The Space Between Two Hearts

Not for a single second of your life have you been in another person's body, seen through their eyes, or felt the sadness sitting in their heart. Every connection you've ever had with anyone, you've lived all of it from inside the one perspective you've ever known: yours.

This isn't a flaw in you or anybody, really. I've come to understand that it's simply the reality of being human (for now?), and it means something enormous: you can never know, with total certainty, what is actually inside someone else's heart, no matter what words come out of their mouths. Maybe it's by design; I don't know.

Philosophers have quite an unglamorous name for this: the problem of other minds. It asks a simple, extremely depressing, and creepy question. It's the same one I've been asking myself ever since I was 11 years old:

How do you actually know that anyone else, other than yourself, is conscious the way you are, feeling things the way you feel them?

In order to truly know what's inside someone else's heart and understand what they are actually feeling, you would have to stop being yourself and become that someone else. But the moment you stop being yourself, there would be no "you" left to do the knowing.

None of this means connections are pointless. If anything, it might mean the opposite. Every time someone manages to feel truly understood by another person, even for a moment, it's a small miracle.

I just felt like writing about this question that still haunts me. What if I'm the only conscious being in this entire universe and everybody else is an illusion? Am I alone? If I'm the only conscious being, then am I real? Is anything real at all? FUCK!

I hope that one day, like the computer's 0s and 1s, we find something better than words. Some way of letting one person feel directly what's in someone else's heart.

Will the world be a better place if humanity actually invents something like that? I'm uncertain. But regardless of what the world evolves into, it will all be genuine, devoid of any fakeness.