Essay on reality

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Prompt: Reality can be seen through a series of lenses

Recently I attended a comedy festival and chose to go see one of the comedians’ shows with a friend of mine. This specific comedian had based his jokes around making fun of different people in certain countries. I had found the entire show completely amusing- it was very entertaining. However, when I questioned my friend about how she found it she was absolutely bewildered. She had found the jokes very offensive and humiliating towards the people of the ethnic groups that were mocked. It was a surprise to me that her perception of the show was entirely different from mine. The same event we had both experienced had seemed to produce different reactions. The situation made me realise that the window through which we perceive reality cannot be objectively verified due to the subjectivity of a person’s feelings, thoughts or memories. ‘After you've heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, you begin to worry about history,’ was written by an unknown author. Hence the perception of reality can be seen through many windows.  This circumstance made me question the validity of an objective reality in any situation and to what degree can certain factors influence the way we perceive reality. 

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Variations in the perception of reality can indeed be affected by the age and what has been experienced by the individual during their maturation process. Overtime one person’s perception of reality changes in that their initial knowledge of reality is entirety different from the reality they may perceive years later. The difference between the perceptions of reality of a forty year old adult to a ten year old child will vary greatly. A child has not yet been subjected to or experienced any major events; so their view on reality has not yet properly matured. As an individual matures, it ...

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