A Siloed World View

Our explanation of the world

This is a thought that came to me deep in meditation.

I would be lying if I said that this question came to me exclusively in meditation because it really was picking at me all week. The question: “how do you explain the world?” is really a question about identity.

How we explain something is almost entirely based on the things we consume consciously or subconsciously. Often our mental radar has already been calibrated to pick up on ideas that are most closely in line with what we value. Our values are really what determine how we explain the world, but more specifically, our world view. 

On social media, the content we post, share, or engage with all says something about us. It all says something about our identity, what we value, who we are, where we are from, what we support, what we care about, and how we express ourselves. It is not wrong that we engage with things that we can relate with, in fact, it is completely natural and expected — however it becomes problematic when we silo our thinking into our version of the world. As we engage, share, post, like, and comment, we reinforce our existing biases, we create an echo chamber of sorts, devoid of any critics or contrarians. I imagine that it will eventually sequester our thinking into the confines of our feed, rendering us as static humans.

What we portray versus what we are i.e the way we intend others to see us versus the way we see ourselves is vastly different. The mathematical set difference between what we show to the world and what we show to ourselves is our internal world view. I believe that this splice of our human experience contains the spectrum of thoughts and behaviors, which subsequently create our perception of reality.

It is this set of experiences with which we explain our world.

Reflection Prompt: What assumptions about the world have you created as a direct result of your experiences? Did these assumptions serve you at one point or another, if so what did they do for you? If not, what created this shift in perspective?