The guy who cut you off in traffic. The colleague who snapped in the meeting. The cashier who wouldn’t look you in the eye.
Your first thought: what a jerk.
But you only saw one moment. You didn’t see the phone call that came an hour earlier, or the three nights without sleep, or the pain that won’t let up.
All behavior makes sense when you have enough information. The problem is we almost never do.
The generous interpretation isn’t the naive one. It’s the accurate one. It accounts for everything you can’t see instead of pretending there’s nothing to miss.
If someone caught the worst thirty seconds of your worst day, they’d have a story about you too.
And they’d be wrong.