Parallax Thinking: Relative to the Observer [Part 2]
You Don’t Have to Choose a Side to Understand
Where I’m Coming From:
[A short briefing before we begin.]
I used this kind of thinking long before I had a name for it.
In the latter part of my career, I leaned on perspective shifting like a craftsman reaching for a trusted tool. Whether gathering intelligence, managing teams, or navigating chaos, success often came from my ability to observe a problem from multiple angles and the space between, before acting. I didn’t know it was called parallax thinking back then. I just knew it worked.
When I transitioned out of uniform, I started searching for the language to describe the way my mind worked. The way I processed conflict, contradiction, and complexity. Eventually, I found a small piece of that puzzle. It’s called parallax thinking. And like most things, I realized I’d been beaten to the punch by smarter minds who’d studied it long before I arrived.
But that didn’t lessen the impact. It confirmed it.
I am not writing this to pretend expertise. I am writing to map the concept onto real life through science, philosophy, and lived experience.
Because once I understood what parallax really was, I realized it had shaped everything: how I remember, how I manage emotion, and how I try to stay grounded in a world that no longer knows what it’s standing on.
This is not about agreement or allegiance. It is about learning to understand without needing permission. You do not have to adopt another observation point. But if you refuse to understand it, you are choosing blindness over strength. And that choice carries a cost. Mapping the ground is only the first step. Building a framework for surviving it comes next.
What you are reading here is only a fraction of what I’ll be exploring in what feels like an audacious plan: writing two books. One will be a non-fiction, practical framework, a philosophy shaped by experience, contradiction, and the refusal to see life through a single lens. The other will be a philosophical fiction that sits beside it, not to explain, but to embody.
Parallax thinking forms part of the foundation for both. Not as some abstract metaphor but as a functional tool. A way to shift your perspective, observe with clarity, and move with intention. A way to live without chasing certainty in every direction.
Maybe I’ll break this down in front of a crowd someday. Speak on it, if the opportunity shows up. But if not, that’s alright. Some truths don’t need a platform. They just need to be used.
[Disclaimer: I write about things that walk the edge. This essay covers ground that some will find uncomfortable. It was not written to attack. It was written to reveal. If you are not ready to think past slogans, or to hold uncomfortable weight without dropping it, this may not be for you. If you are, take a breath. Step across the line. I am not your enemy. And this essay? It might not just change your perspective. It might change how you move through the world.]
Shifting Angles, Same Truth
Parallax is “simple”, on paper. It’s the observed shift in an object’s position when viewed from different angles. That’s it. In astronomy, it helps measure the distance between stars. In day to day life, it’s why your thumb appears to “jump” when you look at it with one eye closed, then the other. But like most things that matter, the real power of parallax has less to do with what we’re seeing and more to do with how we’re seeing.
This isn’t an essay about science, not exactly. It’s about what happens when we admit that where we stand changes what we see. That truth isn’t lost or broken when seen from different angles, it’s just deeper than we thought. And sometimes, the space between those perspectives is the only place where understanding can grow.
Philosophy, science, memory, and even identity, each operates within its own form of parallax. There are no pure viewpoints. Just shifting ones. And the more willing we are to see that shift, the more honest we can be about the nature of reality. Not a reality that comforts or confirms, but one that requires movement, patience, and a bit of humility.
This essay isn’t a pitch for agreement. It’s not a moral plea, a position paper, or a veteran’s “hot take.” It’s an exploration. A mapping of perspectives, from the stars, to the soul, to the streets we walk every day. And at the heart of it is this question:
What if the contradictions we run from aren’t obstacles to truth, but signs we’re finally seeing clearly?
Without further ado, let’s begin.
Scientific Parallax : Depth Through Distance
In astronomy, parallax is how we measure the distance to nearby stars. Not with fancy tech or far off probes, but with simple geometry and patience. As Earth orbits the sun, a nearby star appears to shift slightly against the backdrop of more distant stars. That shift is tiny, fractions of an arcsecond, but it’s real. And it’s measurable..
