🌵 TREE 102: Reality is costly
Every nation, tribe, community, political party, religious organisation, company and club has some beliefs, ideals and ways of doing things that are based on unreality. Think about the Catholic church’s commitment to Earth being the centre of the universe and the trouble Galileo got into for arguing otherwise. I could give current examples but they just tend to make some people angry and other people smug.
It’s easy and not costly to see the unreality in other people’s tribes/politics/religions/clubs. The hard and costly thing is to see it in your own. It’s hard because humans are wired for belonging. We are not good at acknowledging things that threaten our belonging. It’s costly because when you exchange unreality for reality, your connection to your people is weakened. You don’t feel as close to the centre of your crowd as you used to. If the unreality is big enough and you talk about it too loudly, your connection to the true believers may be severed with speed and anger.
Why choose reality if it’s so costly?
I think the value of reality is greater than the cost. But my reasons will have to wait until tomorrow.
Grow slowly
Jeff
It’s been too long since the last Warpaint album.
Every song from every past email:
Classic scene from The Matrix when the guy with the terrible chin hair chooses the fake steak over reality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gL0xQHI0wo
I 'met' a guy on a train once who knew with absolute surety that worms ruled the world. I was initially pretty sure they didn't but as he explained more to me about this fact of his existence I realised that I couldn't prove that he was wrong. I spoke to him for 40 minutes about the implications of wormism and in the end he just reassured me that '...believing what I say or not makes no difference to the reality so you may as well embrace it...' Trying to force my reality on his reality would have shut down the conversation and alienated him, but instead I came away enriched and far more curious about the world of the worm than I had been previously.....