Reality

There is a famous saying that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” which captures a significant portion of what reality is [but has problems when one shines its lights on things like money].

Since our birth, we have been taught about reality and how it manifests itself: “this is what we, humans, have chosen to distinguish other humans who are in close vicinity of you in the tree of the family,” “one can count things and here is a way to name a set of a particular count of things,” “here is a formal language that we have developed which helps in creating molds of models of reality,” “here is a method that we have chosen to run a “country” and the rules by which the “citizen” must adhere to.”

When one is a kid, one is generally curious about reality; they are mindful about it as they are not experienced with things, they “live” in the real world and another thing is that kid’s abstraction ability is not fully developed. Hence, most of the time, they still think in literals terms. But after a certain age, when we are used to the real world and when there is nothing “novel” in it, we tend to mostly ignore reality, and abstract things which are of importance to us, stop getting curious about the commonplace things, and accumulate a lot of bias (read “heuristics”) about the workings of reality. And these collections of prejudices and beliefs about the mechanisms of the world, and few things [that we choose to care about] create “reality” for us.

This reality lies mainly in our heads. We rarely leave this artificial construct because things outside of it do not concern us, and if the outside world interferes with this shell, we act and respond based on a preconceived static set of beliefs. We often fantasize this ad-hoc model of reality with various irrational mental colors: hope and positivity[defined by the individual] (or negativity). In hindsight, the objective of these mental colors is to restrict the appearance of possible happenings[after all: belief is a form of memory which reduces the possibility of the number of possible incidents]; as an instance, I didn’t think [before this] that there can be self-cannabilism, but there has been an instance in human history[my goal is not to point out the ethics of this action]. This view of reality gives forward-thinking aspects like hope, expectation, intention, and confidence their shape, creating a mindset and perspective.

This confined space is broken through boredom or emotional turmoil, breaking oneself out of this self-stabilizing and self-reinforcing cycle.