You're Doing Reality Wrong

“We’ve been shaped to have perceptions that keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. If I see something that I think of as a snake, I don’t pick it up. If I see a train, I don’t step in front of it. I’ve evolved these symbols to keep me alive, so I have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take it seriously, we also have to take it literally…. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”
 — What if everything we believe about the world around us turns out to be untrue? What if we are simply a series of responses to stimuli we can neither name nor understand? What if our actions are only the result of a soft-shelled cellular sort of machine learning, and the values we ascribe to things we do are as empty as the sorry little lives we lead while we think we do them? It might mean that we could let go of all the worry we carry around — that the hurt we’ve caused can never be forgiven, that the pain we’ve felt will never truly heal, that our loved ones might be sad to lose us — each day and truly embrace the oblivion that is our inevitable destiny. We could face it unafraid, with arms open wide and a sense of relief that no one need ever suffer for us again. But what do you think is the best part about understanding that our lives are futile and hollow? Tell us in the comments!