It was bound to happen
T-minus 9 days to full-time
Dear Writer,
Today is ordinarily my very organized, full-of-information and advice day, but… I am sorry to report… the people at work who have known that I’m leaving for four months have suddenly realized that they need me to do All Of The Things now. Because of all of this, I literally did not see Wednesday coming this week and didn’t realize until just now that I hadn’t yet written my Wednesday Dear Writer today.
So, as a treat, I’m going to take probably my favorite of the paid-tier Dear Writer letters that I’ve written and share it with y’all here.
Hopefully, I’ll see Saturday coming this week, but… no promises.
Thank you for all your support! Keep writing!
Everything,
L
What has reality done for you lately?
Prepare yourself for some truly crap argumentation. I might pull a muscle.
Oct 2, 2021
Dear Writer,
I’ve been thinking about reality lately. You know… just easy, casual thoughts about the nature of existence. Whatever. I’m going to share these thoughts with you but let me say up front that a) I can pretty much guarantee that there will be no intellectual rigor in my argument and b) that my conclusion is still absolutely 100% on the fucking money.
All right, so if I’m going to talk about reality, then let’s start by defining our goddamn terms, shall we? The good ol’ Merriam Webster defines reality as, I shit you not, “the quality or state of being real.”
And the quality of Lani-ness is being Lani. Thanks ever so, MW.
Well, okay, so what if we hop back a step to just defining “real?” There, we get, “having objective independent existence” and “occurring or existing in actuality.”
Seems chill, but here’s the question… how do you know that something “exists in actuality”? Because you see it? Well, there are lots of things we see that aren’t real, right? Mirages. The moon illusion. Your brain is literally a computer that draws conclusions that are not always, in actual fact, correct, or, you know…
…reality.
So, fine. Reality is not necessarily what we can see. What about what we can hear? Well…
Okay, FINE, then, what about touching? If you can touch something, you know it’s real, right?
Turns out… not always.
But okay, let’s stop playing around with the edge cases as though it validates anything because that’s some bad faith argumentation right there, and let’s talk about our general perception of everyday reality.
Reality is that which is shared and confirmed by others around you… right? Mostly… except in the case of shared delusions like the Mandela effect and the fucking dress is white and gold I don’t even know what the rest of you are talking about and CLEARLY it’s “Laurel” for fuck’s sake.
All right. So right about here, this is when I start to panic. I don’t have a rock solid sense of reality due to being raised by a narcissist who changed reality on a dime to protect her fragile sense of self, so I legit need other people to confirm my reality in order for me to feel comfortable that it is reality, but there is no version of any reality that isn’t contradicted by someone and…
Okay. I gotta slow down here and box breathe for a minute. I cannot concede that there is no such thing as objective reality because some things are true and some things are not true, and I know this is true because I know it shut up.
Science and math are largely provable through repeated experiments testing the edges of knowledge, but even science is wrong sometimes, which is unnerving until you realize it’s designed to be mostly wrong. That, apparently, is kind of the point; science actively, deliberately and constantly investigates its own wrongness, and in that process, occasionally trips over demonstrable truth. Math seems to be the only truly reliable thing in the known universe but wait oh fuck oh fuck fuck.
All right, so we’re here… let’s keep fucking going. When reality is math and science and tactile or visual or auditory, there are edge cases where it falls apart, but for the most part, it’s pretty reliable.
But what about the kind of reality that is just what we believe to be true? Is that real?
I mean… fuck it, right? Why not? Let’s ask the question that might destroy our sense of fucking everything.
Because if you didn’t pick it up from the first half of this semi-cooked, pseudo-philosophical essay that I am in no way qualified to write, let me state for the bleachers; reality is fucking malleable. And when we’re talking about belief in something that can’t be disproven—because you can’t prove a negative, except when you can—then belief is reality and that is fucking that.
All right. Now we’re here in the middling space of this highly specious little essay on the nature of reality, and I’ve basically made an argument, I think, that reality exists, but it’s not necessarily consistent from person to person, even in sensory experience and science and math, so belief is just as real as math or science or our senses, because it all comes from the same place. Our perceptions. Which are in us. So reality is basically centered in the self, and the self is a goddamned mess.
Take that, Descartes.
So now that I’ve thrown all of that at you, here’s the next question that’s gonna fuck up your mind space: What is the purpose of reality?
Let’s take a moment to sit in that one; what is the purpose of reality?
In other words, what has reality done for you lately?
And when I really think about it… I mean… reality is just a shared belief in something… right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah… I hear some of you freaking out about that one. “Belief is not reality! Reality is provable! Belief is not!”
