How much do you insist on reality? How much do you demand that you experience reality? Now, it seems like maybe an obvious thing that we all want something real.
I mean, nobody likes to be fooled by something fake, right? Well, maybe unless it’s a very pleasant fake that makes us feel good.
And even those with the strongest hunger for the truth and for things being real certainly can often feel like “I would rather just be comfortable right now.” Even if it has to bend the truth a little bit, I would rather just have something that is comforting.” Because the truth, raw reality, certainly does not seem to be designed to make us feel good.
It’s not arranged in a way that makes us feel comfortable.
When we’re exposed to raw reality, it’s like we’re a very small part of a very big universe with a lot of things going on, and they’re certainly not all positive towards us, and they are not synchronized and set up in order to give us just the right experience.
So when we compare this kind of raw reality with stories, imagination, fantasy, escapism, it’s very tempting to go into worlds of the imagination where we can sort of have our world designed for us.
Like if we’re in a fictional story, or maybe some kind of a game, everything is set up by a human designer in order to give us a particular experience.
And you know, it’s somehow designed to give us something that’s in some way a pleasurable experience.
Maybe it’s frightening, maybe it’s challenging, maybe it’s horrifying, but still all designed to provide a human experience, an experience that is somehow pleasing to us, or somehow gives us something that we want.
And when we compare this to undesigned reality, just being exposed to the winds of fate and everything that’s going on in the nonfiction world, then it’s really hard for nonfiction to keep up.
And when I say nonfiction I really mean just the world outside storytelling altogether, because even nonfiction, nonfiction stories, are still narratives built out of real events, but they’re still designed to make stories and to somehow be accessible to us in some way that fits with what we want.
It’s like we as humans have such power of design that we can design our own reality to such a large degree.
We’re living so many layers removed from just pure nature.
We’re living within these stories of society and the city and the people that we know and the way we interact and our technology.
It’s all designed and built up to give this kind of comfortable cocoon to humans, that we don’t have to face raw nature.
So it’s just so difficult to get out of that, and maybe, who really wants to completely get out of that? I mean, we don’t want to live in raw nature.
It seems like it’s part of being human that we live in these constructed environments.
That’s part of what we are as creatures.
We’re not going to be out there, you know, in the forest competing with the bear and the lion or whatever other animals.
I mean, we do best when we have this kind of constructed world that we create.
But it seems like there’s something worth remembering about that, that we have a hard time accepting raw reality.
We have a hard time really living without this designed world and all the designed structures that we have.
So it makes me think, as much as I like in principle that I want the truth and I want reality, but it makes me wonder, how far is any of us really willing to take this?
#rawreality #constructedreality #reality