Things I Notice That Other People Don't
Are We All Watching Different Versions of the Same World?
I have noticed that chickens are terrible at keeping secrets.
One hen will find something, a beetle, a scrap of food, a patch of freshly turned dirt, and within seconds the entire flock is gathered around her. It doesn’t seem to matter whether their discovery is particularly exciting. What matters is that somebody else found it first.
But are they investigating the object itself, or the excitement surrounding it? I wonder whether humans are really all that different.
We like to think we’re independent thinkers. We imagine that our attention is guided by careful judgement and deliberate choice. Yet most of the time, we seem to be drawn towards whatever everyone else is looking at.
A story begins circulating online and suddenly thousands of people are discussing it. Someone expresses anger and the anger spreads faster than the original event. A new trend appears, and before long people who had no previous interest in it are investing their time, energy, and emotions into it.
Until a week later. It’s gone and everyone has moved on to something new.
What fascinates me is not the event itself but the movement of attention. It’s like attention has an energy of its own. The more people that focus on something, the more significant it appears to become.
There have been times when I’ve watched an issue suddenly become the centre of everyone’s attention.
One day hardly anyone is talking about it. The next day it seems to be everywhere. News articles appear. Social media fills with opinions. Conversations at cafés, shopping centres, and workplaces.
What interests me isn’t whether the issue is important. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it isn’t. What interests me is how quickly attention gathers around it. Like the chickens.
It’s almost as though attention has its own momentum. The more people focus on something, the more attention it attracts, and the more the issue grows. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, it collects more energy just because it’s already moving.
For a short time, the topic appears huge and important. It takes up so much space in our collective awareness that it becomes difficult to remember what people were discussing before it appeared. Then, just as suddenly, something new appears. And it’s gone, like it was never there.
The crowd changes direction, a new story takes centre stage, and the thing that felt so urgent a week ago fades into the background. Forgotten.
Watching this happen over and over again has made me wonder how much of what we experience is determined by events themselves, and how much is determined by where attention happens to be flowing.
Maybe attention doesn’t follow importance. Maybe importance follows attention.
The more people that gather around an idea, a fear, an outrage, or a possibility, the more real it seems to become. But maybe not because of the thing itself, but because it now occupies the minds of those observing it.
I’ve noticed this more and more since stepping away from the news and spending almost no time on social media.
The longer I watch this process, the more I wonder whether each of us is living inside a slightly different version of reality. I’m not saying the physical world is different, but because our attention acts like a filter, it selects which parts of that world become experienced and which parts fade into the background.
Every now and then I’ll discover that a major event has been dominating headlines for days or even weeks, and I know almost nothing about it. People have formed opinions, chosen sides, shared articles, argued with strangers, and experienced waves of concern, outrage or excitement. Entire conversations have unfolded without me even realising they were happening.
The event existed, of course. It was real. But in another sense, it barely existed in my world at all. While thousands of people were directing their attention towards that event, I was not experiencing any of it.
Sometimes I wonder how many realities are unfolding side by side in this way.
One person wakes each morning and enters a world filled with political conflict, economic uncertainty and alarming headlines. Another wakes and enters a world filled with coffee, books, and lighting the fire on a cold morning.
The same planet. The same day. Yet completely different lived experiences.
I’m not saying we should ignore important events or disappear from the world. But I have become very curious about the relationship between attention and experience. This is why it has become important to me to choose carefully where I place my attention. Not every argument deserves my energy. Not every frightening headline deserves my attention.
What if the reality we inhabit is shaped as much by what we notice as by what objectively exists?
What if our attention is constantly tuning us into one version of the world while tuning us out of others?
When I watch my chickens rushing towards their latest discovery, I sometimes wonder whether humans spend much of their lives doing the same thing. We gather around whatever has captured the attention of the flock, rarely stopping to ask whether we actually want to be there.
Maybe attention simply decides which world we get to experience. Not choosing what exists. But choosing what receives our attention.
We can walk away and notice something else entirely.