Not for a single moment of your existence have you been in another person’s body, seen through their eyes, or felt the sadness they feel. Every single connection you’ve ever had, you’ve experienced all of it from inside the one perspective you’ve ever known: yours.
This isn’t a flaw in you or anybody, really. It’s just a condition of existing as a human (maybe for now?), and that has a rather disturbing implication: you can never be absolutely certain about what is really in someone else’s heart regardless of what they say. Maybe it’s by design; I don’t know.
Philosophers have quite an unglamorous name for this: 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 falsity. Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? I’ll leave that question for you to cogitate.