Nothing is as we see it.

Our senses, as we probably have realized, are incredibly bad at perceiving the world.

And our brains are just terrible at making sense of what our bad senses perceive. We make stories, we jump to conclusions, we imagine things that aren't there... Lots of reasons for this, but it's a different topic for a different post.

How a human sees the world is different than how a dog sees the world, and both of those are different than how a blade of grass sees the world. Obvious, right?

This is pretty easy to accept, because when it comes to how other living creatures perceive the world, we're not attached to the idea that a dog or a blade of grass experiences life in the same way we do.

But when we get to human beings, all of a sudden, this story changes. Our viewpoint - our subjective opinion of the world - becomes the truth. And that truth is applied to every other person’s experience, regardless of differences in senses and brains.

It is almost impossible to see someone else’s truth as their own perception and our truth as our perception. We may think we have common perceptions and so would come to the same conclusions, but even in witnessing a one-time event, more than 60% of people give different accounts of what they've witnessed (source: Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory).

What are the chances that people could agree on all of reality?

Zero. I am genuinely astounded that we can form relationships at all! (I think the only way we can have relationships is because we rarely have to synchronize our realities. We're usually making tons of assumptions, which protect us from conflict)

So not only do we have these subjective sensory input and processing, our priorities are subjective based on our view of the world. If we feel unsafe, we may prioritize defense or security. If we feel secure, we may prioritize openness.

But our perspectives on these priorities are even subjective based on everything from lived experience to generational experience to whether we personally got enough sleep the night before (source: Sleep deprivation attenuates neural responses to outcomes from risky decision-making).

This can be problematic when we hope other people will see things as we do,
and will value the same things that we do,
and will have the same opinions about how a thing is achieved.

This is true on both a micro and a macro level.

This is true of our most intimate partners and society at large.

"We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are." - Anonymous

I think that may be one of the reasons that, at least for me, it’s easier to have a relationship with a dog than it is to have a relationship with many humans - and definitely any group of humans.

I give a dog, literally any dog, the latitude of having a completely different worldview because they’re a dog and they've had the experiences of a dog. It's one of the many gifts I have received from adopting dogs with mixed (and often traumatic) life experiences. I do not question the validity of their life experiences or their responses, but I do my best to work with the dog's worldview.

My hope, as I become a more complete person, is that I will be able to give every person that I encounter, and every creature that I encounter, the same understanding that I would give a dog. And I hope that people would give me that understanding as well.

We are all just human animals with heads full of imagined stories, doing the absolute best we can with what we've got.

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