Real life is what it is

Unchecked fantasy just isn't the same.

A reliance on fantasy is destructive.

We superimpose inventions on to life that don’t exist. Imagined motives, anticipated outcomes, emotionally satisfying fictions.

We then become disappointed when real life doesn’t match up. People, events, movements. Nothing is ever quite as satisfying as the simple models we create in our heads.

Doing this tends to make for an unhappy life. We are forever let down when reality asserts itself, indifferent to our brilliant ideas.

A good life is more grounded. It accepts things for what they are. It embraces reality.

Alas, reality seems further away than ever.

Our perfect fantasies

We have big brains and imagination. We can imagine better and often do.

Clever ideas have a long history of success. From miracle medicines to satellites orbiting the Earth, innovations have changed our world beyond recognition.

Ideas emerging from people’s heads have helped. But ideas themselves are worthless. It is their ability to survive contact with reality that matters.

Penicillin, the internet and women’s bras all took hold because they made it through the crucible. Not everything does.

We can never be so entranced by fantasy we overlook reality and forget we must test ideas for validity.

Our mental models can be perfect. The material world is always imperfect. When we compare the two then real life often comes up short. It can seem off-putting, horrible and inadequate; something needing fixed.

We can misunderstand this feedback as a call to action and ignore what it is really telling us.

Reality is brutal. It takes no prisoners. Anything that does not conform to its rules is destroyed. The more we invest in an idea or fantasy the more we wish to protect it from this brutalization making it all too easy to retreat into a defensive fantasyland.

Some examples

Examples abound, from our personal lives, our relationships and even at the societal level.

We often imagine life should be different. We should be better off or more successful. Perhaps we expected more fun and excitement at this stage of life instead of working, sleeping and watching TV.

This disappointment is little more than contact with reality. It is so mundane we overlook it and focus on the negative feeling and how we can alleviate it.

Feedback from the physical world is a constant reminder many of our ideas are fictions and require correction. This is a positive process we benefit from even if it depresses us.

Similarly other people often fail to live up to our expectations. We project traits and qualities onto them. A new friend or romantic interest, a work colleague or perhaps someone more distant like a famous politician or business leader.

This leads to disappointment when they turn out to be normal and human. This is why our heroes so often disappoint, and it is why investing in distant leaders is foolish.

Most dangerous of all are grand fantasies projected onto the world by the energetic.

Thanks to bias and cognitive distortion, dreamers can imagine many brilliant solutions to society’s problems.

Gun crime, domestic violence, public drunkenness, poverty, international disputes. There is much the dogooders are keen to improve.

Messiahs are especially plentiful in academia and the media as their business is idea generation and its management.

Almost none of these schemes work. Many make things considerably worse.

The very long list of utopian failures teaches us that imagination can aid progress but only if subservient to reality. When reality is replaced with a projection we invert this positive process.

Appealing mental models can be treated as true or plausible because they serve emotional needs not practical ones.

Wars on poverty, drugs and toxic masculinity are inept simplifications of life. They are not based on a realistic analysis of the world but emanate instead from the minds of those with limited information just like the rest of us.

And yet this Fisher-Price thinking is commonplace to such an extent we can almost say people want to keep reality locked away.

A retreat from life

It seems we're growing more susceptible to escapism in the West, clinging to fantasy and craving uncomplicated narratives.

Our lives are governed with soundbites and emotions transmitted via consumer technology. Many seem to accept it at a superficial level. They certainly don’t revolt.

We have only twelve years to save the planet; toxic masculinity is an existential threat to society; only communism can deliver a fair, equitable life for all despite its legacy of murderous failure.

None of this is grounded in reality. Importantly none of it is received firsthand, only through intermediaries broadcasting via devices. People are told what to think and accept it, they do not come to these conclusions independently. Through repetition it can become passively accepted by the masses.

Why is this so commonplace? Why do we sense past generations would have accepted none of this? Is it the comfort? Are we all becoming like the intelligentsia lost in their mind mazes?

We can observe one potential culprit. We are avoiding reality more and more. This is a literal avoidance as we spend less time interacting with real life.