Six months apart, two views from opposite sides of Earth’s orbit give us the angle. From that, we get distance.
A star with a parallax angle of 0.1 arcseconds is 10 parsecs away. That’s about 32.6 light years. Nothing flashy, just consistent math. It works because we accept a basic truth: where we stand affects what we see. The greater the shift in position, the clearer the measurement becomes.
But this isn’t just a trick of telescopes. Our brains do the same thing every second. Both eyes take in slightly different images. That difference, optical parallax, is how we perceive depth. Without it, everything would look flat.
Motion parallax takes that further. When you move, nearby objects shift faster than distant ones. Watch trees fly past a window while mountains barely move. That difference is how you judge speed and distance. Your brain doesn't need a lecture in physics to understand it, it just does.
In tech, this shows up all over the place. Virtual reality depends on simulating parallax. As you turn your head, the digital environment adjusts, shifting what you see based on position. It tricks the brain into believing the world has depth. And the only reason it works is because the brain expects perspective to change.
The first time I truly grasped how small Earth is compared to what’s out there, I couldn’t sleep. The scale didn’t just humble me, it unraveled something. And it didn’t stop. Every time I dug deeper, it happened again. Watching lectures by minds like Brian Cox or the work of Alex McColgan didn’t just expand my understanding of the cosmos, they shattered my sense of certainty about everything I thought mattered.
The vastness isn’t cold. It’s beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. For a long time, I felt like a grain of sand on an infinite beach, insignificant, forgettable. But somewhere in that shift, something else took hold. Statistically, the odds of even existing, in this form, at this time, are almost incalculable.
According to a rough, but popularized model that breaks down the odds of any one person existing, the probability looks something like this:
That’s 1 in 16 trillion. And that’s being generous.
The estimate includes several major factors:
The chance your parents would meet at all: about 1 in 20,000.
The chance they’d stay together long enough to have a child: 1 in 2,000.
And the chance that the exact sperm out of 400 million would fertilize the exact egg to make you: 1 in 400,000,000.
Multiply those together and you get that number above. And that’s not even accounting for generations before them, genetic mutations, environmental shifts, or the sheer chaos of history aligning just right for you to be here, now, reading this.
You weren’t just born, you landed a one in several trillion shot. That doesn’t make you special in a cosmic sense. But it sure as hell makes your existence rare.
That’s not meaningless. That’s a lottery ticket punched against impossible odds. And now, knowing that, the question isn’t what does it mean? The question is what do I do with it?
That’s the thing with parallax: it doesn’t change the object. It reveals the space between where you are and where you’ve been. And in science, that’s everything. Perspective isn’t bias, it’s part of the measurement.
Philosophical Parallax: The Space Between Contradictions
Perspective changes things. Not always in obvious ways, but enough to force a pause. Sometimes that pause is where reflection starts and philosophy has always lived in that space.
Slavoj Žižek reworked the idea of philosophical parallax to explain what happens when two views of the same thing don’t line up. Instead of seeing that gap as a mistake or flaw, he treated it as the very structure of how we encounter reality. Not a bug in the system, but the system itself.
In this view, contradiction isn’t something to fix. It’s something to hold. And maybe even learn from.
Philosophical parallax says this: two conflicting ideas can both be true, depending on where you’re standing. That space between them, the part that doesn’t resolve, isn’t weakness. It’s where understanding expands.
Truth, identity, even morality, they shift depending on the angle of approach. That doesn’t reduce their meaning. It adds dimension. What looks sharp and defined from one side might blur from another. That doesn’t make it false. It just means you’re seeing it from farther out.
Suffering, for example, can be read as a trial, a burden, a fact, or a doorway. None of those invalidate the others. They’re just different ways of framing the same weight. And if you’ve only seen it one way, it’s easy to believe that’s the only way.
I’m not trying to pull those ideas together into a single conclusion. It’s my attempt to show the space between them and what can live there if we stop forcing answers where questions are enough.
