Is The Earth Real?

Artwork by Xen Ruiz

When you lay with your head resting against your silk pillow, gazing up towards the piece of drywall which separates you from the vastness of the cosmos, you have one singular decision to make. And this choice is one which for many people has become binary. Before falling asleep, you can either stare into the magic rectangle which stores essentially all of the information of our species, every book ever published, every movie ever put into theatres, and generally every piece of content which has ever been put out; or the back of your eyelids. 

You are able to jump from one area to the next. In one swipe you see a happy birthday post of you from your mom, an AI kirkified meme, and a plea to donate to a GoFundMe. You jump from Arkansas, to Australia, to a sci-fi dimension in a matter of seconds. 

It’s easy to see this as an issue. As a complete mutation of human life and what it means to be one of us. I mean, come on. Our ancestors lived amongst themselves, with little to no awareness of the vastness of the land, world, and larger universe within which they resided. Isn’t that how we are meant to live? With a benign unawareness of the uselessness of their existence. Clearly we are doing that currently. We do everything seemingly in spite and in distraction of our ultimate demise and the abrupt uselessness of our lives.

However, portraying that as an absolute would be disingenuous. Humans have been explorers since before the transition to humanhood. We searched the vast oceans without knowledge of other continents, travel time, or triangulation. We flew to another rock in space in hunks of rock with the computing power 1/10 that of an apple watch.

We are and have been explorers. We take in information faster than we have ever been able to offer it.

That is what is being exploited through social media. The ability to hop from idea to idea in fractions of seconds is not a defect. It’s destiny. It is the natural progression of a species with the fastest mental computers ever curated by mother nature. 

And the popularization of overuse of social media has brought forward an interesting question: Is the earth real? Seriously. For the many people who live their lives predominantly online, the “real” world is seeming increasingly more foreign. But this is not a new thing. Everything that humans do is to feed the mind. We socialize, read, write, think, watch television, and now we watch TikTok. All things throughout history have been for the sole purpose of feeding our minds. 

Looking at things through this view, it becomes clear that we live life not in the “real” world. Nobody ever has. Instead, the “real” world has always been in our minds. Nothing about the earth is you after you die. Your mind, when you are here, is the only thing that completely encompasses you. The true world we live in is the neuron firings of our brains, and the world we know as Earth is nothing more than the catalyst for those firings.