Lily Tomlin once said that reality is just a collective hunch. She was right. We all squint at the world, shrug, and agree on what we think we see. But now the hunch is being shaped by people who have never met us. They shape it from boardrooms, newsrooms, and somewhere deep in the silicon valleys where no one grows anything anymore.
They call it reality engineering. At least they should.
They don’t use that name, of course. They use words like “narrative” and “engagement” and “data.” But what they’re doing is not new. The old word for it was propaganda. It had sharp corners and wore a uniform. You saw it in posters, heard it on radios, and felt it in your gut when the drums started.
Now it’s softer. Slicker. It comes wrapped in high resolution and posted by someone who looks just like you, only more tan and confident and strangely sure of things. It doesn’t shout at you anymore. It whispers in your feed.
It is harder to see because it looks like the truth.
In the old days, a man could at least feel the weight of the hand that pushed him. Now the hand is made of algorithms and influence. It taps you on the shoulder when you’re half-awake and scrolling. It nudges you to watch, to react, to want. It builds your world for you before you know you’re living in it.
Reality is no longer something you bump into on a cold morning when your feet hit the floor. It is something that has been selected, shaped, and streamed. There are still facts, of course, but they are buried beneath interpretations, filters, and hot takes. The truth is still out there. It’s just harder to hear over the music.
It is not all sinister. Some of it is silly. Some of it is cats. But even the silly things shape us. They tell us what to laugh at, what to want, what to be afraid of. They come fast and constant. They wear us down. That’s how it works.
It used to be that reality was what happened when you went outside and talked to someone. When you sat at the diner and heard what the man at the next table was angry about. When you watched the sky, felt the weather change, and knew what season it was without checking your phone.
Now, reality is often curated. It arrives in headlines and highlight reels. It arrives from places where no one is watching you directly, but they know what you like and what keeps you up at night. They use this to make a world for you that feels like your own. But it isn’t. Not really.
It’s engineered.
The trouble with reality engineering is not just that it fools us. It’s that it makes us forget what it feels like to not be fooled. It steals that quiet certainty that comes from chopping wood, or watching a storm roll in, or listening to someone tell the truth even when it hurts. It makes those things feel old-fashioned, like listening to the radio for the weather when you’ve got radar in your pocket.
But reality, the real kind, doesn’t change just because the screen says so. The wind still howls through broken windows. People still cry in private. Bread still rises when given time and warmth. These things don’t lie.
The antidote, if there is one, is not rage. It is noticing. Turning the volume down. Looking at the world with your own eyes and asking, “Who wants me to believe this, and why?” That question alone can shake the whole illusion.
The engineers are clever. But they are not gods. They build things. We live in them. We can walk out of them, too.
It starts small. A walk without earbuds. A conversation without a screen between you. A long look at something that has no opinion; trees, maybe, or the ocean. The feeling you get there? That’s yours. That’s reality. No one built it. It just is.
And if enough people remember what is, maybe the collective hunch will shift again; back toward the simple, sturdy truth of things. Back to a world that doesn’t need to be engineered.
Just lived.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.