My Everyday Superpower🔗

Rather than inventing a superpower, I'm going to write about something I actually have. It's not super, and I don't think it's rare. I don't know the official term, but for now, let's call it pattern recognition.

How it works🔗

Detectives, scientists, and plenty of other professions build on pattern recognition. We all have it, but we use it for different reasons and in different ways. For me, it manifests itself in many forms.

Even if I'm in an unfamiliar part of the city, I learned to find important places like metro stations without a map. It doesn't matter if it's just one or two people at night or hundreds during rush hour. The flow of the crowd, together with the time of day, tells me which way to go. I follow the most logical route. And there it is. How do I know? I listen to the people around me.

Sometimes, I do something my wife is about to ask me to do. Although she is usually shocked when I take care of things without asking, it's not mindreading. It's simply that I see, out of the corner of my eye, how her posture changes when she is cold. Or her unintentional glance at her empty mug tells a story of coffee that has run out.

Many books and movies tell their endings early on. This doesn't make them any less interesting for me. In fact, it makes them safer for me to enjoy.

If I trigger a bug in a video game, I want to understand it so I can learn how to work around it.

Debugging at work feels like solving a puzzle, which I like. There, I don't have to live with defects, I can work to fix them. Especially if we do it together with teammates on a call, sharing a screen. It's like solving a murder mystery together with all the clues in front of us.

When it backfires🔗

As a teenager, I could already use it to a certain degree, but I got it wrong more often than I do nowadays. Realizing how often I was wrong helped me learn why. I shouldn't construct narratives. Life is not a story, it has a different structure. I only need to listen to the people or to what is actually there, and focus only on that, regardless of my thoughts or preconceptions. Otherwise, it will fail me.

If I'm stressed, worried, or angry, it's not my pattern recognition working but the thing Brené Brown calls the "shitty first draft".

Also, there is the Cassandra effect. People welcome encouragement, but when I point out pitfalls or risks, they blame me for being negative. Sometimes, people choose not to see the pattern until the consequences unfold. I don't understand them, but I've learned to keep my observations to myself. I use them to test my success ratio.

Reasons for having this ability🔗

There are many, but the main reason probably is that at certain points in my life, I felt my survival depended on recognizing even the slightest mood changes in others. To stay safe, I began listening more closely. And now I can't turn it off.