July 29, 2026

The World Next to Ours

We spend a lot of time trying to understand our animals. What if we tried to understand the world they live in instead?

We usually think of animals as part of our world. We decide where they sleep, when they eat, and what we consider good behavior. But just because we share a space doesn't mean we share the same experience of it. The same hallway, the same chair, the same sunny spot in the afternoon can mean entirely different things depending on who's looking.

Sharing a home with an animal is an exercise in translation. Just like trying to understand a whole different language. Why is my dog barking? Why does my cat scream at 3 in the morning? What's with the glass flying off the table? And why does my pup think he needs to be in every Zoom call I have?

Animal behaviorists spend their careers helping us answer questions like these. They teach us to read body language, understand their habits, and remind us that what seems like stubbornness or goofing off usually has a totally reasonable explanation. That's important work. But most of those questions begin from the same assumption: how do we get what they're about? Not enough people flip it around and ask: how do they understand us?

Imagine being a cat. Every morning, this giant (aka human) gets out of bed around the same time, brews some hot drink, then disappears into a room for hours talking to a big glowing box where people who aren't even there. Sometimes there's laughter, but other times it sounds like they're frustrated. Most of the time, they just stare silently at the glowing box for an entire afternoon.

Every few days, it feels like the furniture gets rearranged for no obvious reason. Closed doors suddenly swing open, and that random cardboard box pops up only to vanish again. Humans spend so much time staring at objects that never stare back while barely noticing the birds fluttering outside. If you think about it, we might just be the weird ones here.

I started thinking more about this because of my own cats. It's not so much about which colors they could or couldn't see, but where in the house they really felt like home. Those little spots I barely even noticed seemed to mean the most to them. All these questions and thoughts turned into Cat's World, inviting you to see things from a different perspective for a little bit.

We might never know exactly what our animals see when they look at the world around them. But maybe that’s not the most interesting part. What's interesting is whether we're open to realizing that we're sharing the same space while living in totally different worlds.

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