On paper, it’s bone-stupid obvious that you need to step out of your own routine to see how other people interact with the world, and understand how that affects their intersection with you, how you need to reach them, and so on.
In practice, it’s hard as hell to reset your perspective. I had my eyes opened in the last couple weeks on something as simple as screen time. We all spend too much of our day with our eyes cast down at the phone, that much is hard to argue, but I didn’t think about how other people’s habits, and how different my doomscroll is from theirs.
I look stuff up on YouTube, and I watch a lot of things there when I’m shown links from other places, but I didn’t realize it was its own destination and primary port of call for so many people. Friends and family members showed me their subscriptions and playlists and it blew my mind. I genuinely was ignorant of the fact that YouTube is pretty much “TV” for a lot of y’all now, Friends and The Office replaced with emuguy46 and his houseful of rescue animals, or Vern’s ASMR Furniture Stripping vlog, or in my pal Salli’s case, feed after feed of live cams from forlorn train platforms across the heartland.
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