For contrast to the boundaries and open relationships discussions, I’ll introduce the first of several analogies between physics and humanity that I have found helpful, intriguing, or entertaining.
Just as no frame of reference is inherently any better than another, at least an interesting exercise is to contemplate the same neutrality for human perspectives. It’s easy to personalize people’s lives to the extent that we think they see things a particular way because of properties “intrinsic” to them — for example, their personalities and idiosyncrasies. But I think this is actually getting the causality backwards; these seemingly “intrinsic” attributes are the results of interactions between a person’s ever-changing body and environment.
This is not to say that it never useful to think of people as though they have intrinsic properties that travel with them regardless of time or circumstances — even if they were to “become someone else”, or die, or otherwise somehow be divorced from their body. But unless you genuinely believe in a version of dualism, we see how fragile these notions are, even when we simply try to define them. Simplifying our mental models of people as point-like objects with some static descriptors can help us make a decision about, say, whether we want to go on a date with a person. But the reality of the person is enormously more complex.
This also isn’t to say that people don’t exhibit patterns in their physical appearance and behavior that persist through time, at least somewhat. But I would argue that these patterns are local features of people’s lives; globally, we change dramatically, sometimes even unrecognizably.
To the main point: This neutrality between human perspectives, to me, is a result of borrowing this ill-defined notion of “becoming someone else” to undermine it. Suppose that “you” had access to only and all the information available to someone else about the world. Then I claim that “you” would see things in exactly the same way as that person. Often, we project our own knowledge of the world onto the minds of other people, or compare their perspectives to our own, as though ours were the privileged default.
As a society, we can see even larger patterns of privileging frames of reference, such as the “default male”. This favoring of male experience and perspective doesn’t make practical sense, given that half of the population is not male. It has also been one of the causes for worse treatment and understanding of women, including their basic health and safety.
I don’t think that privileging our own perspective as our day-to-day M.O. can or should be helped; it allows us to make decisions that (hopefully) contribute to our well being so that others don’t have to do the exceptionally difficult job of figuring that out for us; as individuals, we have the most access to the information contained within our own perspective. Indeed, you could spend a lifetime trying to fully understand someone else’s, even if your view of them is clouded or sullied by your own emotions, biases, prejudices, social position, etc., possibly leading you to think that there isn’t much to understand.
What I hope, however, is that porting this idea of neutrality among reference frames to social interactions can help us break free from the default mode of self-privileging, when appropriate — which, if we’re paying attention, is probably much more often than we thought. For myself, it has enabled me to approach people with much more humility and curiosity. It has allowed me to get a clearer sense of just how small my own little world is.