2025-10-30-Is my life a lie
Some of my favorite movies and some of the movies that blew my mind as a kid had the concept of a fake world. A manufactured world, or the threat of it, that the characters fought to become free of. The Matrix, the Truman show, Inception, ect. These movies had the tendency to push you to start asking in the back of your head if the world was fake. Is this all a dream? Is this a simulation? Is it all some elaborate ruse or prank played on me?
This theme is fun and can get a few existential questions out of you, but I really think it should inspire more than just paranoia.
For example the right has this weird obsession of "breaking free of the Matrix" of the modern world. And when I first saw these kinds of posts, I was disappointed at the shallow takeaways of these movies. "Theres malicious forces trying to control our lives! People are trying to control you!"
The potency of these dystopian, fake worlds is not the idea that some conspiracy is being made against you, but that it makes you ask how truthfully you are really living your life. Because after you ask if your experience as a whole is a lie, you may start asking if parts of your life are a lie.
Heres an example to give an idea of what I mean. Lets say you met someone, and you click really well. You fall in love and theres the normal ups and downs, but you stick together. So much so, you get married, have kids, grow old, the whole shebang. You make a good life for yourselves. But one day, talking to your partner, they confess the truth. They didnt get or stay with you because they loved you, they just thought it was convenient, easy and made the most sense. The question is, is that real love? Was it true or genuine?
What about other things? What if your friend secretly hated you and constantly shit talked you behind your back? What if your painting was only bought for a tax write off instead of its beauty?
You might ask what does it matter if you get the same result. And thats a really good question, because how true does something have to be before it becomes a lie? Will you tolerate friends sometimes being iffy? Does love have to be perfect or can it be a bit of a rocky road? This will determine how much you purge, if you purge at all. But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if youre compromising on what real or true means, and if youre compromising on living that definition out.
I would argue that according to my own principles if my partner never really loved me, if I had no friends that really had my back, and if I wasnt part of something because of my own merit but because of a quota, my life is as fake as the matrix.
So if any of that was the case, I would quit it and try again. Because I want to live the truth, not a lie.
These movies made me ask these questions. Which made me ask if I had real friends, and how I would pursue love or a career. I extrapolated these questions to my beliefs and values. If a "virtue" was really just for manipulation, I stopped playing along with it. If something could be true and pure, I wanted to chase it. It made me solidify my principles and solidify how I wanted to live them out.
These movies dont only ask "Could your life be a lie?", they ask "Does the way you live your life create lies, and if so are you ok with that?" I think these are the real deep questions these movies make you ask.