Where is the world?

And WHAT is ’the world’?

If I see destruction and hopelessness everywhere I look, and you see nothing but opportunities and growth and love, are we talking about the same world?

‘The world is going to shit’, I might proclaim with a serious face, while you might be absolutely convinced that things are exactly as they’re supposed to be.

Absolutely perfect.

And now I can call you naïve and unrealistic.

Cool!

It’s fascinating to reflect on this, especially if you start to realize that nobody really knows, or sees.

There is not something like THE world.

That’s why we argue about it all the time.

Most of us don’t realize that we’re living in localized, personalized, heavily curated creations.

We only see what we see, we experience nothing but what we experience.

But that is not THE world.

That is a tremendously, infinitely small, and extremely subjective experience that is somehow appearing in awareness.

Part of that is a world that’s constantly and exclusively created for a specific me.

Which means we only see our world.

Nothing but that.

Only always.

So why would we even argue about stuff if we’re starting to see that we can’t ever truly see somebody else’s world?

Well, that’s obviously how it works.

Seeing a different world but not realizing it and not taking it into account, makes up for a lot of delicious (and not so delicious) drama.

A couple of days ago somebody tried to completely obliterate me in the private messages section of LinkedIn.

Somewhere buried in a blog I’d shared something about the fact that I had Covid, and this person didn’t really appreciate my personal account.

My description was something like ‘I had Covid, it wasn’t all that bad, and I kinda used the couple of days when I was down with a fever and a bit of coughing to sleep and sweat and watch Netflix, and I actually enjoyed the simplicity of surrender.’

What they read, I reckon, was something closer to ‘I had Covid, Covid is not even very real, and people who suffer from it or die from it are fucking losers and it’s their own fault, basically.’

I guess.

So that’s where they messaged me, foam around the mouth, telling me how incredibly insensitive my blog was towards people who’ve lost loved ones to the virus (the reason I don’t know who this person was, is because they appeared as ‘anonymous’ after blocking me).

Intriguing, right?

The anger was almost tangible, the disappointment vast and solid.

It was as if I’d put out an official statement on national television claiming that people who die of Covid are ignorant and stupid and they deserve it.

The person who contacted me said they liked me and my writing at first, but now I was nothing but a fucking asshole and a loser.

And they blocked me.

In their world, I’d committed a heinous and disrespectful crime, while in my world I was just describing a situation, an event, and my response to that.

It’s also in my world that I don’t feel responsible for other people’s resentment towards me, because that is literally an endless, slippery slope.

In my world, I don’t set out to insult people as far as I can prevent it, and if they still feel I did or said something wrong anyway, well, whatever.

Fuck it.

That’s how the meeting of different worlds can work.

I didn’t create that awesomely confusing but fascinating phenomenon, though.

And although I can totally respect the idea that people come from vastly different places, I don’t believe it’s my responsibility to take that into account all the time and be the wisest person in the room.

Wherever different worlds meet, there’s a chance for trouble and animosity.

That’s just how it works.

But that’s not all.

What makes it EXTRA complicated is that, even if people realize that thing about the different worlds coming together, they STILL believe (innocently) in universal principles and other things we should ALL agree to.

That’s a fallacy.

Ethics and morals are not universally and absolutely shared as far as the content goes.

We might talk about the same concepts, but still have quite a different sense of what they mean and how to measure them.

Even our experience of those values is colored by our personal world, and therefore not a reliable 100% common thing.

Good and bad are not experienced and regarded exactly the same and with the same elements and borders all around the world.

That’s one of the reasons for wars.

There’s nothing we can ultimately rely on, even Love is not the same for everyone (although it’s one of the more commonly embraced sensations), and if somebody decides to kill another person out of love, we wouldn’t put it on a Hallmark card.

It’s complex, and we’ll never figure it out.

Yet it’s certainly not hopeless.

What makes a HUGE difference is realizing our own fallibility, our naivety, and our total and utter incapability to see the big picture.

My world is bullshit, really, and so is yours.

And, of course, it’s ALSO beautiful and amazing and tantalizing and realistic and magical and weird and stupid and colorful.

If we really know that we are all living in separate realities, then we might still not understand other people, but we’ll just be less inclined to take ourselves so seriously, and let go of the tendency to attack or defend all the time.

There’s not one world.

And it’s totally okay if you disagree.

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(Photo by @a2_foto, for Unsplash)