On fragments, faith, and the dangerous comfort of certainty
My generation was raised by cinema in the same way earlier generations were raised by scripture and later ones by algorithms. Movies didn’t just entertain us; they calibrated our metaphors. Few films, however, managed to leave a dent as deep as the first installment of The Matrix trilogy.
Not because of the special effects—though yes, bullet time was intoxicating in its day. Not because of the acting either, although I’ll freely admit that Lawrence Fishburne lodged himself into my mental pantheon with the calm authority of a man who could explain the end of the world without raising his voice. And certainly not because the film delivered some thunderclap revelation that rearranged my worldview overnight.
It didn’t.
That particular set of questions—the nature of reality, perception, truth, mediation—had already been quietly fermenting in my head for years. Decades, if I’m honest. Long before Neo swallowed anything, red or blue.
It started early. Schoolboy early. The moment I learned how a body actually functions—not in the poetic sense, but in the cold, mechanical one. Nerves transmit signals. Signals are electrical. The brain interprets those signals and produces what we generously call “experience.” Sight, sound, touch, pain, pleasure—all of it downstream from electrical impulses bouncing around wet tissue.
Add to that a basic understanding of physics: the speed of light, the latency of transmission, the inconvenient fact that everything we perceive has already happened by the time we perceive it. Even “now” is a fossil. A neurological afterimage. The past, hastily reconstructed and labeled as the present.
From that point on, the conclusion was unavoidable: whatever we think we know about the world is interpretation. A model. A user interface. And if the brain can be fooled—and it demonstrably can—then the illusion will feel just as real as anything else. Reality is not what is. It is what registers.
Which brings us neatly back to Morpheus.
“What is real?” he asks. And more importantly: how would we even define it?
If truth is merely what we can hear, see, touch, or smell, then it reduces to a sequence of electrical impulses, eagerly interpreted—some might say coveted—by our brains. Yes, this is openly borrowed from The Matrix. No, its origin in a Hollywood script does not make it less accurate. Sometimes the popcorn aisle accidentally brushes up against philosophy.
Ten thousand years ago, sometime in the younger Neolithic, a human being could determine what was true simply by continuing to exist. Reality was not an abstraction; it was a daily, unmediated confrontation. The world delivered immediate feedback. Sometimes that feedback was nourishing. Often it was lethal. Get it wrong, and you didn’t need a peer-reviewed paper to explain the outcome—you were dead.
Truth, back then, wasn’t debated. It wasn’t theorized. It wasn’t outsourced. It was experienced viscerally. Hunger was true. Weather was true. Bone breaks were true. Tooth infections were catastrophically true.
Our ancestors didn’t need to liquefy their synapses in endless epistemological gymnastics. Their truths were etched into sinew and stone, reinforced by seasons and scarcity. Yes, they already entertained supernatural beliefs—we know this from burial practices, cave art, talismans—but those were clearly acts of faith. Stories told to explain the unknown, not substitutes for lived reality.
Today, the situation has inverted itself entirely.
The modern world is far too complex to be grasped by direct observation. Almost nothing we “know” comes from firsthand experience. Instead, it arrives secondhand, thirdhand, or twentiethhand—mediated by institutions, filtered through experts, compressed into headlines, sanitized for consumption, and wrapped in narrative.
Which means that modern humans must believe far more than our prehistoric ancestors ever did.
Let that sink in.
Early humans lived in reality. We live in interpretation. They had consequence. We have content. They had hunger. We have feeds.
We like to imagine ourselves as more informed, more enlightened, more rational. In truth, we are vastly more dependent on belief. We outsource our understanding of the world to people we will never meet, institutions we cannot audit, and models we do not understand.
Take a short mental detour.
How many of you have set foot on Antarctica? Not flown over it, not watched a documentary narrated by a concerned British voice, but actually been there—felt the cold that cuts through language, lived long enough to understand the place beyond spectacle.
How many have spent meaningful time in Greenland? Not a cruise stop. Not a curated visit. Actually lived there. Experienced the seasons, the culture, the food, the way weather asserts dominance over human intention.
I haven’t. And I say that as someone more traveled than roughly 95% of the world’s population. Not just business-class hopscotching between conference rooms, but months-long journeys. Backpacking. Cycling across continents. Eight countries at a time. Boats. Borders. Bureaucracy. Dirt.
I’ve seen every continent except Antarctica—and I remain profoundly ignorant of most of the world.
Anything I “know” about those places depends entirely on other people’s accounts. And here’s the problem: everyone has biases. Everyone filters. Everyone edits. The question is not whether a narrative is biased, but which bias you choose to rent space in your head.
What happens in Antarctica might as well happen on the Moon. It is so far removed from daily human experience that whatever news emerges from it already carries the timbre of myth. Glacial sagas recited by journalists who’ve never left their desks. Penguins enlisted into moral allegories. Ice shelves collapsing “faster than expected”—always faster, never slower—like a Nordic bedtime story written by a climate model.
