Moments of Asymmetrical Importance

Sometimes I think about how every single person I meet has an entire backstory of childhood, relationships, ups/downs, etc. For every minute of my life I experience, there are 3 billion other people experiencing a minute of their life.

Even when people are interacting within the same environmental context, their experiences are different. I’ve noticed lately how different these interactions ‘feel’ between people.

Consider a job interview. They are interviewing 100 people for 4 spots. You are extremely excited about the opportunity - this is a dream job for you that you have worked towards for years. Palms are sweaty, knees weak, and arms are heavy. But the interviewer has 8 interviews that day, and this is the 5th day of interviewing. Even if well-intentioned, they simply can’t care as much as you do about this interaction.

Figure 1

This asymmetry happens more often than I realized. Most doctor visits fit into this. No matter how supportive and empathetic your doctor is, you are their 19th patient of the day at the end of a 5 day week when they have been doing this for years. Surgical management of bowel ischemia is a pretty significant event from the point of view of the patient, but rather routine for the surgeon. I’ve been told you will never forget the birth of your first child, but there are people in the room helping deliver the child that won’t remember your name by the time their head hits a pillow that night.¹

Figure 2

Sometimes dating falls into this asymmetry (and it is probably a red flag). So does meeting celebrities. Most service jobs (electrician, plumber, etc.) where you are called to fix something probably have an element of this.

It would be convenient if there were Significance Meters™ that displayed what degree of importance was currently being felt by people and that number was displayed above their head. Imagine riding the subway. You look around and see a bunch of people with ‘low’ Significance Meter™ values as passengers go on their daily commute in a quasi-aware state, half asleep. But there’s one person in the corner that is different. Their Significance Meter™ readout is high. You take off your augmented reality glasses and, lo and behold, that person blends right in with the crowd. You never would have known. What’s going on in their mind? Are they on the way to an interview? Heading to a funeral? Overwhelmed with anxiety and dysphoria for an unclear reason?

The importance that accompanies our experiences is independent of the valence of the experience. Valence refers to if things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some experiences are significant and exciting. Other significant and painful.²

Significance Meters™ would help people empathize with each other, but we don’t have that kind of combination of augmented reality and neuroscience tech yet. Therefore, situations like the subway above are going to slip by unnoticed (but they are happening all the time!). I don’t have really any actionable intuitions about this ‘Moments of Asymmetrical Significance Model’, but once I defined it, I have noticed it more and more often.

1. This isn’t to downplay the idea that people in healthcare don’t care. It highlights the opposite - things are really important to patients. I.e., the right bar in Fig 2 is sufficiently tall enough. It’d be unfair to expect it to be higher. Nonetheless, the left bar can get really tall, and that shouldn’t be ignored.

2. On a side note, I wonder how baseline ‘importance’ varies from person to person. What role this has in mental suffering (or lack there of)? and how malleable this is?