The other night I was with a friend watching a horror movie.

If you’ve known me for a while, that might sound a little surprising. It’s not that I’ve ever disliked horror movies — they’ve just never been my first choice. If someone else wanted to watch one, sure. But left to my own devices, I probably would have picked something else entirely.

This time was different.

We were watching a movie I won’t name (no spoilers), and at one point a character mentioned the Greek myth of Sisyphus — the man condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder uphill after cheating death. I heard it, thought it was interesting, and the movie kept moving. After the film ended, my friend looked over and asked, “Did you catch why they used that myth?”

I admitted that I hadn’t.

He explained that the character in the movie had cheated death too, and suddenly that passing reference wasn’t just an interesting line of dialogue anymore. It was another layer of the story. A clue. Something that deepened everything else happening around it. We had watched the exact same film. But we’d seen two very different things.

That stayed with me. Not because I suddenly became a horror movie enthusiast, but because I realized that for a little while, I’d been seeing the film through someone else’s eyes. And that turned out to be a much more interesting experience than just watching it through my own.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Over the last few years, one of the unexpected gifts of some of the friendships I’ve built has been discovering how enjoyable it is to experience someone else’s enthusiasm up close. There’s something genuinely contagious about real passion. Spend enough time with someone who truly loves something, and eventually you stop asking “why do they like this?” and start wondering “what are they seeing that I’ve never noticed before?” That’s a very different question, and it leads somewhere much more interesting.

It’s happened with movies. It’s been happening with video games too. I’m not exactly playing them yet — and if you’ve ever seen me with anything more complicated than a Wii controller, you probably understand why — but I’ve spent time watching, asking questions, and trying to understand what people actually enjoy about them. Compared to the Atari joystick I grew up with, it’s a completely different world. And I’m finding that I genuinely enjoy learning about it. Not because I need a new hobby. But because somewhere along the way I became less interested in deciding whether something is for me, and a lot more interested in understanding why it matters to someone else.

It turns out that’s a surprisingly good way to learn. Not just about movies or games, but about people.

I think that’s one of the benefits of getting older that we don’t really talk about. When we’re young, curiosity comes naturally because almost everything is new. As life becomes more familiar, we find the restaurants we like, the music we enjoy, the books we read, the routines that fit us. And without really noticing it, we start believing we’ve already figured ourselves out. We tell ourselves, “This is who I am. These are the things I like. Those are the things I don’t.” The list hardened somewhere along the way, and we stopped questioning it.

I don’t think that’s really about age. I think it’s about familiarity. Familiarity has a way of convincing us we’ve already explored enough — that the decisions were made back there somewhere and we’re just living them out now. But every now and then someone comes along who invites us to look again. Not because they’re trying to change our minds. Simply because they’re sharing something they genuinely love. And if we’re willing to borrow their perspective for a little while, what sometimes changes isn’t our opinion of the thing itself. It’s our understanding of the person sitting beside us. And sometimes, it’s even our understanding of ourselves.

The funny thing is, I still don’t particularly love slasher movies. I’m probably not going to become a competitive gamer anytime soon. That was never really the point. The point is that I’ve started asking a different question. Instead of “is this for me?” I’ve started asking “what am I missing?” Those two questions lead to very different places in life. One closes a door before you’ve even looked through it. The other leaves room to be surprised.

Looking back, I don’t know whether that particular film will ever make it onto a list of my favorite films. That’s not what I took away from that evening. What stayed with me was how much richer things become when we’re willing to see the world through someone else’s eyes for a little while — even just long enough to catch something we would have walked right past on our own.

I’ve spent a lot of years thinking wisdom comes from collecting experiences. Lately I’m starting to think it also comes from staying curious about other people’s experiences and being open to experiencing the world through other people. Because every once in a while, if we’re willing to look through someone else’s lens, we don’t just discover something new about them. We discover there’s still something new to learn about ourselves.

Your Turn

Think about something you’ve always said wasn’t really your thing. Where did that opinion actually come from? Have you revisited it recently, or have you just been carrying around an old conclusion?

Maybe the invitation isn’t to change your mind. Maybe it’s just to spend a little time seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. You never know what part of yourself might be waiting there.