Because the place is so remote, the boundary between truth and fairytale becomes elastic. Stretch it a little. Add a fabricated statistic. Sprinkle in some digital snow. Who would know? If the media doesn’t report it, it might as well never have happened. And if it does report it, it acquires an aura of inevitability.
But the real magic trick isn’t what we haven’t seen.
It’s what we should have seen by now—and haven’t.
Big coastal cities that, according to decades of confident projections, should already be fish habitats. Lower Manhattan was supposed to be an underwater museum of capitalism: submerged taxis, drowned office chairs, coral-encrusted espresso machines. A scuba commute.
And yet—annoyingly, stubbornly—the waterline remains mundane. The same level that greeted immigrants past Lady Liberty a century ago still greets tourists today. Her pedestal remains dry. Her torch remains symbolic. And her ability to illuminate delusion remains as limited as ever.
This isn’t unique to New York. Pull out century-old photographs from London, Venice, Mumbai. Compare horizons. The apocalypse is remarkably bad at keeping appointments. No biblical flood. No cinematic submersion. Just humanity’s unbroken talent for believing whatever narrative flatters the anxiety of the decade.
We’ve been told to panic for so long that we’ve mistaken adrenaline for insight.
Perhaps we’re anesthetized now. Sedated by headlines and hashtags. The fairy tales keep changing, but the moral remains constant: trust us, the end is near. Meanwhile, Lady Liberty stands ankle-deep in propaganda, not water.
But we don’t even need to reach back a century. Deception operates far faster—and we are enthusiastic accomplices.
Vienna experienced the hottest summer of my lifetime in 2017. Forty-two degrees Celsius. Brutal. Unmistakable. Since then, summers have been hot—but we haven’t touched forty again. Yet each year arrives with declarations of “the hottest ever.”
If you’re standing in thirty-seven degrees, sweating through your shirt, you’ll believe it. You feel hot now. The missing five degrees are an abstraction. Pain collapses context. The present devours memory.
A fragment is enough to convince you—and once convinced, it becomes true. How is that different from belief?
“But I’m just a layperson,” you might object. “Surely the experts know better. The white coats. NASA.”
Do they?
In practice, they do the same thing everyone else does: assemble fragments of data—or what they believe to be data—mix them with assumptions, season heavily with narrative requirements, normalize the output, and present the result as knowledge.
Voilà. Certainty.
It is intoxicating, this confidence we place in fragments. From a sliver of bone, we reconstruct entire species. From a shadow of data, we erect empires of prediction. It is impressive, undeniably. But inference is not truth. It remains interpretation.
Recall Pluto.
When New Horizons finally swept past that distant outpost in 2015, decades of confident assumptions collapsed in silence. The planet-that-wasn’t displayed complexity no one had predicted. The universe, it turned out, did not feel obligated to honor our models.
Until something has been witnessed—actually seen, not inferred—it remains conjecture. Elegant conjecture, perhaps. But conjecture nonetheless. And conjecture deserves restraint, not worship.
Science is littered with wrong paths that were once treated as immovable truths. And when something is declared true while being false, it is because someone decided it would be. Sometimes for power. Sometimes for convenience. Often for career preservation.
Not every error is a conspiracy. Many are honest mistakes. Hubris. Overreach. Institutional momentum. But honest mistakes are still wrong—which is why everything we consume today should come with a generous grain of salt.
In the 1940s, the medical establishment decided the frontal lobes were the seat of psychic excess. António Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize for developing the lobotomy—a procedure that severed connections in the prefrontal cortex to “cure” mental illness.
The result was a human catastrophe. Thousands reduced to vegetative states. Many killed. What was marketed as treatment functioned largely as social control—neutering those deemed inconvenient, unruly, or undesirable.
At the time, this was fact. Settled. Irrefutable.
Until it wasn’t.
John Locke understood this centuries earlier. He insisted that true knowledge requires direct intuition or demonstration. Everything else—everything learned from teachers or books—was merely probability.
Discard everything you haven’t observed personally, and your knowledge collapses to near zero. You wouldn’t even know who your parents are. You didn’t observe your own birth. You were present, yes—but not conscious in any meaningful sense.
All that remains is reason. And even that is compromised—because memory is treacherous.
A younger version of me once cycled from Vienna to Egypt. Over a hundred days. Eight countries. Boats. Borders. Solitude. I kept a journal.
Today, I know I crossed from Austria into Italy through Tarvisio. I spent a night there. I have no memory of it. None. The journal tells me it happened. My mind insists otherwise.
How much else have I forgotten? How much have I rewritten without noticing?
In the end, real is what we decide to make real. The interpreter in our head obliges. That’s why you can’t argue people out of narratives—they are experiencing them as real.
A man once bought two oriental rugs. Cheap ones. Ashamed of the price, he invented a story about their exclusivity and cost. Decades later, when selling them, he believed his own fiction. The lie had fossilized into memory.
I know this because I was the buyer who discovered they were fakes.
You didn’t see it. So to you, it’s just a story.
But that’s the point.
Humans are fact-generating machines. We fabricate reality on the fly. Constantly. Effortlessly.
Keep that in mind.
Especially the next time someone tells you what is real.
