If you don't know who James Veitch is, well, he's a guy who made a pretty good name for himself as a ""pretending interlocutor" in all kind of strange situations. He's doing a lot of talks and presentations (I saw him first time on TED) in which he tells the stories of all these "pretending" encounters, in a very witty and humorous way.

One of them, probably the most famous, is the one in which he's engaging in a real conversation - via email - with a Nigerian scammer, to the point that he drives the man crazy. Like literally, the scammer gives up after being trolled hard by Veitch. You can watch this classic on YouTube here.

Recently, James released another video, in which he's playing the landlord for a certain tenant, who texts him by mistake.

Here's how it goes:

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A part from the laughter, I think there's a lot more to take from these videos.

Mind you, I'm not challenging their value of truth. I'm not convinced he actually had all those encounters, or if he did, he drastically embellish them in the videos. But that's really not that important.

What's important is what Veitch puts his finger on with them, namely the inherent confusion in human beings. In the case above, it was jut a question of fat fingers, a single digit wrong, and "boom!", you get a completely different person to talk with, while you still think you're talking with another one.

That's actually happening a lot more often than we'd like to believe in our lives. We get used to a certain type of face, and we assign to that face some psychological traits. For instance: "my grandfather has round cheeks, small nose and blue eyes" and he's a very tender and nice person. Chances are, next time we see a person with round cheeks, small nose and blue eyes, we will infer that that person is also nice.

But we really have no way to know that. Absolutely no way.

It goes like this in all the traits we assign to people, from beauty to ugliness, for calmness to anger, from patience to restlessness.

We take in a limited set of data and then start inferring from that set of data in order to cope with our world.

Statistically, this works out relatively well.

Otherwise the world as we know it would have been extinct by now.

But even if we do one single mistake, it can costs us a lot.

For instance, we have a certain model of physical beauty and, when we find a woman with these traits, we insist on starting a relationship. But beauty or ugliness is just one facet of a person. There's also emotional balance, appetite for work, intelligence, compassion and so on, and so forth. The chances that our physical beauty model will also have all of the above are very small. So, after we already engaged in the relationship and we discover, after some time, that the person in front of us is not who we thought she was, we become frustrated. If we already married her, then there's real trouble.

But there's nothing wrong with her.

There's nothing wrong with James Veitch in the video above. He's just a guy. The tenant made a mistake. Just like we, when we inferred that just because our partner fits in our physical beauty criteria she would be a good relationship choice, made a huge mistake. A real relationship is made of a lot more than that.

Truth is, our reality fabric is way thinner than we think. We base a lot of our day to day actions on assumptions and we keep going on, building a certain model of the world, when these assumptions confirm or not.

But deep down, the world is really hectic and our cognitive tools are way too small to really make sense of it.

We think we can control the world, but what we can really do is to merely react to outside events, which are way out of our control.

The way we react to these events will eventually change what we experience.

But I will leave this part for another article.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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