Imagine for a moment that the course of your life is like a long, meandering corridor. You’re walking down it, in one direction (you can’t turn back), and you have a great view of the two walls, floor, and ceiling, together with some idea of where you’re going and what’s behind you.

Imagine that everything you do, see, and experience is represented within these walls: this is your personal tunnel through the dizzying totality of existence.

Windows

Along the walls of the corridor are windows.

And here we need to get a little bit non-Euclidean, because the windows open out onto myriad other corridors. They allow you to glimpse other people’s experience.

For the people you share your life with, the windows are big – you get a lot of insight into their lives. Other windows are smaller: they may represent a novel or a memoir or a history, something that lets you inhabit a life that isn’t yours for a while – a deeply satisfying thing to do. The smallest windows might be newspaper or magazine articles, TV shows, and social media posts. Brief glimpses into another perspective.

Until the late twentieth century, your corridor was really mostly solid.

Explosions

The World Wide Web has exploded all that.

You are wandering through a world without walls.

You probably carry a multidimensional window around in your pocket, that you can use to access literally billions of human perspectives without a thought.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? To connect so easily with so many people is truly a revolution in human consciousness. In the long run, it might even save us – provided it doesn’t damn us first.

Boundaries

And it can also be confusing and overwhelming.

What do you do when you can’t see the boundaries of your corridor any more? Are they there? It may seem as though you can hop over into someone else’s life just as easily as you can read about it.

You cannot.

The corridor is still there, even if it’s now an opener, freer, more culturally intricate place to walk. You have your life to lead, and it’s important to walk your path, not hanker after someone else’s.

Take inspiration from other people’s lives, visible to you now as never before in human history.

But live your own.