What is the Difference Between Objectivity and Subjectivity?
Are any of us truly objective? While a noble concept, being objective is challenging to achieve. Objectivity is 
acknowledging something as existing in reality, experienced in the world by others, separate from our mind, without attaching any meaning to that something. As soon as meaning is attached, which may include any feelings, thoughts, or opinions, objectivity is lost. As soon as meaning is attached, there is a projection on that ‘object’, and objectivity moves to subjectivity.
Subjectivity takes place in the reality of our minds, ‘the mind of the beholder’, and doesn’t necessarily exist as we view it in the reality of the world outside of our minds. This leads to the questions of what is truly ‘reality’, what is truly ‘meaning’ and what does this all truly matter?
What is Reality and Meaning?
Reality may be considered factual and physical creations or beings. A factual creation may be the time of day, mathematics, or the score in the hockey game last night. A factual being may be something like gravity. A physical creation may be a building. A physical being may be a human , a tree, or a rock (arguably all creations too). When it comes to meaning, meaning may be considered the definition, interpretation and experience that we attach to reality, based on our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and overall points of views. Put another way, there is the world as it is, full of factual and physical creations and beings, and then there is the world as we experience and define it, what it means to us.
What may truly matter most is that the fundamental difference is that the world objectively, doesn’t decide our experience, it just presents us with ‘objects’, and we decide our experience of those objects, subjectively. When we feel joy, we’ve attached joy as the meaning to the experience. When we feel suffering, we’ve attached suffering as the meaning to the experience. This isn’t about right or wrong in what you’re feeling or thinking, this is about “I decide”.
Maybe the truest form of being objective, is acknowledging that we’re really subjective.
For more information about being objective, one of the four essentials to being intentionally open-minded, get your complimentary ebook.