For example: I consider myself a patriot, an American son born to defend this land and its people. But I also consider myself a nomad. I don’t claim any one place, not really. I’ve seen enough to know that a flag doesn’t always mean what people think it means. I’ve been called a hero and treated like a leper, often in the same breath. I’ve heard Americans say things that made me question the very oath I once took without hesitation.
For a long time, that contradiction ate at me. I couldn’t resolve it. Part of me still can’t. But I’ve come to see that maybe resolution isn’t the goal. Maybe it’s the tension itself that builds something worth carrying.
I don’t believe this country is worth dying for, full stop. But I do believe it’s worth living for. That’s not weakness. That’s clarity. Living for something means staying when it gets ugly. It means helping others find light in the dark, even if they’re not ready to look at it yet. It means saying what needs to be said, even when it cuts deep. Especially when it cuts deep.
That’s the parallax view I’ve made peace with. One truth fits what I’ve seen. The other fits what I feel. I can be a patriot and a nomad, not by choosing sides, but by drawing from both to become someone I can live with. Not perfect. Not pure. Just real. And that’s the only kind of character I’m interested in building now.
Parallax thinking doesn’t seek unity. It accepts that we see differently depending on where we’ve been and that’s not a flaw in the lens. It’s a feature of being human.
Observing Without Contact
There’s a kind of comfort that comes from distance. The ability to speak boldly about chaos without ever being touched by it. That’s not a crime. But it becomes one when that distance is mistaken for clarity.
Some people will send others into fire without ever asking what the burn feels like. They’ll draw lines on maps, draft speeches about freedom, and wrap themselves in slogans like armor, all while refusing to face the outcomes of the things they set in motion. It’s a particular kind of blindness, choosing to see only what fits the angle they’re comfortable with, then calling it truth.
That’s parallax, too, but here, it’s enforced. The other perspective isn’t invisible. It’s just ignored.
Often when I speak, my view is often dismissed, not because it lacks depth, but because it’s too close to the flame. Too complicated. Too real. It doesn’t match the clean version already accepted. So it’s ignored. Erased. Or politely sidelined as “just one perspective.”
[Some of you are already hovering over the unsubscribe button. Some faces are probably turning redder than a ripe tomato. Take a breath. Prepare yourself, it’s about to go deeper.]
Before you stake your claim on a conflict, before you argue for intervention, send money, post flags, or chant slogans, ask yourself:
Would I die for this?
Would I send my child to die for this?
If the answer is no, then take pause. That’s all I’m asking.
I've stood in places where those decisions weren’t theoretical. Where dying for something wasn’t a tweet or a headline. It was a possibility every day, every militia checkpoint, and every minor mistake. And from that position, you start to see how different the same event can look depending on where you're standing.
That’s parallax. It doesn’t care about your feelings, it just shifts the frame.
From far away, a conflict might look justified. Noble, even. Zoom in and you might see something else: confusion, loss, collateral damage that never makes the news. None of it fits neatly into a slogan but all of it is real.
And to be clear, I’ve jumped to conclusions too. I’ve looked at a situation and made a call before I had enough information. I’m not immune to the human tendency to react first and reflect later. That’s not weakness. That’s human nature. But with age, experience, and a little distance, I’ve learned to question where I’m standing before I start speaking. And that shift in position? That’s everything.
Just because you believed it yesterday doesn’t mean you’re bound to it today. The observation point moves. And with it, so can your view. This isn’t about guilt. I’m not calling anyone out. I’m just saying the closer you’ve been to fire, the more cautious you are with sparks. You learn not to throw matches unless you're willing to burn with them.
So take a breath. Look again. Not through your feed. Not through your politics. But through the lens of weight. Of cost. Of consequence. That’s what a parallax view gives you, if you’re willing to use it.
This isn’t about demanding that everyone feel the same weight. It’s about naming the gap between consequence and commentary. Between those who write the script, and those who have to live it.
