Blindness & Bias
Blindness & Bias - Day 36
On this day I spoke from a place of emotion.
I admitted that sometimes I feel a real sadness watching how easily people get blinded by their own preconceptions. We generalise. We categorise. We decide, often within seconds, what a person or a type of person must be — and from that point on, we only look for evidence that confirms it.
Judgement by appearance. Judgement by accolades. Judgement by first impressions. Each of these is its own quiet trap, but underneath all three sits something bigger and more stubborn: judgement through old, outdated lenses.
This is the one that troubles me most. Someone meets you once, forms a verdict, and then carries that verdict forward indefinitely — never checking whether it's still accurate. You could change entirely, and the lens wouldn't know. It would keep reporting the old version of you back as though it were current, because lenses don't update on their own. We have to choose to update them, and most of us never do. We mistake the snapshot for the person.
More than half the time, I believe we see only what we're looking for. Bias narrows the vision before the looking even starts.
This isn't just about others. It's about me too. And the more I sit with it, the more I realise this same exact mechanism — the outdated lens — has spent years operating on the inside, pointed at myself.
For a long time, I ran on autopilot. Years of it. And during those years, I formed a verdict about who I was and what I was capable of — much the same way a stranger forms a snapshot judgement of someone they've just met. I decided, somewhere along the way, that certain things simply weren't available to me. My shoulders were finished. My body was what it was. The version of discipline other people seemed to have just wasn't part of my wiring. I looked at myself once, drew a conclusion, and then — without realising it — spent years treating that conclusion as current fact.
It wasn't current. It was outdated the moment I decided it, and it only got more outdated the longer I left it unexamined.
I couldn't do a single pull-up two years ago. Now I've completed a ring muscle-up. If I were still judging myself through the lens I formed back then, none of the work that happened in between would even register — I'd still be looking for evidence that confirms the old verdict, the same way a person with a fixed impression of someone else only notices what fits the story they've already written.
That's the part that troubles me most about bias turned inward: it doesn't just distort how we see strangers. It can quietly imprison our own future inside a story about who we used to be.
And it isn't only about physical capability. The same outdated lens shows up around worthiness. I notice it in myself even now — a quiet, old belief that I'm only acceptable when I'm producing something, moving forward, achieving visibly. That belief was forged in an earlier season, probably when output was the only proof I had that I was changing at all. But I'm not in that season anymore, and the lens hasn't caught up. So a quiet day still gets read as falling behind. Rest still gets filtered through a verdict that no longer matches who I actually am or what I've already proven.
Outdated lenses don't ask permission before they distort what's in front of us. Not when we point them at other people. Not when we point them at ourselves.
When we approach someone with a fixed lens, we don't meet them — we meet our own projection. I said that earlier today, thinking about strangers. But it's just as true pointed inward. When I approach my own present self with an old lens — old beliefs about capability, about worth, about what's possible for someone like me — I don't meet who I actually am. I meet a projection. An outdated file I never bothered to update.
Bias is a thief. It steals clarity, it steals connection, and it steals the chance to see people — including ourselves — as we actually are right now, rather than as we once were.
That's why this matters so much to me, and why I think it matters for anyone trying to believe that change is real. If the lens never updates, the proof of change never registers — not in how we see each other, and not in how we see ourselves. Someone can transform completely and still get judged by the person they used to be, including by their own mind.
The sadness isn't despair. It's a call to awareness. If we can catch the lens before it decides what we're allowed to see — in someone else, or in the mirror — we can begin to loosen its grip. And once it loosens, we might actually notice what's true: that change already happened, and the only thing still living in the past is the lens itself.
"Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things." — Epictetus
How open-minded are you about the possibility that the verdict you're carrying — about yourself, or about someone you've already decided you understand — might simply be out of date?
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