Alright, hang on. This is going to be a bumpy ride that isn’t going to look like it has any purpose or end goal, but this is what happens when you decide to drive in complete silence for an hour.
Also, the image that I’ve gone with here is because I was looking at expectations vs reality memes (will maybe make sense later) and this pic came up as a biting-lip “reality” with what looked like a potentially underage male as the “expectation,” so I just went with Andy Sands face. So…context?
Whatever. Anyway
Have you ever thought about why we use curse words when we’re upset? There are a number of 4-letter words that we use when something bothers us, but for what reason? Why specifically do we use those words? That’s when I realized that words are just something we use to convey a thought or feeling, and the words themselves actually have no real meaning. Like the “F” word (click with caution) has a definition that we’ve all accepted, but ultimately, someone had a feeling or thought, and came up with a word that would convey that thought.
But then I realized that the interpretation of those words are uniquely processed and accepted based on what we’ve learned through an experience. Like take the word “green” for example. Everyone has an idea of what green looks like, but the issue is, I can only understand my definition of green because that’s all I’ve ever seen. Take a moment and think – what if the color green as you see it is a little lighter than shade of what I see, or perhaps, a completely different color? I would honestly never know. Imagine if my green is actually your orange. But we both use the term green because that’s what we know green to be.
Then think of the other words that we use to describe things, like food. We might eat something when we are young and someone describes the way it tastes. We then associate that taste to that word, regardless if we are actually experiencing the exact same taste. If I was young and someone fed me poop (I don’t know who this hypothetical asshole is, but let’s just say they do that), and then said it has a “sweet” taste, I might associate “sweet” with poop. Now, sweet for me has an entirely different meaning for you who ate ice cream and for me the poop-eater.
The phrase “one in a million” was probably said when a million people was a hard number to understand. If someone says you’re one in a million now, there would be about 38 of you in California and 318 of you in the US. There would be about 1380 Chinese versions of me. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is probably someone with extremely similar features that looks and/or speaks and/or acts and/or thinks very similar to me. That kind of eliminates the feeling of specialness.
Then I started thinking about how similar or different those versions of me were experiencing life. Then I realized perspective is very difficult to really understand because we’re using a skewed version of how we see reality in the first place. That’s when I realized that maybe reality does not have a concrete meaning. Maybe reality is just how I am interpreting my entire life, and the words I say are just trying to build a understanding around the general thought of what I’m experiencing. But if we were to swap places and you saw the world through my eyes, there is a chance that you would use different words to explain the same thing that we’re looking at. What’s strange is I look at something like chocolate, and I’ll associate it with goodness. I have a co-worker that hates chocolate because of a bad experience, and now, our realities are different. But I guess we can both agree that it “exists.” But can we even agree on what “exists.” That’s just another interpretation.
So now maybe I am different. My doppelganger could be out there and we could be experiencing reality in a completely different way. So how can we ever really understand someone’s experience? I can always comment on what I think someone is feeling. But how can I know that what they are experiencing is the exact same as I would understand based on the words that they use?
There’s no real point in this post other than realizing that I can only TRY to understand what people have experienced, but that’s based on my experiences. What if this is all nonsense? What if nonsense is an interpretation of a word that we can’t agree on? Maybe I’ll dig a little deeper into some of these topics, and maybe I just won’t and this will be a big waste of all of our time.
Regardless, thanks for spending your time reading this. Hope it was…something.
– Andy Sands, the Green Pooper
