the world around us
right now, as you read this, you're convinced you see these words clearly (white letters on a black screen), maybe a coffee cup in your peripheral vision, the familiar weight of your device, etc. but what if i told you that none of this really exists as 'you' think it does? am i being vague or "do we see the world as it is or do we see the world as we are?" well, that single twist of psychology is almost comic in its irony, billions of eyes, each convinced they hold the “real” picture, when in fact every glance is just a private edit of an indefinite instance. 'the world around us' isn't a shared stage but rather a hall of mirrors, each tilted at just the perfect angle to make us think we’re looking at the truth.
speaking from a more psychological pov, "perception" isn't really passive reception but more of active construction i.e. our brain doesn’t wait for data, it guesses, fills gaps, and it later checks whether we abide by reality or not. Neuroscience calls this 'predictive processing', Shakespeare called it 'madness'. when Hamlet insisted that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” he wasn’t being poetic or heroic, he precisely described the true psychology behind humanity's ability to perceive.
but you know what's the most unsettling fact here? it’s not that perception shapes reality, its that it 'filters' it. don't believe me? well, in the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment, people focused on counting basketball passes often fail to see a gorilla walk right across the scene. how do i prove my point by this you may think right? well, we don’t miss reality because it hides, we miss it because we limit our attention, spending it only where our expectations allow. we are blind by design, and "confident" while being blind.
i would like to give a very prominent example i.e. the reminder from Alfred Korzybski, "The map is not the territory," means that our understanding, perceptions, and models of reality are not reality itself (as in they're partial). the moment we mistake our perception (the map) for the world itself (the territory), we stop exploring and start enforcing (just like how maps confine us). nations, markets, friendships fracture not on what is, but on what "each side sees."
perception is an indefinite script that decides which scenes play and which never make it on stage. every assumption is a cut and every bit of attention is an edit. we believe we are witnesses, but deep-down we are the directors directing our perception of the "world around us", trimming reality until it fits the story we already want to tell. this wraps us around the irony that the very act that gives the world coherence is the same act that makes it incomplete.
that's why each and every individual bends the environment and observations according to their limit. this gives us the most beautiful yet disturbing gift of perception i.e. the realization that reality itself is less about what exists and more about what we dare to notice. remember, the picture you hold in your hands may not be a true representation of a scenario, but for better or worse, it's the block around which you'll weave your world around :)