Describing an Episode Without Speaking for the Other Person

Epigraph

"Matter of fact." — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I, short excerpt from the English original edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge. The discussion of evidence and inference is used here in a strictly limited manner, without stretching the entirety of Hume’s intricate epistemology over your everyday household dramas.

What This Article Is About

Your conversation partner glances down at their wristwatch, mutters a monosyllable, and winds the conversation down. An ordinary observer sees nothing more than the physical movement of someone’s eyeballs, but the armchair prosecutor inside you is already joyfully drafting a felony indictment: "They don't care, they are deliberately devaluing my existence, they have a narcissistic personality disorder and harbor covert aggression!" Perhaps the acquaintance really was bored. Or perhaps they are facing a burning deadline, or a questionable street pastry is currently staging a mutiny in their stomach. A person's physical gesture and your brilliant telepathic deductions about their secret motives are, however, fundamentally different categories of material.

Describing an episode honestly means separating what was actually observed and remembered into one corner, and the speculative narrative you grafted onto it into another. A fictional protagonist, Nina, is peacefully drinking tea with an acquaintance and showing snapshots from her vacation. The acquaintance looks at their watch a few times, asks a single question, and steers the exchange toward leaving. Nina feels a dull sting of frustration and instantly concludes: they couldn't care less about her trip. Her hurt is understandable, and nobody is demanding that she crush her genuine emotions. But instead of fabricating a criminal case, she could soberly separate three distinct things: the observable behavior, her own emotional experience, and the assumption of someone else’s indifference. Doing so does not obligate her to make excuses for the acquaintance; it merely serves as a reminder that we have not yet acquired the gift of telepathy.

Below, we examine why observable events do not equal armchair diagnoses from the internet, why your feelings remain completely legitimate without needing to unmask someone else's malice, and how to acknowledge your own ignorance. Hume will remind us of the gulf between fact and conjecture, Confucius will outline the honest boundary of not knowing, and psychologists led by Epley will illustrate just how clumsily we judge others through our own egocentric lens. This piece is not a therapeutic method, provides no medical diagnoses, and does not advocate tolerating disrespect where boundaries ought to be defended.

I. Starting with a Single Accessible Episode

The domestic prosecutor loves sweeping generalizations: "You always ignore me!", "You have never known how to listen!", "You are deliberately ruining my evening!". From a couple of yawns, it is effortless to sculpt a monolithic portrait of a consummate villain. If real, recurring disrespect truly underlies the behavior, it certainly warrants consideration. But for an honest post-mortem, it is far better to isolate exactly one concrete episode. Where were you sitting, what was being discussed, and what specific action caught your eye? A single entry does not require exhuming a five-year archive of text messages; previous instances can still factor into an independent decision later.

Nina has her tea, an open photo album, and an acquaintance who looked at their watch a few times and nudged the conversation toward an early departure. If Nina was not running a second-by-second forensic log with a hidden stopwatch, she shouldn't invent an exact count of those glances. Nor is there any reason to fabricate a verbatim quote about leaving after the fact: an approximate memory is not a courtroom transcript. It is entirely sufficient to record honestly: the acquaintance looked at their watch several times and steered the conversation toward leaving; I did not record the exact number of glances or the verbatim phrasing.

It is also useful to recall one's own unspoken script. Nina might reflect on what kind of conversation she was expecting. Was an adequate window of time actually negotiated in advance? As an illustrative example: a two-hour marathon of holiday landscapes without prior agreement is not a binding contract, even if your head had already stamped it with a notary's seal. This does not imply that friendly attentiveness requires a signed affidavit. It simply helps to notice the gap between one's intimate wishes and what was actually agreed upon at the outset. That said, if an explicit agreement was firmly in place, a breach remains a breach, without any discount for vague hints.

II. Action, Evaluation, and Cause Have Different Statuses

Compare three simple statements: "The person looked at their watch," "I found this inattentive and hurtful," and "They intentionally demonstrated that my story was total garbage." The first statement describes an observable event; if memory is approximate, that caveat should be noted. The second records your personal evaluation and emotional reaction to it. The third is an assumption about intent. That assumption might turn out to be correct, but in itself, it provides no backstage pass into someone else’s skull. When these three layers are carelessly dumped into a single pile, the fantasy of another's malice begins to look just as indisputable as the hands on the clock face.

