I was thinking of the old conundrum of how we perceive the objective world or reality - it’s always through our limited sensory organs. Then is has to be processed: some small latency in the brain, maybe some evolutionary heuristics, our genetic background, etc. after all this we get a tainted fragment the world.
We know these facts: we aren’t getting a full picture, i.e., our perception is limited. We can have levels of perception which depend on various factors, some of which are internal (currently researched and refined in the fields of psychology & neuroscience) and others external. As a species, we have cultivated them, I’d reckon, starting with the first human tribes.
Society is both a necessity and a natural extension of the late humans. The interesting detail is society's effects on our perceptions or reality. I keep using perception at plural because I’m making the case there’s a multiplicity of them (maybe I’m channelling Deleuze here). What I want to add on top of the plurality of perception is its hierarchical property in relation to the immovable real world.
Why do I believe we can switch the perception of the world? Is self-evident, but this property forces it to move under our radars. We box ourselves into a certain instance of reality through a specific perception.
Let’s say, age wise, we are in our thirties and our carrier takes center stage - this becomes the instance of how we perceive the world. Thus, our prima perception is bound to this context and the other instances take a second place. Other instances? we can think of items that ooze meaning in our lives, e.g. our loved ones, passions, hobbies, etc.
This creates a hierarchy of perceptions which, if we’re not aware of it, we can designate as the most important the “wrong” instance of reality. These hierarchies are subjective, but to what degree? What if we get stuck in a perception bubble and we forget or ignore our health? - in the future we might experience the perception of being ill to a higher degree and, sadly, get stuck in it longer or for the rest of our life.
We can sketch this out at a macro and micro-level. The hierarchy of perceptions guides our choices to a certain extent in different periods of our lives (macro). But at any point there’s a multiplicity of perceptions of the same position of reality which unified unto infinity would give us a full picture.