Life: Illusions & Absurdities
Why nothing is what it seems and how understanding this makes our lives better.
Let me blow your mind with the first two sections in this article.
If you invest one minute and forty-two seconds of your time to read this essay, at one point you will say to yourself “What the hell?! This can’t be true!”
I assure you, it is.
What we experience as reality is not reality. In both a physical sciency and a conceptual philosophical sense.
Seeing this allows us to upgrade our mental models of the world, let go of the ones that don’t serve us and, most importantly, relax and stop taking everything so damn seriously.
Let’s dive in. 👇🏼
🔮 The Illusion of Touch
Are you touching your phone right now? If you’re not reading this on your phone, pick it up real quick.
Are you touching it now?
No, you are not.
Just as you are not touching the chair you are sitting on.
In fact, you never really touch anything.
But we touch stuff all the time?! No, we don’t.
Touch as we commonly think about it doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion our brain creates to help us navigate the world — an awesome one to be fair.
What we experience as touching the phone is actually our brain’s interpretation of the signals created by the electromagnetic repulsion between the electrons of the outer layers of atoms of our skin and the phone. It’s magic (I mean physics).
The same goes for your chair. You’re not sitting on it, you’re hovering above it (by a ridiculously small distance). Again, electrons of the outer layers of atoms repel each other.
(There’s also something called The Pauli Exclusion Principle at play here for you physics nerds out there. Go google it.)
🌌 Emptiness
While we’re on the topic of electrons and atoms…
… fun fact: 99.9% of what’s inside your body (or mine) is empty space.
Yes, there are bones, muscles, organs and stuff — but all of those exist of atoms (like everything else).
The same holds true for trees, cars, houses, pets, airplanes and even blocks of concrete. It’s all 99.9% empty space.
The reason is simple, yet deeply profound. Things consist of atoms. Atoms consist of nuclei, orbited by electrons.
Like this emoji here: ⚛️
These nuclei are around 100,000 times smaller than the whole atoms.
For comparison:
If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a grape, the whole atom would be the size of a football stadium.
And if I lost all of the empty space inside me, I would be the size of a grain of sand.
Now, why am I telling you this?
Because it shows just how strongly our perception and concept of what’s there deviates from what’s actually there.
Now, granted, the example above is an extreme case on a very fundamental level of reality, but this principle of conceptual illusion holds true on many levels.
🎨 Conceptual Illusion
As a general principle, we can state that:
We do not live in reality but with (both useful and useless) concepts of reality.
… whether that’s in relation to hardcore physics, culture, society, markets, other people, or ourselves.
These concepts of reality consist of ideas about cause and effect, good and bad, right and wrong, beauty, love, utility, possibility, inevitability, meaning and everything else that matters.
They are nested within and fed by the system we all live in — a result of individual experience as well as societal, cultural and educational indoctrination.
Let’s look at a few more worldly concepts we are all familiar with.
Countries 🇩🇪
We all know what a country is. But do we?
What excatly is Germany, the United States or Mongolia?
I don’t mean identity, culture, traditions, etc., but the down-to-Earth, most direct way you can describe a country.
A country is what’s between imaginary lines in the dirt. More or less.
Sometimes, these lines follow natural markers like rivers or mountain ranges. Sometimes, though, these lines have actually been drawn with a ruler and a pencil on a map (just look at a map of Africa to see what I mean).
In any case, me writing this essay in Munich, Germany basically means that I am within a somewhat circular imaginary line that goes through fields, woods, beaches and dirt — and that’s called the German national border.
Our concept of countries is useful. It helps us navigate the world somehow.
But on the face of it, the concept of a country is an illusion we created. A pretty ridiculous one if you think about it.
Anger 🤬
You know how it is to be angry. I do, too. Everyone does.
Anger can be useful — but most often, it harms ourselves more than the person our anger is directed at.
When someone says something hurtful, we can get angry.
But that’s just the conceptual illusion to make sense of what really happens:
Another person makes certain sounds with their mouth that arrive at our ears where they trigger electrical signals that our brain uses to release chemical molecules (hormones) which, through a biochemical chain reaction in our body, create an indescribable feeling in our gut that we form mental images and mental self-talk around. We get “angry.”
I know, it sounds absurd when you look at it this way. But that’s the point.
Next time you’re getting angry, remind yourself of what’s really happening and you might see the absurdity of it all — and let it go.
Careers 💼
Most of us want to be successful in our jobs, make good money and climb up the career ladder.
The concept of “making a career” seems straightforward and somewhat desirable. But what actually is a career?
There are different flavors of the conceptual illusion of a career, but the most common ones stem from something like this:
Over time, the things you have to do become more complex. The people who tell you to do those things have different titles that should signal that they have more power in the company. You will likely also get to use another title that signals your worth to and power in the company. The number of people that are supposed to listen to what you say increases. So does the amount of imaginary digital numbers that your bank account shows each month — and you can go out and get more (99.9% empty) stuff in return for it. But you will not have so much time available to do something with that stuff because you will likely spend more and more time inside this house where people wear particular clothes and do things they call “work.” Oh, and if you make a mistake, the likelihood that others will suffer as a result and that you will feel really bad also increases.
Yes, this is completely absurd as well. But maybe that’s just what a career is. A conceptual illusion that masks the absurdity of what otherwise might not be so desirable after all.
I’m not saying careers are bad. They can be awesome. But they are just concepts, not base reality.
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that. There are many more conceptual illusions you could tear apart to identify the true absurdities within them (just think Religion, Politics, Money, Property, Human Rights, Laws, Relationships, and much more).
Seeing the absurdity of it all can help us to not take everything so seriously, double down on the conceptual illusions that are useful — and let go of the ones that aren’t.
To absurdity,
Phil