How you see a situation depends on what you are capable of doing in a situation.
Book: How to Know a Person
This explains why different people can react so differently to the same event. In the author's words:
"People in different life circumstances construct very different realities. It's not only that they have different opinions about the same world; they literally see different worlds."
"People with heavy backpacks see steeper hills than people without backpacks, because it is harder for people with backpacks to walk up them. People who have listened to sad music (Mahler's Adagietto) see steeper hills than people who have listened to happy music. Overweight people see distances as longer than people who are not overweight. Baseball players on a hot streak see bigger balls coming at them than they do when they're in a slump."
As Dennis Proffitt and Drake Baer wrote in another book Perception: "We project our individual mental experience into the world, and thereby mistake our mental experience to be the physical world, oblivious to the shaping of perception by our sensory systems, personal histories, goals, and expectations."