To say that you and I can have a shared experience is a misnomer. My eyes see things in a different way. I might be taller, you might be shorter. Your eyes may dart to the sky, mine to the floor. Our ears work differently. We are sensitive to different aromas and odors on the breeze down a city street, or when gazing down at a banquet at a shared meal.
While we each have some fairly close approximation of the same events, the same experiences, we are separated by time, space, and the sum total other experiences we've had.
I can ask you to taste a piece of chocolate, or rather, the memory of a piece of chocolate. How it sat on your tongue, how it perhaps stuck to the back of your teeth. The weight of it on your tongue. All these sensory references are but small shared experiences, but all unique.
How much cocoa was in your piece of chocolate, and how much milk? Did the shape of the chamber of your mouth change the taste due to physical and biological uniqueness? Did you chew on it longer, or let it rest against your tongue, melting, before it was consumed?
Chocolate is one example of a shared experience, and one I think that so many of us have in common, but I am not hear to speak to you of sweets. I don't have a van to lure you into and no sign saying "Free Candy", but if you've got a comfortable chair, I'd love for you to sit a while longer and keep reading.
When I drive a car, and I sit, my foot upon the brake pedal, awaiting red to turn to green at the traffic lights, I sit in a metal box, like all those behind me. A decaying traction zone of white paint is a boundary, and the car beside me, in the other lane, has a driver who has that same fundamental experience occurring in their consciousness.
The shared experience comes to collapse when we start to look at all the other details that make us unlike, and apart. My car is blue-grey - theirs is white. A Mazda, a Honda, a Toyota, a Whatever. Gravity holds me down more than you, I might blink at a different rate. The light goes green in my vision, and my foot applies force.
But there's the chance for another rare, shared experience. Are you listening to the radio in your car? Did you have the same station on? Was the same song creating a rhythm along the highway in different cars? A shared experience, listening to Elton John's Tiny Dancer while driving along Highway 1, on the 20th of August, 2025.
That's a broad scope of a shared experience. But then it starts to fragment again. You could be on the way home from a funeral, me, on the way back from a birthday party. East, West. North, South.
Few people listen to the radio in the car, anymore. Therefore, the odds of this shared experience diminish, as, too, does the proliferation of routes, seating positions, the rubber rotating on the road, and the device of motive force rumbling away somewhere beyond the chamber of the vehicle.
I was an only child. My shared experience with other only children is likely that of having a vast, rapidly enclosing back seat in a sedan as I grew, and my knees began to hit the back of father's seat. Of less wear on the passenger side, because I always sat behind the driver, often getting cigarette smoke in my eyes.
Dire Straits played from the cassette deck, until mother turned on the radio and Alanis Morrisette burst out on a rainy mid 1990s evening, on the way back from the hospital. Cancer, a grandmother, and another small shared experience.
But my experience is mine, and yours is yours. While there may be places and spaces where those experiences intersect in some way or another, we can never truly share an experience with another, even if we eat from the same plate, sit on the same couch, ride in the same plane, or listen to the same song.
We all have our unique perspectives, which are probably formed by the chains of causality which led us to the shared experience of language, of chocolate, and of trundling on down the roadway listening to a song in an acoustic chamber ever so slightly different.
