Peepholes and Perspectives: The Limits of How We See the World

I had a realization recently: we're each seeing just a small part of the full picture, and our particular view feels complete to us, but it's not. This seems obvious once you notice it, but it explains so much about why humans struggle to communicate.

Here's what made me notice it. I was trying to plan a hike using the National Parks website. Here's their entire description of the trail:

"Location: North end of the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway. This short walk (0.6 mile / 1 km round trip) is very scenic and tells quite a story. The trail follows an old 20th century logging road..."

They go on about logging history and restoration projects. But I sat looking at this description wondering how anyone could think this was enough information. I don't live near the park. I need to figure out how to get there, where to park, what to do about food, and how this hike might fit into a full day's plan.

The person who wrote this description sees a completely different world than I do. They know the park. They know where things are. They've sorted out all the basic logistics of being in that area. So those details don't even register as information someone might need.

This pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. It's not about people being bad at their jobs or intentionally leaving things out. It's that we literally can't see the full picture. The knowledge we each have shapes what questions we think need answering.

And here's the thing: bridging these different views takes work. When I read that trail description, I have to spend time researching basic context that isn't included. Someone has to pay that cost - either the writer includes more details up front, or every reader has to figure it out themselves. This friction of incomplete information is everywhere, and we're all paying for it all the time.

I ran into this again recently while shopping online for a birthday gift. As a software engineer, I kept thinking how much easier it would be if I could search and organize products the way I can with databases. Why can't I add my own tags to items? Why can't I have multiple wishlists? Why can't I save notes about why I liked or didn't like something?

I got excited about this idea. I wrote up a blog post describing how we could make shopping websites work more like having a helpful store worker who could rearrange items into different piles based on your needs. I included some technical details about how this could be built simply and cheaply with modern hardware.

The response I got was interesting. A principal engineer from Google wrote a detailed comment explaining all the ways I was wrong - about scalability, deployments, fault tolerance, regulations. Others piled on with their own technical criticisms.

But here's the thing: they were all looking through their own narrow peephole too. I was trying to start a conversation about making shopping easier for users. They saw a technical proposal that needed to be picked apart. My intention was to ask "Would you use these features if they existed?" They wanted to explain why building them would be hard.

Neither view was wrong exactly. But we were all paying the friction cost of seeing different parts of the same idea. I had cut down my technical explanations to make the post more readable, which left gaps for others to criticize. They were focused on implementation challenges that, while real, weren't relevant to the question I was trying to ask about user experience.

What's interesting is how this friction shapes everything we do. We don't just suffer through it - we build our entire society around it. Restaurants don't include parking information not because they can't, but because gathering and maintaining that information costs more than they think it's worth. Park websites don't include travel times from nearby cities because keeping that updated would take work. Shopping websites stick to simple wishlists because building something more complex means more maintenance, more edge cases, more things to go wrong.

This made me wonder: what if we could reduce this friction? What if it only took a restaurant 10 minutes to add and maintain accurate parking information? What if parks could automatically generate custom maps for visitors coming from different cities? Would our whole world look different?

The chains of logic in my mind that make ideas seem complete are probably illusions. When I think I've fully explained something, I'm probably just seeing the parts that fit through my particular peephole. When I get frustrated that information is missing, it's often because someone else looked through their peephole and decided the cost of including that information wasn't worth it.

This isn't just about websites or documentation or technical discussions. It's about how humans process and share information. We're all walking around with different mental models, different background knowledge, different assumptions about what's obvious and what needs explaining. And every time we try to communicate across those differences, someone has to pay the cost of bridging that gap.

I don't have a solution. But noticing this pattern has changed how I think about communication. When I find myself getting frustrated about missing information, I try to remember that someone else looked out through their peephole at the world and made a rational decision about what to include. When I'm sharing my own ideas, I try to remember that what seems obvious to me might be invisible to others - and vice versa.

Maybe understanding this can help reduce some of that friction. Or at least help us be more patient with each other as we try to piece together a complete picture from all our different views of the world.