The parallax view reveals the discomfort most would rather not confront: that proximity to harm changes how we see harm. And some will do everything they can to stay far enough away that they never have to see it at all.
Living Between Worlds
For some, parallax is a concept. For me, it’s a condition.
It’s what happens when you’ve lived inside two realities: one wired for survival, where clarity is earned through blood and failure, and another built for performance, where survival depends on how well you fake alignment.
One world taught me that every action mattered. That mistakes cost lives. That trust was forged in the fire of consequence. The other taught me that appearances mattered more than substance. That saying the right thing mattered more than doing the right thing. That trust was traded for optics and slogans.
The space between them isn’t academic. It’s a canyon. And no amount of speeches, seminars, or slogans is going to bridge it. Somehow, I’m still expected to walk that gap like it’s a paved road. Like it’s simple. Like it doesn’t tear at everything I spent my life becoming. But it does. Every day.
That’s parallax when it’s not a metaphor. That’s what it feels like when you’re stuck between two gravitational pulls and you realize that the only way forward is learning to measure the distance, not pretend it doesn’t exist.
Military life doesn’t leave when the uniforms get folded into boxes. It stays in the wiring. The habits. The language that doesn’t translate outside the circle. No matter how far I move into civilian space, part of my mind stays stationed elsewhere.
It’s the daily tension of wearing one face for the world and carrying another underneath. It’s knowing that collapse doesn’t come with a warning shot. While everyone else debates whether the walls could ever fall, I already know the truth: they’re held together by hope, not strength.
Some try to bury one version of themselves. Others get stuck living in the past. A few of us learn to stand in the middle, letting both perspectives breathe. That space is rough. There’s no manual for it. But it’s honest.
For me, philosophy became a bridge, not because it offered answers, but because it didn’t flinch from contradiction. Reading Camus in silence hits different when you’ve watched people die for nothing. Not in the abstract. Not as history. But up close. And then had to return to a place that still speaks in euphemisms.
I’ve made peace with how my mind works. It’s a solid state drive with multiple partitions. Different roles. Different reactions. Philosophy didn’t fix me but it helped me organize the files. Gave me the tools to observe those partitions from different angles: one from the past, one grounded in the present, and a few from outside my comfort zone entirely.
That shift in thinking keeps the system from overheating. Critical thinking when I need precision. Emotional thinking when the moment demands weight. Rational thinking when clarity matters more than comfort. I don’t let them argue with each other anymore. I choose the voice. I choose the angle. I match the lens to the situation.
I still think like a Marine. Like a father. Like a husband. Like a son. Like a woodworker, a writer, a philosopher and probably a few more I haven’t fully named yet. But I don’t let them all speak at once. I used to think that was fragmentation. Now I see it as a toolkit. Every role, every lens, gives me leverage. I’m not trying to make them all agree. I’m just trying to stay operational. That’s enough.
This is what the philosophical parallax view looks like when it’s lived, not theorized. It’s not just seeing different angles, it’s choosing which one to use without erasing the others. It’s being able to hold the Marine’s urgency in one hand and a father’s patience in the other. That gap between them? It used to tear me apart. Now it helps me move.
This is what the philosophical parallax view gave me: a way to live inside contradiction without letting it consume me. A way to observe without always reacting.
That alone is worth everything I’ve carried.
My philosophical parallax view isn’t a burden to cure. It’s a lived insight into the structure of reality itself, fractured, unfinished, sometimes noble, sometimes cruel. But always requiring me to see from more than one position to understand any of it.
Parallax in Practice: Thinking Beyond the First Angle
It’s easy to get locked into a single view and call it clarity. That’s how most of us were taught to think: identify the issue, break it down, solve it. Clean. Efficient. But life rarely works that way, and neither does meaning.
Parallax thinking pushes us to look again, not to change our minds, but to understand why our minds landed where they did in the first place. It’s not about seeing everything. It’s about knowing that there’s always another side we’re not standing on. That realization alone can change how we move through conflict, conversation, and complexity.
