>Why not accept that reality is different for different people?
There is a consistent physical reality that exists outside the human experience. When people communicate in almost any language, they are referring to this external reality. This is why people constantly choose to "invalidate" someone else's experience.
They are essentially saying "Your description of the shared fabric of reality in which humanity dwells is completely invalid!" rather than "Your reality is your opinion and my reality is my opinion, let's sing kumbaya."
The truth of the world is that there is only one shared reality that exists for humanity and only one description of it that is correct. However, we as homosapiens can only perceive this reality through the human experience. Hence the endless debates about which reality is valid or invalid.
Yes, and whenever people talk about human concepts like inequality, wealth, economics, power, or other social constructs, they are not referring to this physical reality. You can't talk about any of these without injecting values, desires, emotions, and other subjective experiences. These exist only in peoples' heads.
The objective, physical description of a scene at work might be something like "The person called 'Andrew' sat down at a table with the person called 'Bob'. They talked. Bob stood up and left the room. Andrew rested his elbow on the table and cradled his forehead in his hand. He stared at the table for a couple minutes, and then he got up, left the room, went back to his desk, and started typing quickly."
The subjective description from Bob's POV might be: "I'm a manager for a critical feature team. We had a really challenging feature request that may bring in millions of new business. Andrew is my best engineer. Knowing that he has always delivered high-quality code, I called him in to a quick meeting and explained the customer's request. He didn't say anything, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was already grappling with the challenge. I left to go to my next meeting, confident that the project will be done in time."
The subjective POV from Andrew's head might be: "I work hard on my code. Sometimes I wish my boss would acknowledge that. Today, he called me in to a meeting, unscheduled, and dumped a huge new project on me. I'd planned on taking my wife on a vacation to celebrate our anniversary, but now I might have to cancel if I can't get this done in time. Grr. Anyway, better get back to work so I can crank out this code."
See the difference? What happened, objectively, is only the physical actions in the real world. Moving body parts. Manipulating tools. Being physically present in the same place. But there's a whole layer of subjective experience underneath that which people take for granted, but which may be completely different between different people.
Many, many arguments come from misapplying the tools meant to deal with objective reality to subjective reality. Both PG (in several of his essays) and many of the commenters here make that mistake. I've made it myself, frequently, in the past. But in general, whenever you're talking about wants, desires, values, or reasons, you can't say "This is the way the world is" without adding the implicit qualifier "for me" or "based on this evidence".
There is a consistent physical reality that exists outside the human experience. When people communicate in almost any language, they are referring to this external reality. This is why people constantly choose to "invalidate" someone else's experience.
They are essentially saying "Your description of the shared fabric of reality in which humanity dwells is completely invalid!" rather than "Your reality is your opinion and my reality is my opinion, let's sing kumbaya."
The truth of the world is that there is only one shared reality that exists for humanity and only one description of it that is correct. However, we as homosapiens can only perceive this reality through the human experience. Hence the endless debates about which reality is valid or invalid.