Different modes of thinking

Spend any time writing online, and you’ll inevitably run into people, at times, who seem to have an odd understanding of what you published.

Some of this is down to laziness – people scan the text and react to what they assume you wrote. Sometimes it’s an actual misunderstanding that’s either down to bad writing on your part or poor reading on theirs.

But more and more I’ve had to face the possibility that my thought processes are just substantively different from the way the majority approaches the world.

Occasionally, I get reactions from intelligent people who clearly read the text (or watched the video), understood it, but nonetheless decided to reply with what to me is a non-sequitur at best or wilful misrepresentation at worst.

It’s only when I started to seriously read up on autism that I began to realise that the issue probably comes down to different types of thinking, which isn’t a misunderstanding per se (though, that might be my literal-mindedness again).

I tend to think from the bottom-up. I gather facts, observations, ideas, and references and build up to the overall thought or idea, brick by brick, concept by concept. My understanding of pretty much anything, anywhere – work, theory, society, communications, culture – comes from this very labour-intensive process. And, yeah, that includes any form of social interaction, which is part of why I find it difficult and usually overwhelming.

But most other people seem to operate from the top-down: they seem to start with what’s supposed to be, or with the values they hold consciously or unconsciously, and then pick and choose the facts and observations that support that.

For example, there have been periods when – looking at the news and facts we had access to here in the West – it looked like Ukraine was having a hard time fighting off Russia’s invasion.

But saying so to my dad at the time made him outright angry. To him, by making a simple factual observation of that moment in time, I was effectively declaring support for Russia, which prompted a lengthy explanation that, no I wasn’t doing any such thing. Invasions bad.

Top-down thinking: Russia bad, therefore you look for facts that show that Ukraine might be doing well. Looking for other facts meant you didn’t believe in the “Russia bad” value.

(And, yes, I’m exaggerating to drive the point home.)

Bottom-up thinking: look at the facts and try and figure out what kind of big picture the facts, when taken together, show you. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don’t. Values don’t play a part.

Of course, it’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy. Most things are. Training and education affects your thought processes. Your approach can vary depending on interests, subject matters, and energy levels. But people tend to lean more to one side than the other. I’m very much on the bottom-up end while it seems like the majority is top-down.

This explains why I’m so often accused of being pessimistic in something I wrote when I know for a fact the writing very much wasn’t pessimistic or optimistic. The text didn’t have much of a position on the future course of events at all. I’m perfectly capable of pessimism, but not in these cases.

It happens because, to many people, bad news is pessimism.

This feels like a bunch of hot nonsense to my extremely literal mind. It’s already happened, has systemic causes, and bad things with systemic causes are very hard to unwind. Describing the present can’t be pessimism. The pessimism-optimism axis points to the future not the present.

It’s like calling a report of an earthquake “pessimism”.

This may sound silly, but it is how many react. If you write a report about people who disregarded safety guidelines and built on a fault line, only to subsequently lose their homes in an earthquake, you will get replies like “well, I live on a fault line and I haven’t felt an earthquake yet.”

To them, your factual report of an earthquake elsewhere is pessimism as, when they hear the news filtered through their top-down, value-driven thinking, it sounds more like this:

“I like where I live and hope there won’t be an earthquake. But he’s talking about earthquakes elsewhere so is effectively saying that there will be an earthquake where I live. What a pessimist.”

Replace “earthquake” with “effects of climate change”, or “real estate bubble”, or “deteriorating work environment in the software industry” and I think I begin to understand why I keep getting what feels like very odd responses to what I write.

So…

“My job isn’t like that!”

I wasn’t writing about your job or your employer. Glad you’re in a good place, though. I was making an observation of what’s happening to many people in the industry, how their jobs are increasingly making them miserable, and pointing out that the sensible thing for an individual in that situation to do is to leave. You can’t feed your family if your health fails or burnout takes you out of the job market entirely.

As the airline employees say: “put your own oxygen mask on first before you help others.” Because if you’re unconscious, you can’t help others avoid suffocation.

The mismatch between my mode of thinking and that of much of the rest of the world has always been an issue. People keep hearing things I didn’t say, assume I have value positions I don’t, interpret my general observations as personal criticism of them, and read an emotional dimension in text where there isn’t one.

That last part is especially frustrating because I generally try to make the intended emotions of a text as explicit as I can in the writing without spelling them out directly. I use tone, vocabulary, and style to try and project annoyance, excitement, anger, joy, or sadness as appropriate, and much of the time people choose instead to make up an emotion out of their own biases instead of reading the text.

I could just litter the text with emoji, but that’d be just outright obnoxious and people manage to misinterpret those as well.

I’ve realised that I can’t fix this by adding more detail to what I write. More detail comes across to most people as rationalisation or excuses, and often makes them more sceptical, not less.

Even this, a short note where I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, trying to understand where people’s reactions come from, will probably be interpreted by some through a top-down value-centred lens.

“You’re being judgemental! My reaction to your writing is valid.”

Of course, it’s valid. I’m just saying that I have a hard time understanding it.

“Saying you don’t understand it is being judgemental.”

No, it’s factual. Don’t hear what I didn’t say. My mind works differently. When I say that I don’t understand something I mean exactly that. I don’t mean it as a roundabout way of saying “I don’t understand why you said that,” which is a completely different sentence and thought.

I’m a literal-minded, bottom-up thinker. I generally mean only what I say – except for the occasional very obvious literary or cultural reference that you might be missing, but that’s genuinely your fault, not mine. I can’t read Tolstoy for you.

I’m sincerely trying to understand why people react the way they do because I need to function in a world that for the most part thinks along very different lines than I do.

I do appreciate the effort that it takes to convey a reaction to me, and I’m always grateful for feedback. I’m thankful whenever people take the time to convey appreciation or criticism. It’s valuable to know that I’m not just throwing words into an unappreciative void.

But I often just don’t understand the responses.

Knowing what kind of thinking produced the response is helpful, but only up to a point. Sometimes the reaction comes from an expectation of a shared reality that doesn’t exist, so I just don’t have the context or information needed to understand where people are coming from.

Not without mind-reading, that is.

This is fine as long as people don’t expect me to reply to every response or come up with a witty comeback to every point.

As long as “I don’t know what they’re saying or why, but I’ll like it to show that I saw and appreciated it” remains a valid response, we’ll be fine.