Yes, You Live Inside of a Simulation
Reflections #3
There is something about sitting out alone in the wilderness that is immensely real. I know in previous posts I’ve said that the “real world” isn’t just the humdrum of civilization or the biting teeth of the forest beyond but the tension and communication between the two. And while I hold this to be true, there’s a shade of nuance to that I’d like to parse out.
One of the hot button topics right now is whether or not we’re living inside of a simulation. The hypothesis is something like: Our modern world is actually a computer program that our minds are hooked up to and we’re interacting with the things around us in the way someone might interact with objects in a video game.
The purpose of this supposed simulation is unclear but folks have posited ideas ranging from: “the whole world is inside of a huge lab experiment” to “machines are harvesting us for energy The Matrix style.”
While I find these ideas to be utterly profane and vulgar, there is something about them that rings true.
I think, in some sense, our modern world is a simulation. It’s a simulation in that our parks simulate wilderness, our networks simulate community, our jobs simulate families, and our entertainment simulates meaning and purpose. In Western civilization, everything is a dim shadow of the “real world” or, perhaps a better way of putting it is: it is a facsimile of a meaningful life.
We feel like we’re in a game because, to some extent, we are. A game is something done to simulate reality or to pass the time, and that is how a lot of us live our lives. We are simply chasing thrills and killing the hours as they pass by. Instead of trying to build something, so much of our time is sold off to corporations so that we can afford to entertain ourselves.
The idea of working 9 hours a week so that you can then go home and play video games and binge television is in itself a game. It is a framework that is engaging but is not geared towards any higher purpose. It leaves us feeling worn, tired, without direction.
This is an existence far-flung from our tribal ancestry where we sparred with the natural world simply to stay alive.
In his book Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, Edward Abbey says:
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a junipertree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
When we sit alone in nature, we experience the glimmer of a life we were built for. A life outside in the golden sun and biting rain. A life where everything we come into contact with is connected to our own existence in a way that is readily apparent, unlike the algebra equation of working at a job where a thousand things need to take place between Point A (work) and Point B (Paycheck).
When living inside of Wilderness Time, our trues selves emerge. We exist in the friction between ourselves and nature, and the entirety of our modern civilization is designed to buffer and reduce that friction, causing our true and potential selves to atrophy and dissolve.
So while I still maintain that the real world exists in the dialogue between village and forest, what that means for us is that we need to bring the village into the forest. We need to bring civilization out into the bog so that it can get its feet muddy, have its skin swell up from mosquito bites, and get Giardia after drinking murky water.
Go out into woods and sit there for hours on end. Survey the squirrels and listen to the birds. Hunch your shoulders against the cold. Watch for rain. Long for a warm bed or a hot breakfast somewhere with friends. Do this and the idea of living in a simulation slides away like a bad dream.