Same earth, different realities

Everyone accepts that people live different lives. I’ve started thinking that undersells it. On this one earth, there are entirely different realities running in parallel.

Here’s what I mean. There’s an ultra-wealthy person out there whose day-to-day I will genuinely never understand. Not “haven’t experienced” — cannot understand. The assumptions their life runs on, what feels normal to them, what even registers as a problem — it’s a different physics. And here’s the part people skip: the reverse is just as true. That person cannot understand my reality either. My constraints and trade-offs and small wins are as foreign to them as their world is to me.

And the same gap exists in the other direction, between me and people living in true poverty. I can read about it, care about it, even see it up close — but I don’t live in that reality, and honestly it would be arrogant to claim I understand it.

So it’s not a ladder where the people up top just have “more” and can look down and comprehend everything below. It’s more like parallel worlds that share a planet. Money is the most obvious divider, but it’s really about the whole bundle — what you assume is possible, what you fear, what “normal” means.

Why does this matter to me? Two things.

First, it kills a certain kind of comparison. Measuring your life against someone in a different reality isn’t humbling, it’s incoherent — the numbers aren’t even in the same currency.

Second, it changes how I hear people. When someone’s take on the world sounds insane to me, my new first question is: what reality was that take formed in? Most takes are perfectly logical inside the reality that produced them. That doesn’t make every take right — it makes the disagreement make sense.

I don’t have a tidy bow for this one. It’s less a lesson and more a lens I can’t take off now: same earth, different realities, and almost nothing translates cleanly between them.