We’ve all heard the term, “It’s like seeing the world through rose coloured glasses”, but what does that mean? What is it like to see the world through a biased viewpoint that ‘clouds’ other views? Rose coloured glasses suggests a positive outlook, what happens when our ‘glasses’, our viewpoint, is biased in a negative way? What if our view prevents us from seeing things that can benefit us?

This is too hard!

I can’t.

Why do things like this always happen to me?

There is no way out.

These are gloomy statements that can sour our world view and limit our ability to see good possibilities… to view the world through rose coloured glasses, or for that matter, clear glasses.

What lenses do we choose to look through? For most of us the lenses aren’t clear, they don’t bring reality into focus. We carry biases that cloud our vision, our perspective. But we don’t walk around wearing those biases like a pair of coloured glasses on our faces.

Despite the fact that most ideas lie on a spectrum, most viewpoints seem to swing away from central perspectives to polarized views with thick coloured lenses to peer through.

What does this mean? It means that not only do we not share the same viewpoint as others, sometimes we don’t share the same world as others. We literally exist in world so different than someone with an opposing view, that we can’t see the same things.

Imagine a world where everything is either red or green, and you had to choose red or green coloured sunglasses. To the person wearing green glasses there would only be green items and dark/black objects. To the person wearing red glasses there would only be red items and dark/black objects. None of the items seen by these two people would look remotely the same to both of these people. None.

I fear that few people these days are seeing the world through rose coloured glasses, and that whatever the colour being chosen, it is too dark, there is less light coming through, less opportunity to see the world others different than you are seeing. Maybe my inability to see this is an issue of my own lenses being clouded… but I fear that we are building a world that pushes us towards darkened glasses and away from natural light that lets us see things as they really are.