Here’s a thought experiment for you. Is this in fact a world where reality—true, unfiltered reality—is something no one ever actually experiences. The trees are real, the sun burns hydrogen, and the ground beneath our feet isn’t about to dissolve into binary code. But the moment we open our eyes each morning, we’re not so much perceiving the world as we are downloading the latest update on what the world is supposed to be. A curated reality. A simulation, not of physics, but of meaning.
This isn’t a new idea. Every society has had its own version of a shared hallucination: myths, national stories, deeply held beliefs about how things work. The difference now is that the control panel isn’t in the hands of a high priest or a monarch claiming divine right—it’s decentralized, algorithmic, and built for engagement. The simulation we live in isn’t programmed by a single architect, but by an ecosystem of competing narratives, all fighting to define what’s real. The world outside remains stubbornly physical—oceans, highways, coffee stains on your shirt—but what those things mean is increasingly pre-packaged for ease of consumption.
Take a simple event: a protest in a city square. The air is thick with voices, placards are held high. This happened. No simulation required. But open two different news feeds, and you will see two entirely separate realities. In one, the protestors are brave, standing against injustice. In another, they are a violent mob. The same footage, the same street, but radically different worlds. The question isn’t whether reality exists; it’s whether we still have access to it.
Of course, the idea that we are living in a media-generated simulation is funny, in the way that drowning in water is funny. The irony is that we built this machine ourselves. At first, it was convenient: a little filtering to remove the noise, a bit of curation to help us move through the chaos. But at some point, we stopped curating the information and let the information curate us. We didn’t just seek out the reality we wanted; we outsourced the very act of perception to algorithms and influencers who shape our worldview like a sculptor hacking at a block of stone. Chisel away enough, and what remains is no longer a person who sees, but a person who has been given a view.
What’s particularly unsettling is that even those of us who recognize the simulation aren’t immune to it. You can know the tricks—how headlines are framed, how social media feeds reinforce biases—and yet still find yourself drawn into the game. Because the real trick isn’t misinformation. It’s that the simulated reality is easier than the real one. It’s smoother. It has better dialogue, clearer villains, a sense of narrative coherence that actual existence sorely lacks. The world, raw and unfiltered, is often boring, ambiguous, or completely indifferent to our concerns. But the version crafted for us? That’s streamlined for consumption, optimized for belief.
And so we go on, half-aware that the world outside our screens is real, yet increasingly uncertain of what that means. Maybe one day, someone will pull the plug—not on some grand cosmic simulation, but on the smaller, human-scale one we built for ourselves. Maybe we’ll wake up blinking in the unfiltered light of an unscripted morning, unsure of what to do without a push notification telling us what’s important. Until then, we’ll keep scrolling, keep engaging, keep refining the simulation to be more vivid, more compelling, more real than reality itself.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.