Sometimes, in conversation, I find myself unsettled not by the other person’s logic, but by the way they seem to see the world before that logic even begins.
What they are saying is not necessarily incoherent. In fact, within their own mind, it often has a certain consistency. There are reasons, explanations, and even responses to objections. At first glance, it may look like a difference of opinion or values.
But if you look more closely, the problem is not in the conclusion. It lies in the starting point.
The person seems to be looking at the reality in front of them, but in fact they are overlaying their own desires, anxieties, insecurities, longings, or self-image onto the outside world.
For example, a woman may simply be sitting there, yet someone looks at the hem of her skirt or the position of her legs and interprets it as “showing off.” She may only be present. She may have intended nothing at all. Even so, in that person’s mind, what he felt is converted into what she intended.
Or, in the case of art, an artist may describe a work that has not yet fully come into being as carrying a “profound theme” or as a “unique expression.” Rather than the work actually possessing those qualities, the artist treats what they want to see in it, or what they want to entrust to it, as if it were already an objective property of the work itself.
What is happening here is a confusion between “I felt it that way” and “it is that way.”
That lack of distance is frightening.
Everyone sees the world through their own experiences, desires, and memories. There is no such thing as completely neutral perception. In that sense, some degree of distortion or projection is natural.
The problem is when a person cannot recognize that distortion as distortion.
Is what I am seeing really there?
Or have I merely placed something from within myself onto it?
When this question is absent, logic can pile up as neatly as it likes, but it will still arrive somewhere strange.
What makes it even more difficult is that the person often tries to make others share that way of seeing.
“Doesn’t it look that way?”
“Don’t you think so too?”
“That’s what this is, isn’t it?”
At that moment, one is not simply being asked for an opinion. One is being asked to participate in a world created by another person’s inner projections. One is being asked to affirm, as reality, a world that is not true.
People like this have probably always existed: people who mistake their own desires, fears, or longings for external reality; people who live inside that world and sometimes pull others into it.
In the past, however, such things often remained within the realm of personal delusion or small communities: families, workplaces, drinking parties, hobby circles. They could exhaust or hurt people within those spaces, but there were fewer opportunities for them to circulate widely.
Now things are different.
Social media connects people who share similar distortions. AI can turn distorted premises into polished language. A culture that affirms self-expression tends to validate “the way you see things” as it is. Platforms for publication, open calls, and profiles can give even an unorganized self-image a social form.
As a result, a world created by inner projection can go out into society wearing the face of reality.
This is not quite the same as a simple lie. To the person experiencing it, it is probably very close to truth. Even if the other person never intended what was attributed to them, even if the work cannot support the words attached to it, the fact that “it looked that way” carries a strong sense of reality in their mind.
That is precisely why it is so difficult.
There should have been, somewhere, friction that brought the person back to reality: discomfort from others, criticism, embarrassment, silence, or the experience of realizing that one’s words or work did not hold up as well as expected before other people.
Through such friction, a person sometimes learns that their way of seeing was not the world itself.
But today, one can publish before that friction occurs. One can put it into words. One can gain agreement. One can connect with others who see a similar world.
At that point, the distortion is reinforced before it is corrected.
What is needed is not stronger logic. If the premise is broken, logic only carries the broken world farther.
What is needed is to stop before that point.
What did I see?
Did I really see it?
Or did I merely place something from within myself there?
To live without this question is more dangerous than it may seem. A person may believe they are looking at reality while actually walking through a world made by their own inner projections.
And the contemporary environment can give that world language, agreement, and even social form.
Even so, that world is not true.
Recorded on May 13, 2026