Critical thinking breaks down what we know. Parallax thinking asks, Where am I standing while I evaluate this? One shows you the system. The other shows you the shape.
When they work together, the result isn’t just smarter, it’s deeper.
Using Parallax Thinking in the Real World
1. Identify Your Starting Point: Every perspective begins somewhere. Your background, values, trauma, or training. It all shapes how you see. Before reacting, ask: Where am I standing? What’s shaping what I see right now?
2. Shift on Purpose: Take a step sideways. Not to become “neutral,” but to see what changes. Try to imagine the same issue from another lived experience.
If I had grown up differently, would I see this the same way?
3. Compare the Views: Notice what shows up in one perspective that’s invisible in the other. Where are the overlaps? The blind spots? What truths exist in both frames? Where’s the noise?
4. Don’t Collapse the Conflict: Resist the urge to pick a side just to end the discomfort. Some contradictions are worth sitting with. Parallax thinking says: You don’t have to fix it. Just learn to see the shape of it.
5. Measure the Distance to Insight: In astronomy, the greater the parallax shift, the better the measurement. Same here. If you can hold two drastically different perspectives without falling apart, you’re probably getting closer to the full picture.
Examples in Motion
Politics
First View: “They’re destroying the country.”
Parallax Shift: Study what values are actually driving each side. Look at policy over time, not talking points.
New Depth: Most people want the same outcomes: stability, safety, opportunity. They just disagree on the path.
Veterans and Mental Health
First View: “They’re just milking the system for benefits.”
Parallax Shift: Understand the bureaucratic hell, moral injury, and invisible wounds many veterans carry long after discharge.
New Depth: Most aren’t looking for a handout. Though I have met a few. But the majority are trying to survive a system that sent them into chaos and gave them paperwork instead of peace.
Social Media
First View: “People are just addicted to their phones and need to unplug.”
Parallax Shift: Consider that for many, their digital identity is their only consistent source of connection, validation, or purpose. Especially for the isolated, marginalized, or unseen.
New Depth: What looks like addiction from the outside might feel like survival from the inside. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it does change how you approach it.
Artificial Intelligence
First View: “AI is going to ruin everything.”
Parallax Shift: Look at how it’s accelerating scientific research, identifying genetic markers for disease, and assisting in early diagnosis and treatment where human capacity falls short.
New Depth: The threat isn’t in the code, it’s in the intent. Like any tool, AI reflects the ethics of the people wielding it. Used with discipline, it doesn’t destroy, it saves lives.
Why It Matters
Parallax thinking isn’t soft. It’s not “both-sides-ism.” It’s discipline, the practice of holding space for contradiction without rushing to shut one side down. Combine it with critical thinking, and now you’re not just informed. You’re dangerous in the best way.
I’ve spent time in places where survival is the only language spoken. Where governments do not serve, they vanish. Where the line between life and death isn’t hypothetical. I’ve seen families clawing their way out of that chaos, trying to find anything that even resembled safety. So when the topic of immigration comes up here in the States, the parallax shift hits hard. Not because there’s a simple answer. Because there isn’t one.
The planet doesn’t recognize borders. Water flows, air circulates, animals migrate, and none of them care about the invisible lines we carved into the dirt. But we do. Because without borders, there is no order. And without order, there is no safety. Those lines, drawn from blood, conquest, survival, and fear, decide who thrives and who barely holds on. You don’t earn your starting point. You inherit it. Born in Denver? You get a launchpad. Born in Mogadishu? You get a warzone.
We pretend it’s natural. We pretend it’s fair. It’s neither. It’s a cosmic lottery dressed up as destiny. Then we stamped it into paper and law. A passport isn’t just a document; it’s a weapon, a shield, and a sentence, all at once. It decides where you can flee, where you can build, and where you are expected to die if your number didn’t come up lucky.
Parallax thinking forces you to face it. Borders are imaginary, but their consequences are not. Without them, chaos spreads. With them, injustice calcifies. That is the weight you have to hold before you even think about shouting solutions. There is no clean fix.
