Reality is perceived

Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want to know the plot of Shutter Island, please don’t read this.

While on my unapologetically-being-a-potato during “dead week” this year, I watched Shutter Island again. The film traces Leonardo’s journey as a Federal Marshall who’s gone to an Institutional Facility housing the most dangerous “criminally insane” people on an island to investigate the disappearance of an inmate. For two hours we see Leo uncovering mysteries & sinister plots only to realise that everything was a construct in his head & he had in fact created an alternate reality in his mind because he couldn’t deal with his actual reality. The film is stunning (Scorsese is a boss) & goes below the surface of what people with Trauma can go through.

But, it also got me thinking about our own perceived realities. Don’t we all, construct realities based on the lens we look through life? In my reality, for instance, person X might be a criminal because of what they did to person Y. But, as far as person X’s mother is concerned, they probably didn’t do anything wrong. All our thoughts and actions are filtered through our subjective realities and there’s no objective truth, just the truth that’s true for us.

Science, goes some way to prove objective measurable truths & physical forces such as Gravity are a common truth. But even in those, there can be the filtering of perception. For instance, if you’re driving at 40kmph, you might feel like you’re going fast but for someone else, its actually really slow. So while objectively you’re going at 40, whether its fast or not is completely subjective.

Humans, the emotional creatures that we are rely on relationships more than anything & that’s where a lot of the subjectivity starts to pose a problem. Behaviours I consider absolutely normal in my reality would be completely OTT for others. They might feel it’s too much. By the end of it, maybe a large part of the human experience is simply exploring each others perceived realities & seeing where we stand.

If your perceived reality aligns with others, you can start a club. If the club grows & there’s a lot of people, maybe you can become Prime Minister. If you understand perceived realities of large numbers of people, you can build things that would be useful to them and maybe get paid for your efforts.