When you live in NY City, you become acutely aware that millions of people are living in parallel realities. We each have our friends, our co-workers, the people at the local deli, and a few other people that we interact with. Everyone else becomes a sort of blurred background.
Protocol on the street or in the subway dictates that we politely ignore all of those strangers around us. We do our best to stay out of their way, and if all goes well they do the same.
On a psychological level, it is as though multiple universes are co-existing in the same space, physically intertwined, yet emotionally disconnected. Every once in a while an encounter with a stranger pierces that veil, but for the most part it remains intact.
I wonder what it would be like if we all actually saw each other — I mean really saw each other. Or is such a thing simply outside the capability of a society of humans?