I had any words for it, how much of what we call perceiving other people is really just our own mind talking back to us.

The premise is almost absurd in its simplicity. A man named Chance has lived his whole life as a sheltered gardener, knowing little beyond his plants and his television. Through a series of accidents, he’s deposited into the world of wealth and power, and the people there begin to hear him as profound. He says something plain about a garden, and a room full of sophisticated people receives it as a parable about the economy. He isn’t trying to deceive anyone. He doesn’t manipulate or perform. He simply exists, and the world does the rest.

Because the real story of the film isn’t what happens to Chance, it’s about what happens to everyone around him. They take a few data points and build a wise man. Then they talk to the wise man they built—not to the person actually standing there.

Psychologists have a name for the trap underneath this. It’s sometimes called naive realism: the deep, mostly invisible conviction that we see the world and the people in it as they truly are, rather than through a lens shaped by our own assumptions, moods, and needs. We don’t experience our interpretations as interpretations. We experience them as simply what’s there. That’s what makes the whole thing so hard to catch. The story we’re telling about a person doesn’t feel like a story. It feels like reality.

And we do it constantly. We do it in relationships and families, at work and online, with strangers at the next table and with the people we claim to know best. We rarely listen to people. We listen to our story about people—our biases, our hopes, our fears, our hunger for someone who confirms that the world makes sense.

What unsettled me, watching the film again as an adult, is that it doesn’t let you stay above it. You start asking the same question the characters ask. Is Chance wise? Innocent? Empty? Enlightened? An accidental saint? And then you catch yourself doing the exact thing the movie is about. Wait—am I projecting onto him right now? That’s what good art does. It doesn’t hand you the lesson. It sets a small trap for your mind and then shows you your own footprints.

There’s a final scene that people have argued about for decades. Chance walks out across the surface of a pond, and the film holds the moment just long enough to make you ask whether you’re watching a miracle or a trick of perspective—or one last joke designed to test how badly you want to turn him into something more than he is. The movie refuses to answer. It just watches you watching.

What I took from it, in the end, was one of the most useful questions a person can carry: What am I adding to what I’m seeing? Not what is happening. Not what is true. What am I adding?

When you can catch what you’re adding—the bias, the backstory, the hunger, the resentment, the hope—something loosens. You don’t have to abandon judgment. You hold it more lightly. You start to notice that your certainty about a person is often a costume your mind puts on because uncertainty feels too exposed.

Projection Essential Reads

It’s Not Me, It’s You

How to Become a Mind Reader

There’s an uncomfortable flip side, too. Projection isn’t only unfair; sometimes it’s generous. Sometimes the person we project onto benefits—gets swept into a flattering story that hands them wisdom, warmth, or authority they never claimed. Projection can even feel like love. It’s just love aimed at a version of someone that lives inside our own head.

Which is why the goal was never “stop projecting.” You can’t. The mind builds these models faster than you can supervise it. The work is quieter than that: to notice. To catch how fast you decide who someone is. To feel the moment you turn a human being into a symbol. To recognize, now and then, that you’re not looking at the person in front of you at all—you’re watching your own internal movie playing on top of them.

It eventually changed something with that colleague. Not because I became wise about people, but because one day I caught the movie running. I noticed I had a fixed character where a person should have been, and I got curious instead of certain. The terror beneath the “arrogance” was visible almost immediately, once I stopped narrating and started watching.

Some things don’t reach you because they’re exciting. They reach you because they’re true. And sometimes you only understand what you saw the first time when you come back to it years later—carrying enough of your own mistakes to finally recognize yourself in the mirror it was holding up all along.