For the better part of the last decade (and perhaps longer), we’ve struggled with the fact that not everyone is living in the same reality. Political polarization is, in my view, less about reasoned differences in policy preferences and more about the fact that we’re not working from the same set of facts. Nothing I can say will convince someone who believes that a secret cabal is trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Or more banally, that Joe Biden shut down the country at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recently passed the 10th anniversary of “The Dress,” which some say is the start of all of this.

The day of The Dress, I was interviewing for a job. I wasn’t allowed to have my phone at the facility, so I was offline most of the day. When I got to the airport, I had a chance to catch up on work and also the Internet. I’ll admit that I was a lot more interested in the llamas running loose in Arizona than some photo of a white and gold (don’t @ me) dress.

“The Dress” was definitely a shared experience for those of us terminally online in 2015. Whether it’s the event that tore us apart or not is harder to say. It does seem to mark a turning point, but the same could be said for the deaths of David Bowie and Harambe in 2016.

Instead of a beginning, The Dress might be an end. I see it as the end of shared experiences. With so many entertainment options, we don’t have things like the final episode of “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld” to have a shared experience. And maybe that’s part of the reason we don’t have a shared reality.