Seeing Past Your Reality
Most of us spend our lives in a handful of reality loops, shaped by where we grew up, the work we do, the information we consume, the small circle of people we trust. In those loops, it all makes sense. Outside them, we assume other people just don’t get it.
I recently listened to Geoffrey Hinton talking about AI and echo chambers and how it’s becoming harder to maintain a shared reality at all. Even before AI, he said, people were already losing the habit of agreeing on the basics. Now it’s fracturing even faster.
He described how, not so long ago, you’d open a newspaper and “you had to read things you didn’t agree with, and you got a more nuanced view of the world.” Now, information is filtered and targeted so precisely that “you just get fed more and more of what you already know,” which erodes any common ground. He said he still watches the BBC so he’ll “get the same view as everybody else watching the BBC,” but he knows that shared frame of reference is disappearing.
It’s easy to assume the problem is only cultural or about identity. But I’m starting to think it’s deeper, and more systemic. I’ve noticed that in companies, the same pattern shows up in other ways. Sales people live in a sales reality. Risk teams live in a risk reality. Marketers build their own echo chambers of campaigns and channels. Delivery teams focus only on delivery. Everyone gets rewarded for staying in their swim lane and optimizing it.
But in the process, the shared reality of why the company exists, and what matters most to customers, starts to erode.
Technology accelerates this drift. Tools designed to connect us often end up segmenting us further, feeding each group a customized stream of inputs that reinforce what we already believe. Meetings become performances. Calls become monologues. People aren’t really listening. They’re waiting to talk.
It’s tempting to blame this on a lack of skill, people who can’t think critically, or won’t consider nuance. But maybe it’s not just that. Maybe it’s because shared reality doesn’t form in a one-off meeting. It forms over time, through relationships, trust, and the willingness to see the world through someone else’s eyes. That’s harder to measure, harder to scale, and much easier to neglect when you’re moving fast.
I don’t have a neat conclusion. But if there’s a hypothesis here: we're in this age of infinite information, with tech and ai, and building shared reality might be the most valuable, and most underdeveloped, skill we have.
It won’t happen by default. It takes discipline. It takes curiosity.
And it takes the humility to slow down and really listen, long enough to notice where your reality ends and someone else’s begins.