People are Kaleidoscopes.

It’s deeply frustrating when people don’t understand you.

You are clear on your perspective because it has been built upon a lifetime of experiences. However, without the context of your entire life and thoughts, all anyone has to go on is your communication. How you present your thoughts or opinions is all most people see.

Your words rest on the knife edge of other people’s ability to empathise.

Not everyone is capable of empathy on a level that listens and seeks to understand. Very few people stop and question you, instead rushing to a judgment. Perhaps because we all have a perspective built upon a lifetime of experiences. Everyone does. And that’s the problem.

Our ability to understand people exists primarily at the macro level. We group people by life stage, by demographic, or average them out under propensity-based biases. We try very hard to stick people together to reduce complexity for ourselves and what we attempt to achieve. Yet, all of these are fallacies. Convenient as they may be, all of them are wrong to a certain degree.

While there is merit in the marketing world to use these proxy models to group people, they are primarily there to affect targeting, rather than understanding. They help us fill boxes, not unpick nuances.

What I want to write about isn’t an alternative means to group people, and it certainly isn’t an alternative model to inform targeting. Rather it is a mechanism of training ourselves to think about why people are the way they are. An empathy engine, if you will. It is a mental model for your own conscious analysis of people, of individuals.

When you were a kid you probably had a toy kaleidoscope. A brightly coloured plastic thing that you’d stare through for a few minutes before you got bored of it. You’d twist the wheels and all of these shapes and patterns would rotate, like looking into a different world. It wouldn’t have been a particularly complex mechanism, but it looked complex when you looked through it. On the surface, it was still just a brightly coloured plastic tube.

People are a lot like that. You look at a person and often only see what they want you to see. The clothes they wear seem intentional. Their words feel chosen. You could imagine that their age, race, religion, sex or sexual preference may be enough for you to decide you know a bit about them. How wrong you would be.

Yet that’s what we do. We put people in neat little targetable groups because that’s easier for us. A box ticked.

But if people are more like kaleidoscopes than these simplistic notions, then what could that mean?

The diagram above is of a kaleidoscope used for laser hardening metals. I’m not going to pretend I know what any of that means or how it works. What interested me was the structure of it. Of how light enters from one side, is passed through a lens, and then breaks into many beams in the kaleidoscope, before exiting through a magnifying lens.

If a person were a kaleidoscope then you would imagine their life experiences would become the lenses. Their perception of the world or of the moments they live through would be the net result of what the light passed through.

What kind of perception would trauma cast? Would it shape everything the light shone on? What impact would time have on those perceptions?

Throughout our lives, we are building our kaleidoscope. From birth, we are seeing the world through it. New lenses are shaped and placed within the tube, through which we see all of our existence. Some of these ensure that we interpret moments positively, such as the formative values we were raised on. While other lenses are added through trauma that skews our interpretation of moments or people. An illness, a loss, a betrayal. Violent acts and broken hearts. A lens is irreversibly added each time something momentous happens to us, and it changes how we view the world.

These fixed lenses may change over time, however. Perhaps not from being fully removed, but by other lenses coming after them. Adjusting the final picture.

And it moves and twists not just around these huge moments, but hour by hour, minute by minute. The kaleidoscope rotates and shifts, as our mood changes. Our biology is in constant chemical flux. The atmosphere and climate of our situation keeps the picture moving. The light we see through is never truly static. We are one person to another with every second that passes. The subtle changes are often undetectable, but real nonetheless.

If we think of people in this way, it seems impossible to ever truly understand them. Perhaps we may for a minute, but then they’re gone. They’ve already shifted into another form. And that in itself is ok.

I don’t believe we’re on a quest to actually understand people. That seems impossible. I think our quest is to become more empathetic. To be mindful of how little we truly know about anyone, let alone ourselves.

If you were to consider yourself a kaleidoscope, would you know what lenses you might be looking at the world through? Could you pinpoint when the world somehow shifted in your life? Perhaps knowing these kinds of answers may help when you consider why you acted that way, why you said the things you said, or why those thoughts crept into your mind. At that moment you didn’t recognise yourself for a minute or two.

In thinking this way, we may appreciate the complexity of our souls. Appreciate it as a thing of beauty in itself. To wonder about its immensity. And failing that, perhaps we’d not be so quick to force people into boxes or rush to judgment. Whether as a result of the actions or words of others. Indeed, they may not really know who they are or why they are that way.

Can we ever truly blame people for ignorance if it shaped them unconsciously?

In 1919, Lord Byron first used the word “kaleidoscope” in its figurative meaning of a "constantly changing pattern". I think that’s what people really are. Constantly changing patterns.

Consciously and unconsciously influenced by light passing through ghosts.