Parallel worlds
Yesterday I spoke to someone with ADD who had gotten their first medication. They told me how the world had completely changed: doing chores wasn’t that bad anymore, and it was so easy to get things done. Learning things had previously been really difficult and uninteresting, but now boring subjects had magically turned somewhat interesting. It was exhilirating to be alive.
Another example of a world that changed overnight, is that of someone who was burned out. Suddenly they had to manage a very strict “energy budget”, where they’d manage very few things while still being able to sleep in the following week. For example, going somewhere by subway and going to the grocery store might be okay, but if they also met a friend, they would mean sleeping only for a couple of hours in the next few days. Another day they might take a walk and do yoga, but also listening to music would be too much. If they went to a party one day, they knew that that means not being able to do anything during the next few days because of sleep-deprivation. The world of someone who’s burned out is one of constantly prioritizing where to spend their energy.
While humans are a single species, it’s difficult to imagine how others perceive the world. It’s really easy to assume that everyone thinks like I think, sees what I see, but sudden changes in perception give some insight into the huge differences.
Here are a few other differences that I know a lot less about:
- Being self-absorbed vs. having empathy for others.
- Being self-confident vs. having self-doubts.
- Having self-discipline vs. being impulsive.
- Being good at what you do vs. not.
- Assuming that people are good vs. selfish (or naive vs. cynical).
- Being healthy vs. sick.
- Being rich vs. middle-class vs. poor.
- Having a good vs. bad memory.
- Having friends vs. not.
- Having good friends vs. not.
- Frequently hanging out with friends vs. occasionally.
- Being in a romantic relationship vs. not.
- Having kids vs. not.
- Teasing vs. being the teased.
- Being attractive vs. ugly.
- Being a child vs. a young adult vs. middle-aged vs. retired.
- Being discriminated against vs. not (race, culture, sexual orientation and identity, disability).
- Being a man vs. a woman.
- Living in another culture, time or climate.
- Having any of the wide variety of psychological disorders vs. being normal (if anything at all can be considered normal, considering the above).
Perhaps having empathy for others (the first item in the list) even makes all of this uninteresting, because it comes naturally. Since I’m more on the self-absorbed side, these are highly relevant questions to me, and one of the takeaways is to be really careful about judging others. A saying that comes to mind is that you shouldn’t judge others because you don’t know what they’ve gone through, but that might even be an understatement: their world may be fundamentally different. That doesn’t mean that anybody gets a pass on dealing with their problems, but you need to understand that more or less difficult.
Life choices we make are still largely unaccounted for in my worldview difference list above: profession, interests and habits will also change your perspective.