The biggest game of the year

A ten-year-old in Yanbu has a basketball final on Thursday afternoon. Under-elevens, a school league, a few parents in the stands.

Nobody outside the gym will ever hear the score. To an adult it is a small game. To him it is the most important thing that has ever happened. He cannot sleep the night before. The stakes he feels are not smaller because the league is.

An older woman's parcel is a day late. It holds a present for her grandson, whose birthday is tomorrow. Next to the real problems in the world, it barely counts. For her, today, it is the whole week.

It is easy to look at situations like these and adjust them to our own scale. It is only a school game. It is only a day's delay. And it is almost always a mistake, because nobody experiences their own life on someone else's scale. The feeling is not measured against the feelings of strangers. It is measured against the rest of that person's week.

Nearly everything people choose is driven by feeling, and feelings are always relative to the person having them. Someone choosing a phone, a sofa or a bag of oranges is not buying the object as it would seem to anyone else. They are buying how it makes them feel, given everything else going on in their life.

That is why the customer who seems to be overreacting usually is not. They are reacting to their stakes, not ours.