Untangling these layers does not require turning yourself into an unfeeling automaton. Nobody is forcing Nina to rebrand her bitter resentment as a "minor communicative deviation within the dialogue." She has every right to tell herself: "I felt thoroughly dismissed, and the conversation left a foul taste in my mouth." Yet honesty demands recognizing that this foul taste arose within her own psyche, rather than being read off the other person's palm. Someone else’s soul is under no obligation to be a warehouse of conspiracies just to validate your sour mood.

David Hume, in Section IV of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sharply distinguished the immediate testimony of the senses from bold inferences leaping beyond what is visible. For us, this serves as a strict and narrow analogy: what we perceive with our eyes and how we explain it from the sofa do not automatically fuse together. Naturally, we are not converting Hume's skepticism into a pretext for enduring neglect or denying everyday cause and effect. It is simply that someone glancing at their watch does not, by itself, constitute a signed manifesto of contempt.

III. Describing One's Own Response Without Diagnosing the Other

Many people share a bizarre habit: to grant themselves permission to feel sad or angry, they feel compelled to unmask the other party as a moral monster. It is as if an acquaintance looking at their watch due to a throbbing toothache rather than pure malice suddenly makes feeling hurt strictly forbidden by etiquette. In this scene, Nina felt frustrated when the conversation turned toward leaving; the acquaintance's motive remained unverified. Her frustration is completely legitimate on its own merits. The emotional experience is real, even if the other person's motive remains pitch-black mystery.

One can name their reaction using the plainest, most mundane words, without high-flown jargon: throat went dry, wanted to slam the laptop shut, words got caught, anger flared up. There is no need to don a therapist’s coat and diagnose yourself. If Nina genuinely remembers that she began to rush her words, she can note that down. If she doesn't remember, she shouldn't invent the reaction just to produce a tidy log. Recording this does not explain in the slightest why the acquaintance shifted, but it honestly logs her reaction without rushing into a prosecutorial verdict.

The crucial part is avoiding the opposite extreme: turning around and fiercely putting oneself on trial. Dropping the accusation against the other often mutates into masochistic self-flagellation: "It's my own fault, I'm always imposing with my boring photos, I just need to grow thicker skin!" That is the exact same unsubstantiated fiction, spun out of thin air. If a plausible explanation for the rush surfaces later, it won't retroactively brand Nina as "hysterical." The desire to be heard remains an entirely normal desire, even if the stars failed to align during this particular gathering.

IV. A Plausible Version Remains Just a Version

The human brain is remarkably presumptuous: we assume that other people's motives are crystal clear because we judge them strictly against ourselves. "If I checked my watch in the middle of someone's story, I would definitely be trying to shut them up. Therefore, they must be desperate to escape me!" The logic feels ironclad, except the other person might operate with entirely different habits, anxieties, and social graces. In one's private notes, it is healthy to add an honest marginal comment: "I decided they found me tedious." That is an acknowledgment of your own hypothesis, not an established fact of their biography.

The official abstract of the 2004 research by Nicholas Epley and colleagues describes five studies in which participants began from their own perspective and subsequently adjusted their assessment of another's. Under the conditions studied, this adjustment could prove insufficient; time pressure and other constraints influenced its magnitude. One's own vantage point is a possible starting point, not proof that everyone thinks identically at all times. This serves as a warning against overconfidence in one's own mind-reading powers, not an excuse to slap Nina with the label of an egocentrist or dismiss her memory as bogus.

There is no need to swing into naive indulgence and concoct a dozen tearful alibis for the acquaintance, such as rescuing stray kittens. They might have been in a hurry, they might have been exhausted, or they might genuinely have been bored to tears by someone else's holiday sunsets. The mere existence of a dozen competing versions doesn't make any single one of them true. The practical question is far simpler: is it critical for Nina to know how much time the guest actually had, or is it easier to draw conclusions for the future? Ordinary everyday life hardly requires writing a doctoral dissertation on the internal universe of every casual acquaintance.

V. Ignorance Does Not Mean Abdicating Judgment

Saying that someone else’s soul is uncharted territory is often mistaken for a demand to grant amnesty to every piece of rudeness. "We don't know their hidden motives; what if they have childhood trauma? Let's just understand and forgive!" Absolutely not. We do not need to decipher the microscopic machinations of someone's psyche to evaluate an observable action and its fallout. If a person turned around and walked out, if they blew up a clear agreement, or if they acted crudely, that fact does not cease to be a fact. You can protect yourself and shut the door without drafting a philosophical treatise on the roots of their bad manners.

