Immutable Invisible Devotion
We inhabit experiential worlds so particular to ourselves that what brings another person genuine pleasure can seem not merely foreign, but impossible. His wife savours the sensation of hot sun on skin whilst he experiences it as endurance; his conscious attempts to reprogram this response fail because pleasure operates beneath the realm of will. We cannot think our way into different forms of happiness, yet we persistently assume our own experiential framework represents the human default.
This reveals a deeper paradox: the very specificity that makes each person's joy authentic also renders it largely inaccessible to others, even those who love us most. True transformation of experience appears to be less about changing how we feel and more about accepting the radical subjectivity of all feeling—recognising that what seems obviously pleasant or unpleasant to us exists in a universe of one.
The most generous act may not be sharing our own sources of joy, but creating space for others to discover entirely different ones.