We are each, in a profound sense, a living work of fiction.

Not in the dismissive sense. In the truest sense. Our experience of reality is constructed. Subjective. Shaped by every moment that preceded this one. No two people are living in quite the same world. And yet here we are, sharing one.

The dictionary tells us empathy is the ability to understand how someone else feels. But we barely understand how we feel ourselves. And when we frame empathy as creating understanding, we place the burden on whoever is furthest from the norm. That is not empathy. It may be why so many people feel exhausted by the attempt.

After watching more than 20,000 people move through experiences designed to put them briefly inside another person's reality, I arrived at a different definition.

Empathy is the active acknowledgment that another person's fiction is as real and as meaningful as your own. Not the same. Not necessarily compatible. Real. Even when you disagree.

That acknowledgment is not a feeling. It is a practice. And it is the collective agreement that makes genuine human connection possible at all.

And yet something gets in the way.

Every social interaction carries invisible instructions. How to enter a room. When to speak and when to defer. What to reveal and what to keep carefully out of sight. These are modal norms -- the unspoken rules that govern how we behave in the presence of others, enforced not by law but by the subtler and more powerful force of social expectation.

Modal norms are not the enemy. They make collective life navigable. But they come at a cost. The same norms that make us legible to each other also make us less available to each other. We perform. We signal. We manage impressions. And in doing so, we create a permanent distance between who we are and who we allow others to see.

Not out of dishonesty. Out of the accumulated habit of social survival.

Most art is what art. Human art is how art.

When we make art we most often put it into a static object. A painting. A sculpture. Something that exists independently of the people around it. Human art is something else. It is art that goes into an interaction. The interaction itself becomes the artwork.

It is a door with an invitation to walk through it. A pill that dissolves into the body the moment we swallow it. It asks us to leave our mental baggage at the door.

At its center is an attempt to allow at least one human -- the artwork -- to want nothing of the visitor. To respond authentically to themselves. To have nothing to teach and nothing to prove. The visitor will never know why they experienced the artwork differently than the person beside them. But they will know they are inside an exploration of the bounds of authentic humaning. And that this is mutually, completely okay.

Your results will vary.

Most art asks: what? Human art asks: how. How does it feel to be alive in this moment, in this space, alongside this person? How do I exist when nothing is being asked of me?

These are not questions the work answers. They are questions the work makes it possible, briefly, to live inside.

Emotions spread. All of them. Not just the corrosive ones.

We understand viscerally how something harmful moves through a population. COVID taught us that. Contagion is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. What we have spent far less energy on is the other direction. Joy is contagious. Genuine warmth is contagious. The felt sense that another person really sees you -- that spreads too.

When the conditions are right, something moves through a room. Not information. Not understanding. Something more like a frequency. A reminder that this quality of contact exists. And that reminder, carried out by the people who experienced it, has the potential to move through a community.

Not as fast as a virus. But in the same direction.

Not all experiences are created equal. Some change us. Most don't. The ones that change us tend to share two qualities that are, structurally, in tension with each other: they are deep enough to matter, and they reach enough people to have consequence.

Depth and scale generally work against each other. The experiences that go deepest are almost by definition intimate and unscalable. The experiences that reach the most people tend toward the shallow end.

And yet there is a territory in the middle that remains largely unexplored. Experiences intimate enough to genuinely move people, and structured enough to reach thousands without losing what makes them work.

This is the territory I find most compelling. What is the minimum viable depth at which an experience can still genuinely change someone? And how do you build something that holds that depth while remaining accessible enough to matter at scale?

I believe that in a world of experiential possibilities - each that can define our collective future - that this is one of the most unrealized questions worth asking.