One experience that came hand-in-hand with having kids is that I now find myself having much more in common with people that I previously did not share much ground with. If you have chosen to have kids (and do not regret it) then that is usually a good indicator that we will find something to talk about, probably even share some values. I find this noteworthy because I am mentally placing myself closer to people that previously seemed too far away to connect to at all! They were just a different kind of people, who seemingly existed in a reality mostly disjoint from mine (except for the connection established by this pesky physical aspect of existence; it seems to be a common factor among the worlds we all suffer in).
One of the worlds I occasionally glimpse into is one where the order in which you shake people’s hands at an event suddenly becomes oddly relevant and your appearance and what you wear determines much about your “status.”
Another world I sometimes see is that where “security” is not a question of whether someone can actually crack your 4096bit RSA encryption but of whether there is a law that makes encryption cracking illegal.
These are obviously incomplete descriptions of those worlds, and I am sure someone else could come up with a snarky one-liner about how ridiculous the world I inhabit is. But that is the only window I have into those worlds, and it takes active effort to accept those worlds as legitimate even when they seem so ridiculous: People live in these worlds, in some cases with decades of lived experiences more than me. These worlds are in all likelihood equally ridiculous as mine is when viewed from the outside. In the same way that I might shake my head about a workplace that has a dress-code for office workers (what a weird concept! You tell people how they dress? What else are you going to dictate? Whether or not they can have strawberry yoghurt for lunch?), others might scratch their heads about places that don’t have a dress-code (see “Prof or Hobo?” - a now defunct website that made you guess whether you were looking at a math/physics/CS professor or a homeless person).
My job is already a big filter for what sorts of worlds I need to interact with at all, but even there I find stark contrasts. A concrete example: Programmers are at a loss why someone decided to hire a non-engineer leader into a management role at a software company (“they obviously have no idea how anything works! They have never written a program from scratch!”). The new leader is flabberghasted by the problems obvious to them but seemingly mysterious to anyone else (“those two guys have not spoken to each other in how many months!?”).
At work in particular, I have benefitted greatly from spending plenty of time with people that inhabit a world very different from mine (and sometimes people that once lived in a world like mine but have now wandered off). Those people can tell you things you do not know or cannot even perceive in your world, and you can do the same for them. But you cannot have such conversations in earnest if you are not willing to accept their world as real, or at least real to them. If you speak to them and have accepted them as a decent human being, their world is probably not the result of an idiot interpreting your world, but the result of someone reasonably smart interpreting the world as it has been presented to them over the course of their life. – There are of course also unpleasant idiots out there, but thankfully they usually self-identify.