Neil Alderman pausing midsentence during a conversation with his wife in their Montclair, N.J., kitchen on Tuesday evening. He had been describing the weather. Credit: Margaret Huang/The New York Time5
Neil Alderman pausing midsentence during a conversation with his wife in their Montclair, N.J., kitchen on Tuesday evening. He had been describing the weather. Credit: Margaret Huang/The New York Time5

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — The kitchen is warm and smells faintly of cumin. Neil Alderman, 43, is standing near the counter with a mug of tea he has not yet touched, looking at a point on the wall that does not appear to contain anything of interest. His wife, Sandra, is seated at the table, scrolling through her phone. The house is quiet except for the hum of a refrigerator that Mr. Alderman has described, at various times, as “loud,” “kind of loud,” and “not actually that loud, I think I’m just sensitive to it.” He is not sure which of these descriptions is the accurate one. He is no longer sure it matters.

“I’ll be talking to someone,” Mr. Alderman said, turning the mug in his hands, “and I’ll say something like, ‘That meeting was tense.’ And then I’ll stop, because I don’t know if the meeting was tense, or if I was tense. And those are — those are very different things. But I’ve already said it. And now the other person thinks the meeting was tense.”

It is, by any measure, a problem.

Mr. Alderman, a mid-level project manager at a commercial real estate firm in Parsippany, has spent the better part of three years grappling with what he describes as an inability to reliably distinguish, in the moment of speaking, between statements about the external world and statements about his own interior experience. He is aware that philosophers have a name for this. He does not remember what it is. He is fairly certain someone told him once at a party, though he acknowledges the possibility that he merely imagined the conversation, which, he concedes, would be illustrative.

“It’s not that I don’t know the difference,” he said. “I do know the difference. In theory. It’s that when I’m actually talking, the difference collapses. Like, I’ll say, ‘It’s cold out,’ and I mean it as a report. But then I’ll think, is it cold out? Or am I cold? And once you start asking that, it’s — it’s hard to go back.”

Sandra Alderman, who has been married to Mr. Alderman for eleven years, said she first noticed the pattern around 2023, when her husband began appending qualifiers to otherwise routine observations. A comment about traffic would end with “or at least it seemed that way to me.” A remark about the price of groceries would trail off into a mumbled caveat about the subjectivity of economic perception.

“He used to just say things,” Mrs. Alderman said. “Now he says things and then immediately explains that he might not be the right person to be saying them.”

Dr. Franklin Morse, a professor of cognitive linguistics at Rutgers University who has not met Mr. Alderman but agreed to discuss his situation in general terms, said the phenomenon was more common than most people realize. “We operate, conversationally, on a kind of implicit trust that the speaker has sorted their phenomenology from their ontology before opening their mouth,” Dr. Morse said. “Most people perform this sorting unconsciously. For the people who become conscious of it, the sorting mechanism can break down rather quickly.”

Mr. Alderman said the difficulty has affected his professional life. In meetings, he has begun prefacing his contributions with disclaimers that colleagues have found confusing. “I’ll say, ‘This is just my read on the situation, and I want to be clear that it’s possible the situation is not actually like this and I’m projecting,’ and by the time I finish, the meeting has moved on,” he said. His manager, who declined to be named, confirmed that Mr. Alderman’s contributions had become “longer and less actionable” over the past year.

At home, the issue surfaces in subtler ways. Mr. Alderman recently told his son, Caleb, 9, that the family dog seemed sad. He then spent several minutes explaining to Caleb that the dog might not be sad, that sadness in dogs is difficult to verify, and that what he had really meant was that looking at the dog had made him feel a particular way that he associated with sadness but which may have originated entirely within himself. Caleb asked if the dog could have a treat.

“I gave the dog a treat,” Mr. Alderman said. “That part was straightforward.”

He paused.

“Or it felt straightforward. I don’t know if it was.”