Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to report to you that “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”(Marcus Aurelius). How unfortunate, no? The moments when your mother told you she loved you, when your teacher praised your writing, when your boyfriend told you that you were his only...were not, in fact, facts! But wait, there's salvation! Your mother may love you yet; although these statements are not facts, they are opinions! Oh subjectivity, how you've saved us.
I've rambled, and probably confused you as well. Allow me to explain; we create our own realities! Whether something is fact or not is entirely dependent on the individual. When you hear something, you hear it in only the way that you can; a way that is based upon all of your unique individual experiences, outlooks, thought-processes and feelings. Don't you feel special :D
"Facts" are fabrications, a way to link common opinions together as befitting a society. When a large group of people processes a concept in a similar or identical fashion, that group links their commonality together and synthesizes a brand new fact! Take in example the color of a stop sign. To the majority of people, a stop sign in the US is red, because a large enough group of people see red as, well, red. But that group is not large enough! Enter: color-blind individuals. They may view red as green, and to them red as green is fact.The blind-born in general know not any color whatsoever, telling them that a stop-sign is red as a fact would produce any kind of unconcerned notion. You see, it's all based on perspective. Facts are in reality groups, and these groups help determine reality.
But when an element within the world is processed and differentiated between a varied amount of individuals, and there isn't a large enough number of similarly minded people to sacrifice for the creation of a fact, the individuals are left to their varied viewpoints in the forms of opinions.
As I mentioned before, people live in their own created realities. Their varied perspectives form their varied truths; these perspectives, however, don't form the truth. The truth is an unknown, an entity so powerful that we can only imitate it with our sad paper mache copies...still, what can we do but copy? We've never acquainted ourselves with the total truth, all we have to go off of is what philosophers have determined in their life-long treks to discover truth, and some of them are idiots!
But don't feel bad, take solace in the fact that your perspective is yours and yours alone. Opinions as well as opinions that are facts make up your singular perspective and reality; you may share some with others, it's true, but still others are yours alone. Just be careful that your perspectives don't make you a Meursault!
p.s. I stole this quote :D
I've never really given this topic too much thought, but I think you make a valid claim in saying that we live in our own realities. People's lives are based on how they each perceive the world and the only facts that we know to be true are the ones that we, as people, have all agreed to deem facts. Such as the names of common objects, or places. It's more of a way to be able to communicate one with another than it is a state of trying to prove another person wrong or yourself right...oops this was long, sorry (:
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