Is life a dream we wake out of the day we exit it? Is it a simulation? A hologram of sorts? Questions like these swirl around the internet ever more. While these ideas tend to seem too out-there to the average mind, there is a reason why we like to entertain them.
There’s an unreal quality to life that seems way too real most of the time. The further we go into the experience we call life, the more we see the insignificance of events that once felt dead important. And the more there is a potential to get in touch with the reality that what we perceive as life is an illusion. That is because we see our personal story as life itself. But life is bigger than our own story. It is hard to grasp that in the daily happening as the emotions we drown into truly make our story feel like life itself. But every time we face death or have another existential experience that shakes us, we sense how limited our story is.
Whether life is a dream or a simulation objectively, who knows? However, it seems to me that, in a way, we very much experience life like a dream that we’re more invested in than we should.
The moment we are born, we enter into a story, the story of other people. As we become self-aware, we start building our own story. A story about who we are and what the story of our life is. The further one goes into life, the more invested one becomes in their story.
This may be the story of a victim, a survivor, a hero, a failure or a leader. We buy into our own self-perception and we get consumed by what we imagine our life should be. We live in our heads, chasing goals, conquering peaks, “doing the right thing, going after a horizon that gets further away the further we go after it.
And in that game of life, the storyline we’re so invested in, we sometimes think that it’s ok to do someone wrong, to play unfairly, to cut corners, to lie just a little bit, to cheat just a little bit, to do. Whatever gets us ahead in our own story.
What the immature soul fails to understand is that, while the chase we’re so invested in is an illusion, forgotten the moment we exit life because it was important and real to us only, the way we are in the world is real. It is not only our legacy, it affects other people in a very real way. And it creates an image of us that is a hundred percent real to other people.
Caught up in our storyline, we only see our storyline. Something created by our mind, limited by the interest of one person, insignificant as such, an illusion.
But life goes beyond our own story. It is about human connection and we’re all connected into something a lot bigger than each one of us is individually. What we do, even the small gestures, what we say, how we are in the world and with others, it creates ripple effects in a pond too large for us to see. We set an example and examples get passed down – good and bad. And this is very real even if life turns out to be one big dream indeed.
While working on that storyline you’re so consumed by, it may be worth, every now and then, pondering about the reality you’re weaving by being the way you are, doing what you do.
What kind of ripples do you want to make? What kind of example do you want to be? This is the real legacy you’re building even if you believe you’re working towards another one.