In the seventeenth saying of Book II of the Analects, Confucius succinctly observes that knowledge consists in recognizing what you know as known, and what you do not know as not known. In that ancient text, the subject is ethical sobriety of mind, not a magical parlor trick for reading minds through faces. We are not co-opting adjacent teachings as an X-ray scanner for peering through skulls. The wisdom lies in humility: we honor the boundary between what we witnessed with our own eyes and what we simply do not know.

Nina can lean on what is actually available: a few glances at the watch, a single question, and a pivot toward leaving. If similar behavior recurs, distinct accessible instances can help evaluate the format of future get-togethers; there is no mystical threshold of three visits. She is under no obligation to prove that the acquaintance is inherently cold-hearted. It is quite enough to decide for herself: "I don't enjoy interacting in this format; I won't be opening photo albums for them anymore." You can abandon an unrewarding format based strictly on dry facts, without wringing a confession out of someone under interrogation.

VI. The Other Person’s Message Adds Data, But Does Not Settle Everything

If contact is maintained and dialogue remains safe, the other person might offer their version of events. Their account is valuable incoming information, but it is neither divine revelation nor an automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. One needn't swallow every excuse whole, nor reflexively brand the speaker a pathological liar. In an isolated illustrative scenario, a person might genuinely have been rushing to a dentist and still handled their host tactlessly. Such an explanation does not nullify the fallout; in Nina's scene, the actual cause remains unknown for now.

In a hypothetical continuation, the acquaintance might reach out later to say they were pressed for time and failed to mention it. That is new information that can be weighed alongside their behavior and prior agreements, rather than a proven resolution to the entire encounter. She could calmly respond: "It's a pity you didn't mention it beforehand; I would have saved the story for another time." This keeps the focus on a concrete habit—giving a heads-up about timing—instead of trying to litigate which of them is a moral failure. Of course, if the guest takes offense and turns combative, no notebook in the world will extract tact from them.

Someone's sincere apology is under no obligation to instantly dismantle your personal boundaries. Understanding the reason behind an act does not mean agreeing to endure it repeatedly. When a person's behavior consistently inflicts harm, causes psychological trauma, or poses a direct threat to safety, kitchen philosophy is off the table. In the face of a threat, priority belongs to safety, support, and available protective measures; analyzing motives can wait. Defending oneself always takes precedence over excavating someone else's intentions.

VII. What Could Clarify the Initial Version

In a calm, physically safe scenario, you can stress-test your own working hypothesis. Ask yourself: "What actual facts would cause me to drop this accusation?" If even a signed note from the fire department wouldn't feel sufficient, that is a cue to clarify what information could alter your version in the first place. This is not a formal diagnosis of "calcified resentment": past experience, mistrust, or entirely sufficient grounds for drawing a boundary may be at play. One can simply conclude, "This format does not work for me," without ever solving the mystery of the motive. An ordinary domestic decision hardly requires convening an international tribunal.

Clarifying facts is worth doing only when it is safe and serves a purpose. Asking directly: "Do you have another half hour, or are you in a rush?" is a standard, mature question. On the other hand, snooping through social media, checking their "last seen" timestamps on messaging apps, dispatching mutual friends on reconnaissance missions, or staging petty passive-aggressive loyalty tests violates personal privacy and can escalate conflict. Running an espionage thriller is a poor substitute for voluntary clarification. If asking directly is impossible or unsafe, leave the gap blank.

A mature conversation must not devolve into coercing a confession. It is pointless to demand: "Just admit it—you were bored out of your mind and couldn't care less about my trip!" Backing someone into a corner is a terrible way to obtain a voluntary explanation. Nina can state her terms: "This exchange left an unpleasant taste; in the future, let's agree on how much time we have beforehand." If the other person retreats into stonewalling or aggression, the conversation can simply be brought to an end.

Listening to someone else’s explanation does not mean passively swallowing whatever is dished out. Nina can take note of the other person's scheduling crunch while firmly requesting advance notice next time. She might also discover that the person simply has zero interest in other people's vacations, and choose to show her photos to a friend instead. Precision is not about winning an argument over who holds the moral high ground; it is about understanding whom you are dealing with and on what terms.

