Thoughts

On the Importance of Reputations

 At first the idea of first impressions is absolutely absurd. The idea that we gauge a person by the first few seconds of contact seems both absurd and unfair. People are far more complex than what can be surmised by so little contact. Nevertheless I think that a persons first few interaction with another persons are important. These few encounters are important because they build a reputation. During this time you both build a sort of a ghost of the other that you hold in you mind. It is this ghost which is then used to participate in imaginary conversations, which I wrote about earlier. I think that this ghost is super important because it is the version of you that will interact with the other person most in many cases. When you decide whether or not to ask someone a question or confide in them you usually decide what they would probably say beforehand and use it as  a sort of guideline for whether you should really have that conversation with them. I think because of the accumulation of these fake interactions that first impressions are so much more important than any others. After the first impressions you have to fight against the ghost.

     I think everyone at some point has a fake conversation with someone else in which their ghost says something which the real person would absolutely not have said. We all get mad sometimes and we make a caricature of others in our minds. With certain ghosts though we cannot really do this easily. With very kind people it is difficult to force them to say something clearly mean. By ensuring that other perception of you is such a way as to prevent them making you say the things that you least want you to think you would say you can improve their later perceptions of you. Of course you cannot protect against every possible way to make you say something wrong.

     Another thing to keep in mind is that not making contact with people unnecessarily prevents them from making a ghost of you that is not like you. Especially in cases where there are very few initial interaction this can go very awry. If your first interaction is one in which you make a mistake and then you do not interact for a while then the other persons ghost of you is inaccurately bad and then it gets cemented by time.