Looking Sideways at Things That Might Not Be There

Illustration: Aeppo, South Korea | @_aeppo

Scrolling, noticing, absorbing.

It has become very easy to know things about people I don’t know. Not in any way that builds real understanding - just enough to recognise patterns. Where they are, what they’re doing, what seems to be working for them. It appears without effort. I don’t go looking for it, but it arrives anyway, and often enough that it starts to feel normal.

For a while, it really does feel like nothing is happening in response. Just looking, registering, moving on. But at some point, usually after the fact, I notice that I’ve started placing my life next to theirs. It doesn’t feel like a decision I’ve made. It’s already happened by the time I become aware of it.

There’s an idea by Leon Festinger that people understand themselves by comparing themselves to others. In a smaller, more contained world, that can seem reasonable to an extent. If the lives being compared are visible in context, the comparison at least has some grounding.

What feels different now is the scale and the structure of what is being compared. What I’m seeing are fragments - isolated moments that don’t carry their full context with them. They still get used as reference points, as if they are complete representations of something.

At the same time, what I know about myself includes everything that hasn’t settled yet. Thoughts that change depending on the day, things that feel unfinished, things I haven’t fully worked through. Those two sets of information - one partial, one deeply internal - still end up next to each other, and for a moment, it feels like a fair comparison.

There’s another shift that follows this, which is less obvious but harder to ignore once it’s noticed. It’s not just about what I see anymore, but how I might appear if I were the one being seen.

Whether my life would make sense from the outside. Whether it would look coherent, or delayed, or like it’s moving in the wrong direction. Charles Horton Cooley described something similar - the idea that a sense of self forms through how one imagines being perceived. What’s strange is how easily that imagined perspective starts to carry weight, even when it isn’t based on anything directly expressed.

What complicates all of this further is memory.

There are things I remember with complete certainty that aren’t right. Not significant things - small details that feel too settled to question. A sentence I’m convinced was phrased a certain way. A version of an event that feels fixed, like it has already been decided. And then something interrupts it. Someone remembers it differently, or I come across the original version, and it doesn’t match.

And oh how convincing the incorrect version felt before it was questioned!

The Mandela Effect is often used to describe this at a larger scale - groups of people remembering the same thing incorrectly, often in very similar ways. The explanation for it is relatively straightforward. Memory isn’t stored as it is. It gets reconstructed. Each time something is recalled, it shifts slightly, shaped by what feels plausible, what has been repeated, what fits into what is already known.

Over time, familiarity starts to replace accuracy. What feels right begins to take precedence over what actually was.

That idea becomes harder to ignore when it moves into more personal situations. A conversation that felt neutral at the time but is later described as tense. Something I thought I said carefully, remembered as something harsher. A version of myself in a moment that doesn’t fully match the one I carry.

There isn’t a clear way to resolve that, because the difference isn’t always large enough to dispute. It just sits there, slightly misaligned, without fully collapsing into one version or the other.

If memory works like this - if it adjusts, fills gaps, and leans towards what feels coherent - then the material I use to understand my own life isn’t fixed. And neither is anyone else’s.

Which makes the comparison feel less stable than it first appears. It isn’t between two clear realities. It’s between interpretations. My current understanding of something placed next to someone else’s current understanding of something, both of them shaped by what has been remembered, repeated, or slightly altered over time.

There’s also something more difficult to trace. Some details feel familiar without a clear origin. Repeated enough times - online, in conversation, in passing - they settle into place without being questioned. At some point, it becomes difficult to tell whether something is remembered, inferred, or absorbed.

It still feels like memory.

Well, the comparison doesn’t stop because of any of this. It still happens quickly, often before it can be interrupted.

But it changes something about how convincing it feels.

The habit of looking sideways remains.

It just doesn’t feel as reliable as it once did.