Living in a bubble

Every one of us grew up inside a bubble and mostly still lives in one. You inherit a set of values from your parents, the environment refines them, but the environment is just a bigger bubble, your town, your school, your circle, a place where almost everyone happens to agree, which makes the shared view feel less like an opinion and more like simple reality.

Your reality does not need to be fixed. You can always move somewhere new, take a different job, meet people unlike you, and your beliefs get tested against the world. Some of your values hold and get strengthened. Some crack and get rebuilt. That friction, the constant rub of other people’s realities against your own, is how a person actually grows.

Then there is media, which has always shaped what we believe, television and newspapers once, social feeds now. And something changed with the feeds that is worth taking seriously. The old media at least disagreed with each other out in the open. The new media is tuned by algorithms to show you more of what you already think, over and over, until your particular bubble feels like the entire world. It starts to seem like everyone is worried about what you are worried about, sees what you see, agrees with what you believe. They are not. You are looking at a mirror that has been polished to reflect only you, and slowly your sense of what is real gets bent.

Here is where it turns dangerous. When you finally meet a genuinely different view, it does not register as a different view. It registers as someone who has lost their mind. And they look at you and think exactly the same, because they have been fed the opposite mirror just as relentlessly. Two people, each certain, each sealed in a bubble built partly by a machine. That is a lot of our conflict in one sentence.

The way out is not a clever argument, it is a posture. Keep your mind genuinely open. When you meet someone you disagree with, before reaching for the verdict, ask the more useful question. What does this person know that I do not. What have they lived through that I have not. Everyone arrived at their beliefs by a road you did not walk, sometimes wildly different from yours, sometimes only slightly, even among people you assumed shared your whole world.

Nobody here is purely right or purely wrong. Mostly we are all just caught in our own bubbles, mistaking the inside for the whole.

So listen before you judge. Ask the right questions. There is almost always something you have not yet thought of.