People are complicated, so be curious about them all the time

Two years ago, I wrote a blog on my apparent breakthrough in learning social skills. When I read back the blog, I realized how shallow my understanding of people was then. Here is a excerpt I pulled out from the blog:

I feel disappointed and also a little arrogant when I realize my newly befriended peers don’t fit to my high expectations. They may be too quiet for too good, they may be sexually skittish (for men), they may be lazy, weak, anxious, stupid, unhygienic. Along the process, you face the bizarre experience when you discovered the types of people the you privately mock at becomes your friend.

Unto a Full Grown Man

It makes me cringe now. My conclusion at the time was that I should improve my tolerance for other people’s shortcomings. In retrospect, I had a deeply negative, domineering perception of people.

I can confirm this because when I first joined my company, I quickly attributed the dysfunction I observed to the stupidity, laziness, and lack of intelligence of the people around me. Seniors who didn’t communicate and assigned tasks erratically. Subcontractors who concealed problems for six months. Managers who said one thing to the boss and did another with their juniors.

I did what I always did when I found myself in a dysfunctional environment — I tried to change it. Because I distrusted and disdained my superiors, I refused to listen to their advice. I acted like a dick to them. I deliberately neglected parts of my job I considered boring or unimportant. I thought I was doing them a favour by showing up, and doing extra work to push the company forward.

Then, a few months back, my boss threatened to fire me if I continued acting like I knew everything. Since this would cancel my PR eligibility, I was terrified.

I kept quiet after that. Put my head down and worked. I took courses and networked on the side. Gradually, I got to a position where I was making decisions myself — and that was when I started to see things differently.

While handling bigger tasks, I found myself incidentally reproducing the same bad practices I had condemned. I got frustrated at my supervisors’ slow output after spending whole days giving orders without going to site. My subcontractors didn’t close defect comments because I hadn’t given them clear enough locations. I made wrong calls because it forced a decision before the latest information was available. I said things that weren’t entirely truthful — not because I was dishonest, but because I was learning to manage anxiety, get things done, and avoid unnecessary conflict. I let harmful decisions pass without pushback because I couldn’t be bothered to advise the boss when he seemed unreceptive.

What became clear is that when I was judging them for bad outcomes, they were all just making bets. Probabilistic bets, with incomplete information, under time pressure, with limited resources and limited motivation.

Some carried resentment they felt powerless to act on. Some were navigating the system to pay their bills. Some had absorbed bad habits from above and were promoted precisely because of it. But none of them were evil. None were actively cultivating a corrosive work culture. They were adapting to the system, scrambling the crumbs and pieces they could gather to build some semblance of the life they wanted.

Their situation partly became mine. It was the first time in my life I hated going to work. I learned not to go all-in. I learned to keep quiet and do the bare minimum. I did all of that to survive in an environment where initiative and hard work led to burnout, not progress.

My younger self would have judged me for it. He would have labelled this man dim, going nowhere, just like so many people he’d dismissed before. But I now understand that sometimes, it wasn’t the person — it was the environment. The social context we inhabit can drastically shape our behaviour. That was a hard pill to swallow. I thought I was invincible, that I could thrive anywhere. My site experience dismantled that cleanly.

That shift — from “why are these people so stupid” to “they were making a bet with what they had” — is one of the most useful things I now carry. It doesn’t mean you stop holding people and the culture accountable. It just means you have a more measured understanding of how things actually work.

Understanding what drives the behaviour of the people around me has left me feeling ambivalent toward them. They have shortcomings, constraints, desires, and perceptions that are distinct and overlapping all at once. I find myself feeling distrustful, grateful, and pitying toward the same colleagues at the same time. That mixture of emotions, I think, is what a functioning work relationship actually is. We are all struggling in ways the other cannot see. Some are ahead of us. Some are behind.

People’s lives are more complicated and more difficult than you first assume. It doesn’t mean people cannot choose to fight for the life they wanted, ot that you cannot choose to exit from this kind of dynamic. You just understand the nature of the process more honestly.