I’m not sure where this insight or thought experiment came from. Possibly a professor in undergrad or a weird book I happened to pick up. It pertains to the continual quest for self-knowledge. It goes like this:
Imagine everything that is true about you as a box full of facts, beliefs, ideals, fears, and other esoterica that make up the totality of you. You yourself of course have access to a lot of this information, and others have access to some, but not all of that info. This can be visualized as the following:
There are the things that you know about yourself that others also know: you are male, 36 years old, from Wisconsin, an atheist, middle-class architect.
There are things that you know about yourself that others don’t know: you are afraid of the ocean, you love the smell of burnt coffee, you once saw a ghost as a child but told no one.
And then there are things that others know about you, that you don’t know about yourself: you have bad body odor, you tend to talk over your partner when she’s telling a story, you hate to be complimented.
And finally, there are things about you that no one else knows, and that you yourself don’t know… yet. Aspects of your own personality, psyche, abilities, tendencies that are hidden. It’s the sheltered Jewish boy who goes on a school trip to Louisiana and realizes he loves Zydeco dancing. It’s the elderly woman who starts playing “Call of Duty” with her grandson and discovers that she is fantastic at first person shooters.
It’s this mysterious orb of undiscovered aspects of yourself that makes life so fascinating. I choose to believe that at any age you can uncover new things about yourself, grow new branches, heal broken bits. That can happen at 5, 25, or 55.
For example, at the Unitarian Universalist Church I’ve been attending, one of the clergy delivered a sermon where she revealed that she had recently been diagnosed with level 1 autism. She is in her late 60s. Rather than find this scary, she viewed the diagnosis as a gift. She finally understood why her brain worked the way it did — that she wasn’t broken, she just processed information differently from others.
I hope that I keep that same drive to continually seek to grow, to understand more, to stay open to new insights and perspectives even as I get older.
IMAGE CREDIT: AI-generated image by ChatGPT / Dall-E on February 18, 2025