The other day I replaced an old, cracked mirror in my bathroom. When I took the existing one down, suddenly the room seemed to lose half its size. Turns out it’s just a claustrophobic little room with a toilet, sink, and tub.

The sense that there’s open space in front of me while I brush my teeth is an illusion, but that illusion is much more familiar to me than the reality. In other words, my mirror-skewed impression of the room – the way it seems – feels more real and is more relevant to my life than the room’s actual properties.

The new mirror opened it up spatially again, and removed a bit of dinge and disorder from the view. This even made me seem better — I feel like a slightly more dignified person looking into an immaculate mirror than a damaged one.

The way things seem matters a lot, perhaps more than the way they actually are. You get a hint of this whenever you dress up in good clothes. Even if nobody else is around, you probably feel more capable and more formidable. Sharp attire can change, at least for the moment, who you seem to be, even though the being beneath the clothes shouldn’t be changed by draping new things on it.

Changing the way something seems, even when it doesn’t change the way it is, can have concrete downstream effects on all sorts of things. I already know I do better work when I’m better dressed, because it imparts a certain dignity to the writing process. A room made seemingly more spacious by mirrors affects the mind and mood, which affects behavior and quality of life, even how much someone would pay for the house. Plating a meal attractively makes it more enjoyable to eat, even though the tastebuds are encountering the same substances either way.

I had an interesting lesson in seemingness on my first trip to New York. Manhattan is one of my favorite places for many reasons, but one is that it was the first place I’d ever been where I felt almost no self-consciousness in public. Everybody is too busy and too world-weary to judge you. You could walk down the street in a clown costume and nobody will give you a second look. New Yorkers have seen it all, and your insignificance as an ordinary person is so much more obvious in a New York crowd than maybe anywhere else.

This felt very liberating, and it diminished my background self-consciousness permanently. It didn’t return when I got home, because a long-standing illusion had been dispelled. Most of my self-consciousness had stemmed from the subjective sense — the seemingness — that strangers are evaluating me constantly. In New York, it wasn’t possible to believe this. The indifference of the crowd was palpable. When I got home, I was able to feel that same indifference, that same basic tolerance, from the strangers here too. It no longer seemed so believable, here or anywhere, that my appearance or mannerisms were under constant scrutiny.

Persistent, unchallenged seemingness can dominate a person’s life, and make or break some of their prospects. If it seems to you that your creative work is no good, your life path will naturally veer away from creative work, reinforcing that impression. If it seems to you that you’re profoundly talented and worthy of praise, you’ll probably be more successful than you would otherwise, regardless of how talented you actually are.

How a thing is, and how it seems, are two layers of reality that can move independently, and we can take advantage of that. Psychologists sometimes talk about cognitively reframing an experience – consciously trying on different interpretations of the same event, because quite often it’s the interpretation that determines everything about the event’s impact. The body-buzz of anxiety can seem like the feeling of everything going wrong, of your complete ineptitude in the face of a challenge, or as excitement, energy, readiness for what’s about to happen. The difference consists entirely of what the anxious sensations seem to be about, because they’re the same bodily response.

This idea that seemingness often matters more than actuality, and can be managed artfully or ignored at your peril, is another example of ancient human wisdom people have mostly struggled to employ.

Famously, Hamlet acknowledged that “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” before insisting to his friends that his home country of Denmark is, for him, a prison, because it seemed so given his state of despair.

Fourteen centuries earlier, Marcus Aurelius took a more rigorous approach to the same insight. In order to avoid getting caught up in reflexive impressions – unhelpful forms of seemingness — he practiced viewing all things as plain material realities, distinct from how those things seemed to the thinking mind:

“When meat or other dainties are before you, you reflect: this is a dead fish, fowl, or pig. This Falernian is some of the juice from a bunch of grapes. My purple robe is sheep’s wool stained with a little gore from a shellfish.”

Part of Aurelius’s struggle to keep perspective as most powerful man in the world revolved around reminding himself incessantly that he’s just a guy — an aging human body wrapped in a purple robe, wearing an Imperial diadem on its head, who other men happen to regard, for the moment, as important.

We’re not all emperors, but we are all easily caught in illusory worlds of seemingness, often for the worse. Ideally, you’d want to embrace empowering impressions where you can, and drop the disempowering ones. But seemingness overlays everything; it’s hard to even see where a thing and its impressions diverge. Which is the real bathroom? The claustrophobic, mirrorless one, or the one I actually experience 99% of the time?

The Stoic exercise described above – frequently returning to the obvious material facts of a thing, and letting impressions of meaning swirl about like the fickle breezes they are – does help to temper some of the needless reactivity.

I’m operating a fast-moving road machine, among other such machines.

I’m buying plant and animal parts at the current market price.

I’m having worried thoughts about a potential upcoming challenge.

I’m a human and I’m alive.

Raw, unsensational facts like these are more dependable than any of the abstract possibilities swirling around them.

Like all perennial human dilemmas, both Western and Eastern sages have suggestions. Mindfulness practice can serve as a more formalized version of the Stoic practice: you sit and notice a feeling, a sensation, an urge, or an impression, allowing it to be there just as it appears, dropping all interpretations without fuss, noticing how quickly thoughts about it arise and dissipate. Then another thing appears and changes and dissipates, and so on. The mind begins to see, a little more clearly at least, what actually makes up life and what is fabricated by the mind.

Seemingness is hugely powerful. We live at its mercy. We’ve all had the experience of over-interpreting the punctuation or word choice in an email or text, convinced that the other person is angry because they ended with a stark period instead of a lighthearted exclamation mark or emoji. More broadly, we live under powerful impressions about what we’re destined for, what’s out of reach, whether we’re capable of cooking or algebra or career change or genuine friendship — all just seemingness. The more you can tease the two layers apart a bit, the more paths forward become possible.

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Photos by Lin Po-Tsen, Adam Watson, Enrique Alarcon, Suhyeon Choi