Perception—the thing that determines what individuals find or view as aesthetically pleasing. It’s the reason the range of things considered grotesque or ugly, the beautiful and everything else in between exists because an imaginary scale is created in our minds that when we look at something it has to be defined one way or another or else everything will be the same. There are standards for this depending on where you live but honestly if you consider it who even came up with them; was it one individual, a group, or once it was established everyone just did one of those mob decision making and anything outside of society’s standards is different. Many careers such as being an artist, writer, even in the medical field as an artist they have to perceive their own work to make sure it meets their own standards in their eyes and other artists’ to get a feel for other styles, writers have to perceive everything through the eyes/perspective of their own characters and not allow their character’s feelings to be distorted by their own while writing, and doctors, as an example, must attempt to perceive and read whether the person who is ill making rash decisions how the patient feels about their condition/status and how to ease them into the process of getting better.

Are people taught to perceive things? I’d say both yes and no; yes because of the fact that there are curious individuals who look into things and then there are societies that branch and group things making it so that the way we would probably originally perceive and describe things without it would not be as distorted. Societies dwindle down and diminish our first impressions of things therefore our way of piecing things together. Why tell me do people when crossing paths as they are walking glance down, or pretend they are looking elsewhere or anywhere but at the other person. Perception can create distance like the situation whence you believe somebody to be waving at you but when you turn around someone else is waving. You were misled by the other person’s intention yet it wasn’t not intended to be hurtful towards you. Perception not only affects how we think about other people or things but also how our reactions and actions are triggered in various situations. These feelings are transmitted in everything we do—our daily lives—the music, stories, behavior, emotions, and everything that acts as a normal response for that specific person depending on what they are accustomed to in regards to what they see on a regular basis and feel because of it.

Sometimes the way one person perceives something isn’t well-liked by another resulting in clashing thought processes. There is this psychological question where there is a doctor who can only save one person out of five; one of them is another doctor the other one is a teenage drug addict. The treatment you give should be equal. Another one is you’re driving a car down a one-way street and you lose control of the wheel and your options are you can swerve right into a rich man wearing a business suit and to the left is a homeless man and the answer is you’re supposed to let go of the wheel and let fate decide. This conveys how perception can rule our life sometimes and cause us to choose an answer that might not particularly be the ethical one in a particular case we are dealing with. Perception is a common ground we all have I think and it creates pathways in life for how each of us judges or treats certain scenarios and people. If we guide ourselves using our perception in ways that can better impact our lives without giving too little value of other decisions.