We increasingly work at home and sometimes in isolation. Traditional workspaces are becoming rarer. Many companies now no longer have the floor space to accommodate more than a fraction of their staff.

We use screens to manage life and enjoy fewer firsthand experiences. For some their entire lives seem to be run using a phone or device.

Social anxiety is on the rise as people shy away from normal everyday interaction, exacerbated by a growing sense of disaffection many feel today. The very young have fewer face-to-face formative experiences, and for many lockdowns have encouraged a retreat from the world.

Cultural shifts must be having some effect too.

Safety first culture shuns risk, and it has seeped into everything. It is becoming difficult to do anything unsupervised, and a determined cohort have emerged in every major Western nation to propose ever greater controls on food, entertainment, education, healthcare and even movement.

Many governments have openly stated they wish to track every financial transaction we make, and online anonymity is a major target even for supposedly democratic nations.

All of this is for our own good so lacks any real restraint and surveillance technology promises to bring their panopticon to life if we are not careful. Given a chance some would remove all decisions from us.

Much of this conspires to distance us from reality and is even pitched as protecting us from it. All those meddlesome decisions we must make about what to eat or what to think.

Our ancestors would find our world bizarre and alienating not to mention infantilizing. Yet many welcome these changes. To them reality is worth keeping at arm’s length.

Germs, violence, other people; who wants any of that?

These are the inevitable products of our safety-first world. They are only a hop, skip and a jump away from believing dirt and grime and poor people shouldn’t exist, so let’s eradicate them.

A lack of accommodation of reality is fertile ground for all manner of terrible ideas.

Moar utopia

Many ills today are a result of dreamers in positions of authority. They embrace fantasy and the rest of us suffer.

Net Zero, equality of outcomes, no child left behind. Their schemes have serious momentum behind them, and even goodwill. Much of it sounds appealing. Who wants kids left behind?

But they fail because they ignore reality. Success lies only in full acceptance of the world as it really is, warts and all.

Our job then is not really to fight these absurd initiatives so much as it is to remain grounded, to remind ourselves a real life and a real world actually exist.

This is the countermove to the clown show that has emerged all around us.

Men are not women; children cannot make serious medical decisions about their own bodies; we cannot control climate and people need energy to survive. No one needs the government deciding our food choices or what we read. Socialism doesn’t work and attracts the pathological as does bureaucracy.

Remaining grounded gives us a fighting chance. Those who resisted Covid initiatives used this process often in the face of determined pressure from many sources and it worked. When the world lost its mind some retained their perspective.

And even with the insanity of Covid measures reality won in the end as it all fizzled out and normality came rushing back to fill the void.

Our best move then is to remain grounded while the enemies of civilization burn themselves out as they seem now to be doing. None of their paradise exists except a few flaking George Floyd murals and mutilated children, as well as an army of childless women with blue hair and mounting regrets.

The dogooders do make quite a racket so the world seems to forget the grounded are everywhere quietly going about their business, living in real life and not captured by voices inside their heads.

The grounded are still here, those not taken in by fancy ideas and intolerance of real life. They accept the grime and the squalor, the poverty and the tragedy, the bad luck and the missed chances. They accept this glorious mess with all its heartache, grief and pain because that’s part of the deal.

In doing so they open themselves up to the beauty of life and all it can offer; the birth of a child or the blooming of flowers, the kindness of strangers and the random connections that can change lives in an instant. The decency of men and the caring nature of women, the innocence of children and the wonder of the heavens on a clear night.

They live life because we have no choice. Just as we must accept it for what it is, something the dreamers can never do. So they close themselves off from its magisterial presence in the pursuit of a squalid fantasy that slowly dominates their minds, colouring everything they see and touch.

In doing so they miss something important. Underneath all that dirt reality still shines like nothing else can. What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life as someone once asked?

Perhaps the dreamers are more to be pitied than scorned. Maybe their obsession with scheming and planning and plotting just advertises their inability to be happy so they escape into their mind prisons and reject the sunsets and the drunken nights and the sublime beauty of the whole crazy kaleidoscope that is life.

Whatever the truth I’ll take the real world every time, warts and all. It provides everything we will ever need.

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