And yet the debate is usually loud and lazy. People throw around lines like “your ancestors were immigrants too,” as if that cancels every concern or makes every migration story morally equivalent. It doesn’t. That slogan oversimplifies a brutal, complex reality into something easy to chant. And if you think your ancestors came over here peacefully, paperwork in hand, ready to work and follow the rules, you need to open a history book. It’s full of violence. Full of struggle. Full of people who fought like hell just to survive five minutes longer than the next.
I’ve walked through refugee camps. I’ve immersed in other cultures. I’ve seen what some are running from. It’s not about chasing the American dream, it’s about escaping nightmares. A lack of water. A lack of law. A lack of life itself. Now imagine growing up where justice is what you can personally enforce, and then being dropped into a society full of crazy rules, bullshit social contracts, and never ending rows of complex systems. Expecting seamless integration isn’t compassion. It’s delusion.
Now take another angle. A struggling American family watches people arrive from another country, gaining access to housing, healthcare, legal protections. Meanwhile, they can’t afford groceries. They can’t pay their medical bills (whole other topic, I know, simmer down). They can’t afford to buy a home let alone catch up on rent. They’re angry. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re drowning. And someone else looks like they’re getting a life raft first.
But there is another angle most are too afraid to name. The malicious actor. The ones who are not running from chaos but carrying it with them like a weapon. Those who leave burning countries behind, not to find peace, but to find softer ground to conquer. They do not come to build. They come to take. They exploit systems designed for compassion, using the goodwill of others as a shield. They bring the tactics of lawless lands into places that spent centuries trying to escape them. And while it is not everyone, and it never will be, it is enough to fracture communities, to unravel trust, and to burn what others bled to build. Ignoring that reality does not make you compassionate. It makes you a collaborator in your own downfall.
Then there’s another observation point. The one most people forget to consider. The quiet observer. The person who hasn’t lived either extreme, but still holds a position. Maybe they’ve never seen the chaos up close, never faced scarcity, but they have opinions because they've borrowed someone else’s outrage. Quoting someone else’s suffering doesn’t make it yours. Observation isn’t inherited. It’s earned. And screaming into a megaphone isn’t earning it, it’s just volume without signal.
Maybe the goal isn’t to argue louder. Maybe it’s to share what you’ve seen, not to declare it as truth, but to offer it for understanding. But that would require the neutral party to listen without already preparing a rebuttal. That’s the rare part.
In all my years, whether in Cobb County, Georgia or “small-town” Maine, I’ve seen the same thing. People have no problem shouting into their phones, but won’t whisper a truth face to face. Unless of course there’s a crowd watching or a microphone to make it feel righteous. That’s where observation gets lost. That’s where parallax fails, when people confuse borrowed outrage for lived perspective.
Here’s the thing: having one side of a two sided coin is not parallax thinking. Choosing a stance and anchoring yourself to it no matter what, that’s rigidity. That’s comfort disguised as clarity. The real work begins when you start observing from a place that makes you uncomfortable. When you stop asking, “Which side am I on?” and start asking, “What am I missing from this angle?”
That’s what parallax thinking offers. Not excuses, structure. It gives shape to contradiction. It allows you to see that the chaos people flee and the resentment they walk into aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re stacked. And we pretend they’re not.
I’m not writing this to spark a political debate. This is one man’s observation, seen from up close, from far away, and from the messy space in between. The only practical stance I can take is this: be kind to those who deserve it, and be ruthless to those who don’t. Come in peace, or leave in pieces. That applies to any view, from any timeline, now until the universe collapses.
Parallax thinking doesn’t excuse anything. But it explains a hell of a lot. And if we had the guts to look from another angle, even briefly, we might stop yelling long enough to actually see what we’re dealing with.
Because like most polarized topics, there’s no single side to pick. No “yes” or “no” that solves it. That kind of binary thinking is the problem. If there’s a solution, it’s not a slogan. It’s thousands, maybe millions of hours spent fixing, building, and enforcing something better. It would require something you don’t see much of anymore: a rare agreement on one uncomfortable, unavoidable truth. Some human lives matter more than others.
