2019.10.27 Shared Reality

So, I recently hurt S's feelings by saying a true thing that I thought was trivially true. It hurt her feelings because she did not know it to be so, and had even been thinking the opposite. Meanwhile, I had not been saying the obviously true thing purely for the sake of kindness, assuming that the obviousness of it was sufficient. Human perspective is funny like that.

The default preferred state for many people is to live in reality¹, even though it is difficult to know truths. We pile up required assumptions in order to make sense and try to make progress. But there are things that can be known that we can't guess well, but can easily know if they are shared. I strongly believe that all of us fare better when we cooperate in our experiences of this shared reality. Especially with the things that we can know, but others cannot².

¹ Despite, you know, many many many examples to the contrary.

² This is an allusion to feelings. Just to be clear here, in this shared reality.