“We’re all living in different realities, and we’re not reachable to each other at all. It’s very easy to demonize each other. But the fact is that we have been successfully divided. [The characters] all care about the world and feel that something is very wrong, but they’re all looking at the world through different, distorted and strange windows, and they all disagree on what that thing is.”
Ari Aster
The film Truman Show symbolizes what it’s like to live inside a private reality bubble.
The film Eddington shows what happens when multiple reality bubbles are furiously pitted against each other – fueled by epistemic silos, performative outrage, moral certainty, and social media shaming. This is what the world feels like today.
Eddington
Writer and director Ari Aster was home in New Mexico during the COVID lockdowns, anxiously scrolling twitter. He, like many of us, was attempting to follow numerous divergent narratives about public health, encroachment of individual liberties, cries of systemic racism, violent protest and rioting, and a slew of misinformation on all of the above and more.
Bewildered and exhausted, he captured his feelings in a film named “Eddington”, released in mid 2025.
No Bad Guys
A brilliant and important feature of this movie is there is no “bad guy”. Each character acts relative to their own beliefs, experience, instincts, social pressures, and random luck. They are doing what they believe is right, pushing back against what they believe is wrong.
Who or what then, is really to blame?
Digital Media
Humans have been living in different realities for as long as there have been humans. The difference today is more powerful forces that deepen and perpetuate division.
In past generations our realities were more aligned – revolving around some common value system – such as religions or states. Ideas moved slowly – we had time to reflect – our information was more vetted and often exchanged in-person.
Today, shared perspectives are disintegrating as a consequence of digital media and a relentless battle for our attention:
“Society has been atomized and fractured over the last however many years. I guess this all began once we started living in the internet—when we could carry the internet on our person.”
Ari Aster
While it’s hard to name a single root cause, the internet, smartphones, and attention economy, all seem like major factors for this mass psychological shift.
Our capacity to be psychologically divided is ancient, but digital media acts like a super amplifier – pushing the worst psychological buttons and fanning flames of divergence and hostility.
“Distorted and Strange Windows”
Eddington is a masterpiece in showing what happens when we perceive the world in such radically different ways. Understandably though, it offers no solutions.
Each of our personal windows is distorted and strange in its own way.
Our modern world demands we understand how our windows (or minds) work. It demands we understand how easily we can be conditioned, blinded, biased, and manipulated, so that we can engage with the world with as much wisdom, patience, and resilience as possible.
If Eddington shows us the cost of unexamined windows, Self-Investigation asks what it would mean to examine them. The following sits on our homepage:
Your mind – everyone’s mind – is a private bubble of stories, habits, assumptions, feelings, identity, mental blind spots, and ideologies. This bubble covertly drives our behavior, deepens divisions, and causes personal and collective frustrations. Knowing ourselves means taking this bubble apart, aka Self-Investigation.
Self-Investigation doesn’t solve conflicts, but it changes the posture from which conflict is approached. It maximally positions us to hear and see each other, as sympathetically as possible, so we can actually cooperate and find our way out.
We should not ignore the role of powerful systems and “bad actors” that contribute to societal problems. On the other hand, it is not merely “bad actors” – it is the vulnerability of our own minds and the hyper division we are experiencing in this modern information environment. There is no “master of puppets” here. This problem is bigger than all of us.
Our only hope is to study this fragmentation within ourselves, and work together to inoculate against it.
Taking Action
This is both a personal and team journey.
To start the personal journey, see: A Short Guide to Self-Investigation.
To join the team journey, share your feelings here.
Discussion
This is posted to reddit for voting and discussion.
Eddington: Distorted and Strange Windows
byu/JesseNof1 inSelfInvestigation