prefer to interact with people who already live in the same reality (bubbles).
The ideal scenario is that two or more people meet, and they discover that by coincidence they have the same opinions, are in the same mood, etc. This is more likely to happen, if you have many people who already share the situation, for example classmates.
If this doesn’t happen naturally, the usual thing is that one person, probably the one with the most dominant personality, declares “reality is X”, and the remaining people accept “X” as the reality. This creates some tension; the other people are on some level aware that accepting “X” is just their payment to avoid feeling alone. (Ironically, if two people feel the same tension, and share that feeling, they now have a shared reality “we say X, but we actually feel Y”. (More ironically, something this can become the dominant reality; hypothetically there could be a group where everyone publicly declares “X” and privately says “actually Y; I was only saying X because of the social pressure”. But I think that usually there is someone who really believes in X, or who believes that the belief in X is desirable.))
And then there are people who are unwilling or unable to accept other people’s realities, but also lack the skill to impose their own reality on others, and their remaining option is just to keep looking until one day they hopefully find someone who already shares their reality.
Now of course these are not exclusive, many people probably do a combination of all three.
EDIT:
Seems like I forgot an important option:
everyone gradually moves towards the perceived group consensus
or maybe it’s just a subtype of the first option (conformity). Sometimes there is a leader and everyone else moves towards the leader; sometimes there is no leader and everyone moves towards the center of the group.
You seem to be framing shared reality as implicitly competitive, where individuals must assert or demur on what something is or means. If you fix a component of reality this can be somewhat true, but I think this will tend to make people think of the totality of possible realities under discussion as fixed. As a result, you seem to focus on control over territory on the small island of reality, whereas I would describe it as simultaneously paying attention to the same drop of water coming out of a fire hose. The adopt/push dichotomy also seems a poor match for OP’s experience, such as here:
With practice, we found a way to earnestly share and witness each others’ experience that gave the warm-fuzzies of connection, without feeling forced to shape our experience to match the other.
Relatedly, you seem to be claiming that individuals can only see reality from a single perspective. This doesn’t seem right—people seem to be fully capable of containing conflicting perspectives about a single thing simultaneously (internal family systems is a framework where this is especially obvious).
It looks like you intended for the methods of achieving a shared reality to be exhaustive, but IMO the easiest way to create a shared reality is to genuinely experience the same thing at the same time in the same way as someone else. OP’s description of being in a concert, for example, seems a weird activity to put into “prefer to interact with people who already live in the same reality”. Instead, it seems more about creating contexts in which you and others will experience the same reality.
It seems to me that people have three major ways how to achieve the shared reality:
adopt other people’s reality (conformity);
push their own reality on others (leadership);
prefer to interact with people who already live in the same reality (bubbles).
The ideal scenario is that two or more people meet, and they discover that by coincidence they have the same opinions, are in the same mood, etc. This is more likely to happen, if you have many people who already share the situation, for example classmates.
If this doesn’t happen naturally, the usual thing is that one person, probably the one with the most dominant personality, declares “reality is X”, and the remaining people accept “X” as the reality. This creates some tension; the other people are on some level aware that accepting “X” is just their payment to avoid feeling alone. (Ironically, if two people feel the same tension, and share that feeling, they now have a shared reality “we say X, but we actually feel Y”. (More ironically, something this can become the dominant reality; hypothetically there could be a group where everyone publicly declares “X” and privately says “actually Y; I was only saying X because of the social pressure”. But I think that usually there is someone who really believes in X, or who believes that the belief in X is desirable.))
And then there are people who are unwilling or unable to accept other people’s realities, but also lack the skill to impose their own reality on others, and their remaining option is just to keep looking until one day they hopefully find someone who already shares their reality.
Now of course these are not exclusive, many people probably do a combination of all three.
EDIT:
Seems like I forgot an important option:
everyone gradually moves towards the perceived group consensus
or maybe it’s just a subtype of the first option (conformity). Sometimes there is a leader and everyone else moves towards the leader; sometimes there is no leader and everyone moves towards the center of the group.
You seem to be framing shared reality as implicitly competitive, where individuals must assert or demur on what something is or means. If you fix a component of reality this can be somewhat true, but I think this will tend to make people think of the totality of possible realities under discussion as fixed. As a result, you seem to focus on control over territory on the small island of reality, whereas I would describe it as simultaneously paying attention to the same drop of water coming out of a fire hose. The adopt/push dichotomy also seems a poor match for OP’s experience, such as here:
Relatedly, you seem to be claiming that individuals can only see reality from a single perspective. This doesn’t seem right—people seem to be fully capable of containing conflicting perspectives about a single thing simultaneously (internal family systems is a framework where this is especially obvious).
It looks like you intended for the methods of achieving a shared reality to be exhaustive, but IMO the easiest way to create a shared reality is to genuinely experience the same thing at the same time in the same way as someone else. OP’s description of being in a concert, for example, seems a weird activity to put into “prefer to interact with people who already live in the same reality”. Instead, it seems more about creating contexts in which you and others will experience the same reality.
Thanks, I seem to have a blind spot here. About two things:
people can create shared reality collaboratively, without an obvious leader;
the shared reality can be limited to given space and time.
But how do people decide whether to adopt what they perceive to be their companion’s shared reality?
It seems like that’s an obvious entry point for considerations of status.