04/14/2026
I Saw Two Bumblebees Dancing
Outside My Window:
The Challenge of Shared Reality
I am sitting on my balcony, eleven floors up, watching two bumblebees dancing in the sunlight outside my window. It looks to me like a dance. They move in small arcs, almost like a dance, the sun is out, and the sky is lightly overcast. I know I am here. I know they are there. I know, in the simplest sense, that they are alive in this moment, interlacing a search for sweetness with the joy of companionship.
If I were to tell anyone this, they would believe me immediately. No ideology, no taking sides, not threat to my existence or the readers. Just a shared trust between the reader and me that what I see and describe corresponds, in some basic way, to reality.
But almost everything else I try to write feels different. If I say that in a distant war there are human beings on all sides—some capable of cruelty, some capable of care—, and that I ask the reader for a modicum of what the neuroscientists call integrative complexity, the truth disappears like mist in the fog of disbelief. It meets resistance, suspicion, and sometimes outright disdain. Not necessarily because what I said is false, but because it emerges into a world where people are no longer drawing from any of the the same set of facts. We do all live in separate information realities, even on a good day.
But when we cannot agree on what is happening, we cannot reason about what should happen. If suffering itself is disputed, compassion becomes selective. If facts are unstable, moral judgment becomes tribal.
Until we find new ways—very new ways—to establish and share what is real, we will remain trapped in cycles of mistrust, distortion, and war. Not only because people disagree, but because they are no longer disagreeing about the same world.
How Shared Reality Can Restore Ethical Debate and Human Cooperation
