Are We Losing the Ability to Be Surprised by Other People?
There was a time when meeting people meant discovering them gradually. You learned what made them laugh, what they cared about, where they came from, what irritated them, and which opinions might lead to a very long conversation over dinner. Today, we can arrive knowing quite a lot about people before anyone has said hello.
A social media profile might reveal someone’s politics, profession, religion, interests, causes, relationships, and opinions. Algorithms go further by constantly sorting people according to what they watch, follow, buy, share, and believe. Those categories help platforms predict what might hold our attention, but they can also influence how we begin to see one another.
Somewhere along the way, reading about people can start replacing the much slower process of really knowing them. That creates an interesting problem for kindness, because genuine kindness begins with recognising that the person in front of us may be more complicated than the story already constructed about them.
The Comfort of Putting People in Boxes
Categories aren’t inherently bad. Human beings have always used them to understand the world, and sometimes they provide genuinely useful information. Problems arise when a category stops being one piece of information about someone and becomes the explanation for everything they think, believe, or do.
Political labels provide an obvious example. Once we know how someone votes, we may assume we understand their values. Age can trigger another collection of expectations, as can religion, nationality, education, profession, wealth, gender, or the neighbourhood someone calls home.
Social media makes these shortcuts particularly easy because nuance isn’t especially efficient. A complicated human being takes time to understand, while a label can be processed in seconds. Kindness asks more of us.
It requires enough curiosity to wonder whether our assumptions are right and enough humility to accept that they might not be. Rather than pretending differences don’t exist, kindness allows us to encounter them without immediately deciding they tell us everything we need to know.
Certainty Can Close the Door on Curiosity About People
Curiosity changes the way we approach people. Instead of asking ourselves which category someone belongs to, we begin wondering how they arrived at their beliefs, what experiences shaped them, or whether there are things we unexpectedly share. None of this requires abandoning our own convictions.
You can strongly disagree with someone’s politics and still become curious about their life. Another person’s religious beliefs might feel completely foreign to you, yet a conversation could reveal that you share the same concern for your families, community, or future. Someone whose lifestyle makes little sense from the outside may have experiences you never knew about.
Kindness doesn’t require agreement before conversation can begin. Sometimes it simply asks us to leave enough room for another person to be more interesting than our assumptions about them.
Algorithms Like Predictability & People Aren’t Predictable.
Much of the digital world depends on prediction. Platforms become more useful and profitable when they can anticipate what will keep us watching, clicking, buying, or responding. People are considerably messier.
We contradict ourselves. Our opinions change. Experience alters us, relationships challenge us, and sometimes we discover that something we believed with absolute certainty ten years ago no longer makes sense.
A person can hold an opinion you find deeply frustrating while also showing remarkable generosity to a stranger. Someone who appears confident online may struggle privately with uncertainty. Another person may belong to a group you’ve made assumptions about while agreeing with you on issues you never expected.
Kindness makes space for that complexity. It resists reducing someone to their worst opinion, most awkward comment, political affiliation, or single moment of poor judgement. This doesn’t mean ignoring harmful behaviour or pretending every belief deserves respect. It means remembering that challenging an idea and dismissing an entire human being are not the same thing.
What Happens When We Stop Expecting Surprise?
Perhaps one of the quieter consequences of living in highly categorised environments is that we begin expecting people to behave according to type. We know what “people like that” supposedly think. Before long, we may stop asking questions because we assume we already know the answers.
Conversation becomes less about discovery and more about confirmation. We listen for evidence that supports the picture we’ve already formed, while contradictory information becomes easier to dismiss. Even kindness can become selective when we reserve our patience, generosity, or curiosity for people who already feel familiar.
Yet some of the most meaningful encounters happen precisely because another person refuses to fit neatly into the box we’ve prepared for them.
Perhaps they make us laugh when we expected hostility. Someone we assumed would judge us responds with warmth, while another person challenges an opinion we’ve carried for years. Occasionally, a stranger simply tells us a story that makes their life look completely different from the version we had imagined.
Those moments do more than surprise us. They remind us to remain curious.
Children Are Learning How to Categorise People Too
Children are growing up surrounded by systems that classify almost everything. Recommendation engines decide which videos appear next. Games sort players into rankings and abilities, while social platforms group interests and communities. Advertising becomes increasingly personalised, and online conversations frequently divide complicated issues into opposing camps.
Children also watch adults do something similar with people. They hear the jokes made about particular generations, the assumptions attached to political groups, and the casual comments about people from different backgrounds. Over time, those observations can teach them whether difference should invite curiosity or suspicion.
Kindness offers another possibility. We can help children learn that knowing one thing about somebody doesn’t mean knowing everything about them. Asking a thoughtful question can reveal more than making a confident assumption, while listening gives another person the opportunity to tell their own story rather than having one assigned to them.
These may sound like small social habits, but repeated often enough, they influence the kind of communities children eventually create.
Being Surprised Requires a Little Humility
Allowing people to surprise us means accepting something uncomfortable: we won’t always be right about them. Our first impression might be wrong. A stereotype we’ve absorbed could fall apart when confronted with an actual person, while someone we dismissed may have something important to teach us.
That uncertainty can feel uncomfortable in a culture that rewards confident opinions and immediate reactions. Kindness doesn’t always arrive with certainty, though. Sometimes it begins with a willingness to say, I don’t know enough about you yet.
There’s something generous in that position. It gives another person room to explain themselves, change, contradict expectations, and exist beyond whatever category first brought them to our attention.
Meeting People Before the Label
The answer isn’t to pretend labels don’t exist or that differences never matter. Some beliefs have real consequences, harmful behaviour still needs to be challenged, and kindness should never become an excuse for ignoring injustice. What we can resist is the temptation to turn one piece of information into an entire human being.
A kinder culture leaves room for complexity. It allows disagreement without automatically creating enemies, curiosity without requiring agreement, and boundaries without stripping another person of their humanity.
Perhaps one of the simplest acts of kindness available to us now is also one of the easiest to overlook: giving people the opportunity to be different from who we assumed they were.
In a world increasingly built to predict us, categorise us, and decide what we are likely to do next, preserving our capacity to surprise one another may be more important than it seems. It keeps curiosity alive, makes empathy possible, and reminds us that no label can contain the whole of a human life.
Join the Zorzle Conversation
We’d love you to be part of the Zorzle conversation. Together, we’re exploring how kindness, curiosity, courage and laughter can shape the world around us and the one our children will inherit.
Come and join us on Substack for more stories, ideas and conversations. Or settle in with the Love, Laughter & Kindness podcast as we meet people, share experiences and explore what a kinder future could look like.
