The things you can tell about someone in five minutes
The modern instinct is to insist that first impressions are shallow, and that real character only reveals itself over time and intimacy and long exposure.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Only God can judge me.
We are buried in these. An entire culture of proverbs designed to stop you from reading what’s right in front of you. The message is consistent and relentless: that drawing conclusions about someone quickly is shallow, reductive, and unfair. That the decent thing to do is suspend judgment, give people time, wait for the “real” person to emerge from behind whatever they’re showing you.
This might be one of the most costly things polite society has agreed to pretend.
I’m not saying first impressions are perfect. Of course they’re not. But the insistence that they’re worthless trains people to ignore pattern recognition that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for a reason, and replaces it with a politeness norm that benefits the people most invested in not being read accurately.
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A geologist can read a cliff face and tell you what happened sixty million years ago. The striation, the color, the angle of the grain… none of it is decorative. It’s compressed time. Every layer is a record of what happened to the rock. What pressures it endured, what temperatures it survived, what was deposited on it and what was stripped away. The surface isn’t hiding the history. The surface is the history.
People work the same way, if you’re willing to read them.
Most of us aren’t because we’ve been shamed out of it. The modern instinct is to insist that first impressions are shallow, and that real character only reveals itself over time and intimacy and long exposure. This is partially true and mostly self-serving, because what it actually protects is not other people’s complexity, but our own reluctance to act on what we’ve already seen.
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The word character comes from the Greek kharaktēr—an engraved mark, a stamp pressed into metal or wax. Not a quality someone has, but an impression something makes. The word assumed that identity is legible on the surface, that who you are is not locked away in some inner vault but cut into you, visibly, by the accumulated force of how you’ve lived.
The Romans gave us persona, from the masks worn onstage in theater. A persona wasn’t a deception, it was a functional truth. The face you present is the face that acts in the world. The ancients didn’t agonize over whether the mask concealed the “real” person underneath. The mask was the person, at least the person that anyone else had to deal with.
Somewhere between these two etymologies, modernity made a strange move. It decided that surfaces are unreliable and interiors are sacred and that the “real” person is hidden underneath, accessible only through sustained closeness. That reading someone quickly is a failure of generosity rather than a function of intelligence.