Everyone Lives in a Different World
I remembered something painful recently — painful not because anything bad happened, but because of what it revealed.
I was in a film class at university. The lecturer asked whether anyone had seen Children of Heaven, the Iranian film about a brother and sister sharing a single pair of shoes. A classmate raised his hand. The lecturer asked, “What did you feel after watching that movie?”
He answered: “I feel pity for the little boy.”
He is not wrong. That is a perfectly reasonable response to that film. And yet something in me collapsed a little when I heard it.
Children of Heaven is not really a movie about a poor boy you pity. It is a film about dignity under scarcity, about the quiet ingenuity of children protecting each other, about a whole system of family love operating just out of the children’s ability to name it. Pity — the spectator’s distant, slightly condescending sadness — is almost the opposite of what the film asks of you. It flattens the characters into objects of charity instead of meeting them as people.
But here is the thing: my classmate watched the same frames I did. He was not inattentive. He simply saw a different movie.
That is when I lost a certain kind of faith — not in humanity exactly, but in the idea that there is a shared world we all live in and merely perceive differently. I began to suspect something stronger and stranger: there is no real world at all. There are only interpretations. Each of us lives inside a private construction assembled from our experiences, our language, our emotional history — and we spend our lives assuming everyone else is in the same room.
They are not. There is no room.
This sounds bleak, but I have come to find it almost liberating. If everyone inhabits a different world, then disagreement stops being a malfunction and becomes the default condition. Communication is not the transfer of a shared object from one mind to another; it is two aliens attempting signal contact, occasionally succeeding well enough to keep going. The miracle is not that people misread each other. The miracle is that they read each other at all.
It also explains why art matters so much, and why it works so unevenly. A film is an invitation into someone else’s constructed world. Some viewers accept the invitation and are changed. Others stay at the border, waving kindly: “I feel sorry for that boy.” Same projector, same screen, same ninety minutes — different worlds entirely.
I still remember that classroom moment more vividly than the film itself, which is probably the real lesson. The movie gave me a story; my classmate’s answer gave me a mirror. Everyone lives in a different world. The best we can do is keep describing ours out loud, carefully, and stay curious when someone describes theirs.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2024-06-06), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.