Except for this…
Each of us has an individual perception of reality that is centered within our existence.
Sometimes, we share parts of that reality with others… things like gravity and time and physical objects that we all bump into but which are mostly empty fucking space what the fuck?
But the rest of that reality? Is just what we say it is. And when we believe something unprovable like, say, that God exists, or that God doesn’t exist, it affects how we behave and how we behave has a ripple effect into other people’s real, lived experience and at that point regardless of whether that other person believes what you believe they have suffered the very real consequence (or benefit) of your belief and at that point, if reality is an experience that is shared by more than one person, then yourbelief just became their fucking reality and…
Okay, hang on. I’m getting a little dizzy. I need some water.
So, what got me started on this today is that I read this article about how we all have ADHD, or something like that, and the author is (I think) arguing that people don't get to just decide that they have ADHD or decide that their grief is actually depression or decide that malignant narcissism is a thing because then reality has no meaning or some shit like that, but it’s a crap argument because of course people get to just decide.
That’s what people do.
Because here’s a reality for you; we made all this shit up. We decided what gender was and what mental illness means and that Pluto is a planet OH WAIT NO IT’S NOT and it’s all fucking made up, but we made it up for a purpose, and that purpose was to share an understanding of ourselves and our universe. So, if you identify with the symptoms of ADHD and the strategies for handling ADHD that someone puts on TikTok are helpful for you, then who the fuck am I to tell you, “No, you’re just distracted like the rest of us”? Your reality is your reality and you don’t get to tell me who I am, but you sure as fuck get to decide who you are.
Reality, when it comes down to it, is malleable. Your reality is what you decide it is. And my reality is what I decide it is. The proscriptive era of reality is over.
Which means that right now, absolutely everyone’s reality is disintegrating and we’re all freaked the fuck out and reasonably so. Reality is shifting from being externallydefined by society… fully fucked, but with rules that we all understood… to being internally defined by us as individuals, and which is empowering but fractious and unpredictable and unshared fucking terrifying.
Sit with that for a minute.
Reality itself is shifting.
Some of it is absolutely for the good as the power structures of patriarchy and white supremacy and ableism and classism and all that shit are finally beginning to be meaningfully challenged. It’s good that we’ve thrown off the shackles of our externally-defined societal reality, because it was harming all of us, even the people who benefited from it. But now each of us has to decide what we believe to be true and real, piece by piece, Yanny by Yanny, Laurel by Laurel, gold and white dress by blue and black dress. We’re all exhausted and scared and unsure and trying our best to unfuck the things we were taught and figure out what reality is now.
Right now, every person on this planet has been ejected out of one shitty but shared and definable reality airjet midflight and we are all free falling into a new universe of WTF. We’re all trying to hastily construct an individual reality parachute as we fall, with no real skills in how to build a reality parachute because historically, it’s always been built for us. Built shittily, but built. And now we need that parachute to slow our fall toward the ground, hoping it will be lofty enough at least to help us survive impact.
So this whole, long ramble is all to say…
Reality may be malleable, but reality is not.
Wow, Lani, you may be thinking right now, what the fuck do you mean by that?
I mean this: Reality is internally generated. Everything we perceive to be reality is generated by a quantum computer in our skulls and by… our gut. There’s science out there about the gut being the second brain or whatever, maybe someday we’ll figure out how it all works through epistemological means, but right now, you already know.
You already know what you should do about that thing you’ve been worried about. You already know that you’re being so hard on other people because you’re worried that you might not be enough. You already know who you love. You already know right from wrong.
But Lani, you say, what about the sociopaths and psychopaths and people with no moral compass?
I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to you. And you know that using edge cases to dismiss an entire argument is bullshit. I know you know it because I just told you right up there.
It’s bullshit. It’s all bullshit, except what you already know.
Living in this world has seriously gunked up the works on that internal guide for many of us, especially those of us who are younger and haven’t gotten so fucking tried they just can’t anymore yet. So I’m bringing my hard-earned wisdom of the just fucking can’t anymore to you to tell you that… you already know.
That question you’ve been wondering about? You already know the answer. That problem you’ve been having with a person you love? You already know the answer. That thing that’s been bothering you and you can’t figure out why?
You already know.
Find a friend or a therapist and tell them about your problem and you will tell yourself the answer while you tell them because you know what?
You already know.
And when you don’t know, when you’re really not sure, there is only one answer.
Kindness.
And that, my sweet darling, is reality.
Everything,
L