And we already know it. We pretend the line is clear. It isn’t. We pretend we know where to draw it. We don’t. And that blindness, that refusal to measure what must be measured, is why the cycle keeps spinning.
We don’t have to tear down borders. We don’t have to shut everyone out. There are other options, in the space between. That’s where the humane answer lives. We don’t have to agree with every perspective. But we do need to understand why people see what they see. That knowledge alone changes how you walk into a room and sometimes whether you should stay in it at all.
And another truth few say out loud: the human condition is messy. When pushed far enough, people revert to survival mode behavior. That doesn’t make it right. But pretending it doesn’t happen? That’s worse.
Screaming into algorithms is not a plan. It is surrender. Problem solving is the only rebellion worth the noise. I’ve yet to meet anyone in power willing to put in that kind of time. Maybe that’s because parallax thinking, real critical thinking, isn’t built for politics.
Not because it’s difficult. But because it’s honest. And honesty has never polled well. The truth was never complicated. Just inconvenient for those selling simpler lies.
Failure of Understanding
The last point I want to make, for now, isn’t about immigration. It’s about something even more dangerous.
It’s about the failure to understand.
Parallax thinking doesn’t require agreement. It demands awareness. And if applied honestly, it can make sense of some of the most polarizing issues that dominate the modern brain.
I think about people who grew up in dirt floor poverty in the ’40s and ’50s, folks who spent most of their lives without electricity, never mind the internet. Now, in their later years, they carry pocket sized machines that talk back, feed them gigs of information, and trap their minds in a constant loop of headlines, noise, and outrage. These systems aren’t neutral, they’re built to show one angle, one feed, one version of “truth.” And they rarely account for the observer’s experience, what that person has lived, lost, or seen firsthand in this absurd universe we call reality.
Hell, I still think Pluto is a planet. There. I said it. Go ahead and ban me.
But seriously, imagine holding onto what you’ve been taught for decades, what you’ve experienced as truth and now you’ve got a 20-something screaming in your face, calling you a “fucking Nazi boomer” because you didn’t update your vocabulary fast enough. As if the word Nazi means the same thing to someone raised in post war America as it does to someone born in 2002. For one generation, it was literal evil. For the other, it’s become a meme, a catch all insult, a badge to slap on anything disagreeable.
Now change the observation point.
A younger generation, raised in an entirely different world. One where tattoos, piercings, and dyed hair aren’t rebellion, they’re the norm. They see older folks clinging to outdated ideals, yelling about “back in my day” while ignoring the world that’s burning now. And let’s be honest: the youth didn’t invent this mess. They inherited it. They’re navigating a future built by the very people calling them soft. That’s a parallax gap so wide, no tweet is going to close it.
[Let me be clear, I’m not picking “teams”. I’m trying to understand how people see what they see. That’s not the same thing.]
The older generation does not owe the youth an apology. But they do owe them the truth. The world has shifted faster in the last thirty years than at any other point in human history. Like it or not, the future we are standing in is one they helped build. Screaming at the next generation for seeing it differently will not change that. Conditions shape perspectives. No one is exempt from that.
And the younger crowd? You are free to question, free to challenge, free to rebel. But you are not free from the consequences of misunderstanding what you are standing on. Not every argument is oppression. Not every disagreement is a betrayal of humanity. Before you call someone a villain, make sure you are not just shouting into a mirror.
Screaming louder does not make you right. It just makes you easier to manipulate. You are free to choose your observation point. You are not free to escape the cost of where you stand.
Here’s the reality nobody profitable wants you to hear: Despite all the noise, despite the headlines screaming collapse, 2025 is still the safest, healthiest, most opportunity rich time in human history. Wars still happen but they are smaller, fewer, and less catastrophic than the bloodbaths that defined the last century.
