Is everyone you've ever met just a connotation of yourself?

Michael
Sep 13
3 min read

From psychology, philosophy of mind, and even mysticism, I've pondered on this question ever since thinking of it in 2015. 10 Years has passed since I first had this thought to which I recently found in my phone archives in 2025. Now, I just might have been able to shape the inquiry in order to understand it and therefore share it with others who may wonder similar deep philosophical questions.

One way to look at it is through projection in psychology: we often interpret others through our own experiences, values, and biases. In that sense, every person we meet is filtered through the lens of our own mind; so they are, in effect, a connotation or reflection of us.

But there’s another perspective: other people exist outside of our consciousness, with their own independent realities. Meeting them is an encounter between two subjectivities. You may only ever perceive them in relation to yourself, but that doesn’t make them reducible to you.

Mystical traditions (like Vedanta or certain strains of Buddhism) sometimes lean toward this question’s implication: that others are aspects of the same consciousness, and the division between “self” and “other” is more illusory than real.

So... in one sense, yes, everyone you meet is a connotation of yourself because your mind shapes the meaning of the encounter. But in another, they remain whole beings beyond that connotation.

This brings us to looking through the lens of two worlds: psychology, and/or spiritual philosophy.

1. Psychological lens

Perception as projection: You never experience another person “as they are,” only as they appear to you. Their words, tone, and actions are filtered through your memory, emotions, and expectations. For example, if you meet someone with the same laugh as an old friend, you may instantly trust them — not because of who they are, but because of what that laugh means to you.
Mirror theory: Carl Jung suggested that people we meet often reflect aspects of ourselves — the “shadow” (parts of us we deny or repress), the “persona” (the masks we wear), or the “anima/animus” (our inner opposite). So everyone becomes a mirror of something inside you, whether admired or resisted.

2. Philosophical lens

Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty): Other people are only ever experienced in your consciousness. You don’t access their inner life directly; you infer it. Thus, they are always partly a construction of your own mind.
Solipsism: The extreme version says only you exist, and everyone else is a projection. That’s logically hard to disprove, but most thinkers find it unsatisfying because it collapses the richness of life.
Existentialism (Sartre, Buber): Meeting others is what reveals the limits of the self. Sartre famously said “Hell is other people” — not because others are bad, but because they remind us we’re not the only centre of meaning. Buber, on the other hand, spoke of “I–Thou” encounters, where meeting another is an opening into the infinite.