October 2025
Life is weird in the sense that reality is often the product of perception. If you truly think about it, no event that you recollect or remember is reality. Instead the reminiscence of said event is a byproduct of how you remember it. I’ll rephrase this word salad. What’s remembered is not reality, instead its a series of biases projected onto reality, warping what actually occurred from the “truth” into something completely unrecognizable. The weird thing about this though, is that no one has access to the ground truth. Instead, the perception of each person plays a role in what they truly see. Meaning in a group setting, each member of the group recollects a given set of events differently. It’s easy to let this concept discomfort you. If no one shares a common ground of understanding then how can you progress in any realm of conversation. I think that’s where it gets truly interesting. Those you get a long with are those who have the highest overlap in your perception. Perceiving things in a similar way leads to agreement between individuals. Conversely two people usually do not get a long if their perceptions of events do not align. The outcome of this thought is quite a lonely one. With each person having their own variation of reality, you really are truly alone until you find someone with the highest overlap of perception as yourself. For many people this could come in the form of a best friend, spouse, relatives. For others this person is never actually found, leading to depression and natural loneliness. To be completely honest with you, this thought in specific has not been fleshed out enough to make any definitive conclusions. What I can say is life can often be cruel and hard to navigate. You often do not know what is reality and your own biases dictate the reality you see (perception). Kant perfectly described this. There’s the Noumenon and the phenomenon. The phenomenon is what we perceive, it is the reality and the things that we can see. The Noumenon consist of the ground truth, it is the thing that is outside of perception, and essentially the thing itself. While not knowing the Noumenon does bring me some discomfort, as I’m sure it brings a lot of other anxiety riddled individuals. I do, however, feel gratitude in sharing my perception when I can with others. That feeling of “they get me,” is truly something special, because it’s the closest thing we’ll get to the Noumenon.