Every person you pass is experiencing the world from a center that feels as complete as yours.

Your experience arrives as the center of everything, complete and vivid, and everyone else’s does too, simultaneously, in the same street. Each person has a whole interior with the same claim to being the middle of things. Knowing this is easy; feeling it for even a moment is rare, because attention is not built for it.

Try it once deliberately: pick one person in a crowd and hold, for a few seconds, that their day is as detailed and central to them as yours is to you. It tends to change how you drive, how you queue, and how you speak to people for a while afterward.