VIII. Repetition of Behavior and the Person's Overall Image

A single swallow does not make a summer, but a whole flock certainly invites scrutiny. If an acquaintance routinely abandons you in the middle of a sentence, that is a meaningful pattern. Even so, grouping incidents together should be based on concrete facts, not a vague feeling of "they made me feel sour again." Last time, the person gave an honest heads-up about a toothache; today, they stared silently at their phone; the third time, you dropped by unannounced without calling first. Shoveling all of this into a single pile labeled "they are a narcissist" merely manufactures unnecessary drama out of thin air.

Memory has a knack for cherry-picking convenient episodes: for instance, three unpleasant encounters can easily eclipse twenty perfectly ordinary ones. These numbers are an illustration, not a statistical law of cognition. A handful of glaring memories does not define the entire person. Conversely, you do not need to maintain an exhaustive ledger of grievances over many years just to make a basic practical decision. If someone is systematically an hour late and sees no issue with it, you are entirely entitled to stop meeting them without compiling a multi-volume brief of their guilt.

Labels like "selfish" or "insufferable" are convenient because they conserve mental fuel. But once glued on, they make it harder for us to notice actual changes. A person might make a genuine effort and learn to listen, but filtered through an old diagnosis, we will still hunt for covert mockery behind every syllable. Nobody is urging you to trust anyone at the drop of a hat, but leaving room for reality is a healthy habit. Observable actions can speak louder than polished promises; you don't necessarily have to wait years to see them.

Don't turn your life into an endless forensic crime lab dedicated to analyzing the people around you. If trying to dissect everything only leaves you exhausted, drop the exercise altogether. If a situation reaches an impasse and causes profound pain, turn to a trusted friend or a qualified professional. A competent psychologist will not cast spells or peer into your offender’s mind; they can help you consider your own emotions and resources. Uncertainty does not strip you of the right to support.

IX. A Description in Four Distinguishable Parts

If you feel the urge to dissect a routine domestic grievance, choose a completely ordinary, safe episode. Do not pick a traumatic event, an act of violence, or a dangerous conflict for this exercise: in those cases, the priority belongs strictly to protection and support. Take a sheet of paper and divide the scene into four strictly separate baskets: what was observed or remembered (noting any inaccuracies), what I felt at the time, what ingenious narrative of their hidden thoughts I whipped up, and what actually remained a complete mystery to me.

For Nina, this draft would look refreshingly simple and free of melodramatics. First basket: tea, an open album, the acquaintance looked at their watch several times, asked one question, and announced they were leaving. Second basket: frustration; other feelings or bodily sensations are added only if Nina genuinely remembers them. Third basket: the assumption that the acquaintance couldn't care less about her vacation memories. Fourth basket: how much time the guest actually had and how they perceived the meeting in the first place. No amateur theorizing about their childhood or difficult personality.

The resulting draft is neither sacred scripture nor a clinical regimen, and it certainly comes with no manufacturer's warranty of instant clarity. Nina can glance at her scribbles and simply consider whether to ask a guest about their schedule next time before hauling out the album, save the vacation photos for a genuinely willing ear, or just leave the whole matter unresolved. A personal note can be trimmed down, abandoned on a nightstand, deleted, or dramatically torched, with the calm understanding that real obligations and vital paperwork don't vanish just because you shredded a private scribble. And if you simply have no desire to smooth things over, unpack motives, or force yourself to calm down right now, you have every right to snap the notebook shut and close the door—needed help and genuine safety don't wait for literary perfection anyway.

X. Precision Leaves the Other Person Their Own Voice

Passing off our version of someone else's intentions as an established fact means speaking on their behalf: we script their lines in advance, assign them malicious motives, and immediately take ostentatious offense at them. Separating the working narrative from the event leaves room for the other person to tell their own story, complete with their own plans, pressures, and eccentricities. At the same time, Nina is under no obligation to hand over the steering wheel of her emotional state. She is fully entitled to say firmly: "You may not have meant anything bad by it, but this kind of evening didn't work for me."

The final takeaway doesn't need to be a monumental, earth-shattering epiphany that switches off your feelings on a tight timetable. Instead of a full-blown Shakespearean tragedy about callous brutes, what remains is purely mundane: a simple question about timing over a mug of tea, a comfortable distance, or an answer that stays entirely open, without requiring Nina to swallow a neat resolution, suddenly feel zen, or pretend the other person's inner motives were ever carved in stone.

