"There is no way someone could actually feel like this on the inside."

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Hard to be profound in 140 characters, but sometimes it happens. Michael Strong tweeted this:

I was reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground with a group of 9th graders. One student announced, “There is no way someone could actually feel like this on the inside.”

A classmate replied: “I feel like this every day.” The first student was stunned. His understanding of reality shifted in that moment. Literature had done what it’s supposed to do: reveal that other people live entirely within different internal worlds.

I remember the utterly mundane moment when my understanding of reality first shifted in that way. In grad school, sitting around with grad student buddies drinking cheap beer. One was saying that he had tried wearing tube socks, relatively new at the time, but they had hurt his feet. I said that I had some, and they didn’t bother me at all. He looked at me and said, “I wasn’t talking about your feet.”

I suppose beforehand I might have agreed in the abstract that my experience of the world wasn’t definitive, but in practical terms I didn’t think that way. Essentially I thought that because I was fine with tube socks, therefore the other guy was wrong and should just get over it, perhaps after I helpfully explained to him why he was wrong.

In fact, my experience of tube socks had zero bearing on his experience with tube socks, and I should have just shut up, listened to what he had to say about his experience, and sat with it for awhile, maybe learning something new about myself and others and what it means to live in this world.

That time it took a well-worded rebuke to shut me up. But it also woke me up, a little. And since then I’ve been intensely curious about the worlds that others live in, and why they are so different than mine. As Michael Strong mentions, literature has been a rich source of curated data there, other worlds mapped out and painstakingly described for the benefit of aliens and strangers.

But with some practice it is rewarding to wrestle with the raw data itself. The internet, particularly YouTube, has been a treasure trove for me of people displaying their inner worlds, often unwittingly.

And of course, if you’re up for it, you can engage in conversation with a real live person. And listen.

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There are some people in my life that need the same rebuke. To me it seems like your situation with the tube socks was a social skill related to “perspective taking”, empathy and mostly related to the “art” of conversation. In a social conversation the topic is always primarily a person. If you change the person you are changing the topic.

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Alan Jacobs observes:

a Law of Social Media Life: Every time a person reports that an app or a device isn’t working for them, people reply to say “Works for me.” Which is strange, if you think about it. I mean, if someone writes “I broke my leg yesterday,” people don’t reply “My leg is just fine.”

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It’s interesting to think about why that is. If we were all sharing the same leg, I might respond with “Our leg is working for me.” :slight_smile: Commenting-on-a-shared-experience is a different social context than sharing-a-personal-situation.

A response like “works for me” is rude and dismissive. I see it in forums with strangers that are open to the public. A statement like “I broke my leg” is usually only made to people who have already expressed an interest in your life (followers).