Mike and his blinkered mind's eye, the 2019 edition

As you know, Liz's insecurity about her looks and need to feel validated in her self-loathing makes it almost certain that as the years pass, the only thing she's going to be able to remember about the day she came home with her new eyeglasses is Mike being a jeering oaf who thinks that it's his job to be cruel to his kid sister. That being said, the most irritating thing to me about Michael's reaction to Liz having to wear eyeglasses is not his default belief that Liz is a sitcom horror monster plotting his ruin so he'd better get in the first shot. The most irritating thing is the mental defect that underlies it.

We get to see his mental deficiency the next day when he comes to the ludicrous and lunatic conclusion that Elizabeth is lying when she claims to be disoriented in order to elicit sympathy. This tells me that he suffers from a condition known as aphantasia: the inability to picture how things look from a perspective not the one immediately in front of him. I've never had the impression that Mike can actually understand what other people are seeing because his mind's eye has cataracts. It's why he can hear the life story of his landlady and not realize that she's an Aesop about how hardship curdles character. It's also why when he has to wear bifocals, he won't know how universal his experience with being dizzy is and assume falsely that he has suffered like no one before him.