Honesty with oneself and the facts is not an admission of defeat before a complicated world. It is an acknowledgment of the obvious: we will never be able to crawl entirely inside someone else's skin, and the people around us are under no obligation to match our private expectations. In reality, all we have is one specific evening, a couple of tea mugs on a table, and two adults whose thoughts are never directly accessible to one another across the tablecloth.

What This Means in Practice

Take a single, specific, and safe everyday episode and sort it into three distinct piles: what actually unfolded before your eyes, what you felt inside as it happened, and what juicy detective story you managed to assemble in your mind. Honestly label whatever you recall only vaguely, and leave a glaring blank space where the other person's motives are simply unknown to you. Your hurt or anger has a right to exist without requiring courtroom proof of someone else's depravity, and let your narrative remain what it is: a working hypothesis, not an unappealable verdict from the supreme court.

Do not turn clearing the air into a heavy-handed interrogation. If a fact is genuinely vital to the matter at hand, ask a calm, direct question about their schedule or plans, without lacing it with venomous accusations of cold-heartedness. No clandestine surveillance, no provocative loyalty tests, and no enlisting third parties for espionage. If there is no safe way to clarify the situation, leave their thoughts alone—they don't belong to you anyway.

Weigh dry facts and their consequences soberly. If someone let you down, abandoned you in a bind, or routinely breaks commitments, you do not need to ascertain their motive before assessing the fallout and protecting yourself. Safeguarding your own peace of mind and physical safety should not be put on pause while waiting for philosophical revelations. Another person's words and apologies are merely new incoming data points, not a command to immediately welcome them back with open arms.

Your private scribble can just as easily land on a quick scheduling question, a sensible boundary, or a giant question mark where the other person's motives should be—without turning into a mandatory soul-baring confessional, a miracle cure, or a polished dossier for an evaluation committee. The whole point is merely keeping what you saw separate from what stung, and your own theories out of the other person's still-blank space, all without expecting crystalline omniscience; and if actual broken agreements, harm, or danger are staring you in the face, seeking real help and safety shouldn't be stalled while you neat-freak your way through every single box.

Key Quotation

"When you do not know." — The Analects, selected saying II.17, attributed to Confucius; short excerpt from James Legge's English translation. In context, this refers to a rigorous distinction between the known and the unknown, free from presumptuous claims of infallibly reading other people's souls.

Connections Between Traditions

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, IV.I: A rigorous demarcation between immediate sensory evidence and speculative inference reaching beyond it. A focused philosophical lens of mental sobriety that does not discard common sense, everyday causality, or the right to act according to circumstances.
The Analects, II.17: Recognizing knowledge as knowledge, and ignorance as ignorance. A classical ethical call for intellectual honesty; adjacent historical reflections on human character are not converted into a magic X-ray for peering into other people's thoughts.
Epley et al., Experimental Psychology: A compelling demonstration of how individuals egocentrically judge others' thoughts starting from their own perspective, followed by an adjustment toward the other's perspective that, under the conditions studied, could prove insufficient. A scientific reminder of the limits of intuition, rather than a psychiatric diagnosis slapped on tea-drinking companions.
Editorial Consideration: A meticulous separation of an external event, personal emotional experience, working hypothesis, and the inevitable unknown. This represents an editorial juxtaposition of distinct tasks rather than proof of a universal doctrine: one can preserve personal boundaries and mental clarity without fabricating hidden motives for others.

Primary Sources

S1. David Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I, selected paragraphs 20–23. L.A. Selby-Bigge, editor, second edition 1902, reprint of the 1777 edition; English original. Project Gutenberg 9662. Only the specified short fragment, its immediate context, and metadata were examined, without extending Hume’s broader skeptical philosophy onto personal relationship dramas. The Gutenberg page records releases in October 2003, January 2006, and November 2011.
S2. The Analects of Confucius, selected saying II.17 on the boundaries of knowledge. James Legge, classic translation. Project Gutenberg 3330. Examines strictly the specific saying on acknowledging ignorance and its immediate context, without claiming to encompass the broader Confucian canon. Release of July 2002 with an update in January 2021.
S3. Nicholas Epley; Boaz Keysar; Leaf Van Boven; Thomas Gilovich. Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, 87(3):327–339. PubMed 15382983; DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.87.3.327. Examined via the official author abstract: five studies describe starting evaluations from one's own perspective followed by an adjustment, which under the conditions studied could be insufficient. The full text, methods, and raw data were not verified here.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. He explores themes of internal transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and modern spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside research work, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding operate in real life between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.