If you think the conflicts of today are bad, open a real history book. Look at trenches filled with rotting men. Look at cities leveled to dust and civilians starved by the millions. Look at how casually death used to operate. Most of what passes for chaos now? It’s manufactured. Clickbait outrage. Addiction by algorithm. The truth is harder and less profitable to sell.
I have had the weight of standing at different observation points. I grew up in one time, fought in another, and woke up in this one.
I remember the lies sold to us. Go to college, get married, follow the script, and success will follow. I remember a poster in my elementary school: on one side, a dirty, overweight tradesman; on the other, a college graduate surrounded by Ferraris and a mansion. Guess what? I have friends in the trades now with four-car garages, no Ferraris but plenty of jacked-up trucks. And I have other friends drowning in college debt, with nothing to show for it but a piece of paper and a lifetime of regret.
I volunteered to serve because I believed in the mission we were sold. Defend the nation. Protect the innocent. That was the promise. But the reality on the ground did not match the broadcast back home. I did not see pure hatred everywhere. I mostly saw human beings, scarred by history, surviving the best they could inside the wreckage left by a thousand broken promises. And yes, I saw immense cruelty too, the kind you do not forget even when you want to.
I will never deny that there was some good in the twenty-plus years of the Global War on Terror. Moments where real change happened. Moments that mattered. But now I see it from another angle. From the view of those whose governments we helped topple, whose futures we helped dismantle, and then abandoned when the headlines faded. And I am not just talking about Iraq or Afghanistan. There are betrayals layered under betrayals most Americans have never even heard of.
I have stopped looking for sides to pick. I have started measuring the observation points instead. Understanding where someone stands does not mean excusing everything they have done. It just means recognizing the ground beneath their feet, and the history that pushed them there.
That is what parallax demands. You do not have to like every view. But you had better know where you are standing before you start judging where someone else ended up.
That is the real gift of parallax thinking. It does not promise answers. It forces you to step back far enough to see that maybe we are not as different as we pretend to be. Most of us are just trapped in different versions of the same rigged game. Sold different flavors of the same lie.
Linear thinking keeps us divided. The dopamine slot machine keeps us distracted. And the world? It is not as broken as you have been led to believe.
Trust me. It is not. [More on that in a future essay.]
Learning to Measure the Gap
Parallax thinking doesn’t ask us to choose a side. It asks us to understand the shift, the gap, and the details. To recognize that where we stand changes what we see and that maybe the truest picture isn’t found in any single angle, but in the space between them.
Science uses parallax to measure distance. Philosophy uses it to make peace with contradiction. Life uses it to force perspective, ready or not.
What started as a tool to map the stars turns out to be one of the cleanest metaphors I have found for navigating memory, identity, and meaning. And like any worthwhile observation, it only works if you’re willing to move. It requires distance. It demands another view.
After 41 years on this earth, old enough to be called an elder a few centuries ago, I’ve found more than a few observation points. I’ve learned to keep an open mind, without letting it spill out on the floor. Sometimes I analyze, break things apart, and wait for the dust to settle. Other times I feel first, absorb the weight, then share what that emotion tells me. I no longer believe in living with only one point of view.
As the saying goes, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” - Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher (around 500 BCE).
That’s parallax thinking, at least how I see it. I’ve added it to my toolkit and how I, personally, keep my internal system from overheating.
And as always, I’m not preaching from a pulpit. I’m just sharing what I see from where I’m standing now. Tomorrow, I might stand somewhere else. That’s the point.
If there’s anything I hope you take from this, it’s that the world is still a beautiful place. Filled with epic, flawed, incredible people. But the noise? The drama? The endless outrage machine that lives in your pocket? That’s just one lens.
It’s all relative to the observer.
Change your position. Change your angle. Look again. You might find what you’ve been looking for. And if you don’t? Maybe you’re not really looking yet.
There’s no single view of what’s real. No final frame that captures it all.
But there is depth and that depth reveals itself when we step to the side, just enough, and look again.
The object doesn’t move.
We do.
