I believe I may have discovered a new cognitive bias: the ‘sorted fallacy’, closely related to its cousin, the imposter syndrome - here goes:
Most people secretly believe that others are more tidy, clear, coherent and generally have-their-act-together than they really are. I believe this happens all the time, not just to disorganised, self-employed parents and writers like me, but to anyone looking out at the world through the windscreen of their messy, confusing, rollercoaster inner life.
Everyone needs to curate their appearance and external comms a little in order to function in the world. It’s not surprising that the illusion of other people's curation - of their slick or not-so-slick external presentations - engenders the illusion of non-existent sortedness.
Meanwhile - as you and I both know - our inner life, like our messy back bedroom, is fabulously incoherent – held together by our expectations, habits and rituals like a house held together by bits of sticking plaster.
There is also of course, the opposite trap - believing you are better than others or always right (the superiority illusion). It makes perfect sense to me that some people feel superior, others inferior - reality hates imbalance. It also makes sense that many of us harbour both illusions at the same time, simultaneously feeling better and worse than - the one bias arguing with and cancelling out the other.
To be human is to be deluded. Isn't it fun?
There's not much we can do except notice it. The best medicine I find, though, is to remember the truth - that I am mostly wrong about everyone: old or young, rich or poor, smiling or scowling, no one out there is 'sorted'.
Or if they are, I don't know them.
What a piece of work is a man, so infinite in reason…
FYI. Etymology moment: the word ‘sorted’ in its sense of ‘sorted out’ originated in 1990s British rave / drug culture, as in -
…before becoming a global metaphor for being organised.
And now it's a cognitive bias.
I calmly await my Nobel Prize.
Happy thanksgiving!
www.laurenceshorter.com
Love it! I somehow know that comparing my messy insides to someones curated outside is a fools game, still as a flawed human I am in the habit of doing it. Sometimes I catch myself, sometimes I don't. Games are like that.