We interact with dozens, scores of people daily—and people are indeed very, very complex. So complex that we cannot possibly have time to consider any one person in her entirety. Our brains, those magnificent pattern-recognition machines, have solved this problem in the most brutally efficient way possible: caricature.

It's not just helpful—it's essential. We exaggerate some parts of an individual, diminish others, and pretend the result is the whole person. Especially the parts they choose to show us: it's much easier that way. He's cheerful, she's shy, he's sporty, she's arty. Like children's drawings where heads are too big and arms sprout from necks, we sketch people in broad, ridiculous strokes and call it understanding.

Think about it. Every individual you meet has had experiences as rich and vivid as yours—decades of dreams, disappointments, secret victories, private devastations. Their inner world contains multitudes you'll never glimpse. But there's no way to contain all your experiences and all the experiences of another in your head. Your own experiences are plenty hectic enough, thank you very much.

So we compress. We flatten. We reduce humans to elevator pitches.

The colleague who loves spreadsheets becomes “the numbers guy.” The friend who mentioned therapy once becomes “the one with anxiety.” Your aunt transforms into “the dramatic one” based on three memorable outbursts across fifteen years. We're all walking around as crude sketches of ourselves in other people's minds—simplified, categorised, filed away.

Hence, it can seem strange when we upset someone with no intention of doing so. Perhaps you let slip a word that holds deep significance to them—a word whose weight you could never realistically be expected to know. “Ambitious” might be a compliment to you but an accusation to someone who was told they cared more about career than family. “Sensitive” might sound gentle to your ears but land as “weak” in theirs.

These collisions happen because we're navigating with maps drawn by different cartographers. Your caricature of them doesn't match their caricature of themselves. Neither matches who they actually are. It's cartoon characters bumping into each other in the dark, surprised when the collision hurts.

But here's what's truly fascinating: we do this to ourselves too. We create our own caricature—the version we perform for others, the simplified self we present to make social interaction possible. We become complicit in our own reduction. “I'm not a morning person.” “I'm bad at math.” “I'm the creative type.” We offer up these pre-digested versions of ourselves because explaining our full complexity would be exhausting. For everyone.

The real tragedy isn't that we use caricatures—it's that we forget we're using them. We start believing our sketches are photographs. We defend our simplified versions of people as if they were documentary truth. “Oh, that's just how he is,” we say, as if people are fixed entities rather than constantly shifting kaleidoscopes of possibility.

Watch how quickly caricatures calcify into truth. Someone makes one joke about being disorganised, and suddenly every forgotten birthday card becomes evidence of their chaos. Someone excels at one presentation, and they're forever “good at public speaking” even as they privately wrestle with anxiety before every talk. The caricature becomes destiny.

And perhaps most insidiously: we start living down to our caricatures. If everyone treats you as “the funny one,” you learn to suppress your melancholy. If you're “the responsible one,” you hide your wild impulses. We become accomplices in our own simplification, trimming ourselves to fit the sketch others have drawn.

There's no solution here, by the way. We can't possibly hold the full complexity of every person we meet—our brains would melt from the computational load. But we can remember that our caricatures are just that: useful fictions, efficient lies, necessary distortions.

The next time someone surprises you by stepping outside the bounds of who you thought they were, remember: they were never who you thought they were. They were always infinitely more. Just like you.

Sept. 4, 2025, 7:20 p.m.

Written bY CYril