When I was twenty, I made the dubious decision to walk from Cannes to Marseille—a 150-mile trek along the southern coast of France—in the dead of winter. On my second night, I slept in a stone-gray hostel perched on a cliff above the stone-gray Mediterranean. In the morning, I woke to find a North African man curled on the floor beside me. As we dressed for the bitter cold, we struck up a conversation. After a few pleasantries, he leaned forward and asked, with some hesitation, if he could pose a personal question.

“Is it true,” he asked, trying to mask his disbelief, “that you Europeans wipe your butts with dry toilet paper?”

In that instant, the invisible lens of my worldview cracked. Seeing myself through his eyes, I realized how absurd one of my most unquestioned habits appeared from the outside. A decade later, a friend would put it more bluntly: “If you had poop on your face, Ari, would you wipe it off with a dry napkin?”

Staring into that Algerian man’s eyes, I saw that what I had always taken to be reality—the way things are and the way things are done—was actually the expression of a particular worldview. And as I learned that morning, it’s often only by glimpsing our worldview from the outside that we can see it at all. While we swim in a sea of people who share the same assumptions, its limits and blind spots remain invisible.

Part of what makes those blind spots so hard to perceive is that worldviews are designed to be invisible. They function like a computer’s operating system: powerful precisely because they hum quietly in the background, allowing the conscious mind to focus on higher-level tasks. Just as a writer doesn’t think about the code that allows text to appear on a screen, we rarely notice the deep assumptions that make our thoughts possible.

This invisibility is useful—but it also comes at a cost. Every worldview highlights certain features of reality and hides others—and then blinds us to that very blindness. It convinces us that what we cannot see doesn’t exist. It’s like our inability to perceive infrared light: not only can we not see it, we can’t even see that we can’t see it.

And yet, we can’t live without a worldview. So the real question becomes: will we unconsciously inherit the worldview of our culture, or will we choose one deliberately? This, I think, is what Socrates meant by the “examined life,” and what Malcolm X discovered in prison when he realized his mind had been colonized by a story that demeaned him. To live an examined life is to see the unseen assumptions shaping our perception—and then to choose them consciously.

Einstein once said, “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” Beneath its elegance, this statement contains a searing subtext: if the world is diseased, it’s because our minds are diseased. It’s tempting to imagine the root of our problems lies elsewhere—with corporations, governments, or the greed of others—but the deeper truth is that we are all participants in the thought-systems that created our current crises. As one bumper sticker puts it, “You’re not in traffic. You are the traffic.”

Fortunately, Einstein’s insight also opens a door. The mind has many modes. We can observe the one we’re in, recognize its limits, and shift into another.

This, we believe, is the great challenge—and opportunity—of education in our time. The world our children will inherit will demand new ways of thinking, but we can’t know what those ways will be. That means education must change its aim. Instead of initiating students into the thought-forms of the past, we must help them recognize, question, and reimagine the worldviews that shape their perception and their choices.

If we want to prepare young people for the future, we must help them see that there are many ways of seeing—and that part of their task is cultivating the ones that feel both true to their experience and faithful to the living world.

At The Seed Pod, this is where our work begins: inviting students to question the stories they’ve inherited and to craft new ones—stories expansive enough to carry humanity into a future that is vibrant, inclusive, and alive.

In the next essay, The Price of Freedom, we’ll explore why this capacity to shape our worldview is both humanity’s greatest gift—and its greatest responsibility.