Different Views of Different People

The New York Times had a very interesting opinion piece in it a year ago about Human Nature in Today's Society. The car you drive, the movies you watch and even the way you carry yourself has something to do with how you are perceived by the people around you. Even if what people think of you is a generalization, that picture stays in their head until something prompts them to change it.

The author of this article, David Brooks, says that "teenage girls may cut themselves as a way to demonstrate their ability to withstand infections." This generalization is one that I have never really thought about nor really agree with, I have never known a teenage girl that wanted to prove that she could withstand an infection so badly that was willing to cut herself. Most of the time when I hear of a girl trying to cut herself it is either to get attention or because she is too stressed out to deal with anything.

I do like Brooks' view of how our personalities form and how it is not predetermined to us but that our surroundings shape us and make us who we are as people. The person that a baby may grow up to be can not be determined by a human just because of a study or a hypothesis. Brooks say that people go through a "never-ending process of creating and discovering who they are" and I would have to agree whole heartily with him. Of course I do believe that God knows the exact person we are going to become before we are even born, but no human has that power.

We all generalize and think that we know a person just by the way that they appear to us, but really that is never the entire story. That person could have been driving that car temporarily until their car is fixed, that man could have just spent his last five dollars to his name trying to show off by giving the waitress a nice tip, or you could be watching that movie because it was the only thing on TV. There are so many factors that have to be worked in in order to really find out what a person is really like, so we just need to get to know the person instead of generalizing them into a category.