Reality: A Game of Telephone, TSA Agents & Finitude
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What is real is often what we believe is real.
Reality - the state or quality of being real.
Real - existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious, or theoretical; actual.
If you examine the definition of reality, you’ll come to the conclusion that reality is what occurs in the physical world.
But if that’s true, then why do so many people disagree on so many things? If we’re all experiencing and living in the same reality, how can there exist so much fundamental disagreement?
The short answer? We’re not. The long answer? We each have our own little reality we’re experiencing & living in.
This is because our brains don’t download reality; it interprets reality.
When something happens, whenever your best buddy or the cable news retells a story, they often say this is what happened and in doing so, ever so slightly (or significantly) modify that reality for others.
It’s sort of like the game of Telephone, where a group of people sit in a circle and one person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person to the left and so on until you reach the person who first originated the phrase. They then speak aloud both phrases, the one they first shared and the one that reached back to them. While simplistic, this game demonstrates how information becomes warped, sometimes intentionally, other times, accidentally.
And, if someone adopts a warped version of reality, they can make faulty life choices based on it.
What happens (aka reality), is therefore just as important as the interpretation of that same reality.
This can even occur when two people experience the same physical phenomenon. Take Joseph & Amanda, both on their daily walk to work, when, at a nearby intersection, one car runs a red light and T-bones another car in the intersection. Both drivers get out of their cars, stunned but unhurt.
Joseph shaken & fuming, continues walking to work. What stupid people exist in the world today?!! They shouldn’t have been speeding.
Amanda also continues her walk, deeply worried. That person seemed to be in such a rush! Must’ve been an emergency, I hope they’re OK.
Both experienced the same car crash but Joseph walked away with one interpretation and Amanda with another. What happened there?
Enter the Thought Sensibility Administration agent (aka the TSA).
While a typical TSA agent is designed to prevent dangerous items from entering the airport according to the TSA rules, this TSA agent is a bit different. His role is to apply the framework, called the TSA Guidebook, to every experience you have in order to make sense of the world around you.
Put another way, every experience is shaped by the TSA guidebook.
The TSA guidebook is built from the thoughts, beliefs, and past experiences you’ve had & is a low-energy expenditure way to deal with your environment. It contains basic concepts like what a bicycle is, how airplanes take off, how desks are made to have things put on top of them, beliefs of how the world should be to understanding how social cues work.
The TSA agent itself is a useful construct when applied appropriately, but what really matters here isn’t the agent itself but rather the guidebook.
Now without the guidebook, we’d all be continuously freaking out as we couldn’t make sense of the world around us. We’d be overwhelmed by the amount of information flooding our senses, experiencing the world as an incomprehensible mess.
Meanwhile, adults can blink during their daily commute and suddenly be home & have 0 recollection as to how they got there.
It’s also why children often underestimate risk entirely due to having no prior reference point and elderly people tend to be far more risk averse. But what matters is how the TSA guidebook is written.
When the TSA guidebook is written strictly and designed poorly, it results in a perception of the world that can be limiting, jaded, or absolutist. The world is a certain way, argue those whose TSA guidebook is rigid. The world is either white or black, right or wrong; the guidebook has become a doctrine. This doctrine can be efficient, it allows for the sensation of security and stability but it does poorly with nuance, subtlety, and information that contradicts its code.
For those whose guidebook is written well and battle-tested against various ideas, it is flexible and in areas where the guide is lapse, the guidebook is willing to be self-examining & flag inconsistencies for active thought to correct. In this way, it is evolutionary in behavior; it can be modified based on new input.
Since we each possess this guidebook, whenever some event occurs, we experience the events as though they are a certain way and possess certain immutable traits. She’s angry! Or He hates me. This is the TSA agent deploying the guidebook.
While these determinations are not inherently good or bad, they can impact how we see our current situation and the decisions we make afterward. It can shape where we work, who we choose to be with, and the actions we take.
Therefore, how do we create a better TSA guidebook? One that’ll guide us through the ups and downs of life and help us tackle life’s greatest challenges?
Recognize how little of the world you’ve experienced and will experience.
And this is me being generous with how much you’ll experience.
Each day, 82 years’ worth of Youtube videos & 11,000 books are published, and the 8 billion people on Earth have each had 24 hours in which to think 8 billion different thoughts. You cannot feasibly experience everything there is to experience (in reality) and this is not to mention the 8 billion different weird little worlds that are occurring in every person’s head.
Therefore, assuming that your guidebook, which is based on the already narrow existence of life is supremely correct and can operate as a doctrine in a world of complexity strikes me as equivalent to believing all relationships are bad from a bad first date.
How do we counter doctrines?
Assume that no matter how hard you try, you will never experience most of what humanity has to offer and you will always be walking thru life with an imperfect point of view.
And when you do so, the hard, grounded reality you experience becomes something of a discovery, something which is mostly unknown. You can ask tough questions, see where your filters exist, and challenge them. You can recognize the existence of other people’s TSA guidebooks, from doctrines to flexible codes. And when you do so, you can better shift your own TSA guidebook, opening up new ways of thinking and acting in the world.
-Kiran
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