Our search for meaning, purpose, and truth, challenging as it is, is further complicated by the age of information, misinformation and abundance. The stories we tell ourselves shape our experience. And our experience shapes our future. Delineating what’s truly vital for us from the myriad of things competing for our attention and what compounds beyond the ephemeral to ultimately bring more light rather than heaviness into our lives is ever more necessary for living a good life.
Our time is finite, but the things vying for our attention and the seductiveness of their art are increasing. Choosing how we direct our attention and what we spend it on is one of the most important choices we need to make. In the words of Annie Dillard,
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
But our lives are governed by a lot of illusions and myths masquerading as truths that hijack our attention and take us down rabbit holes, some spanning lifetimes.
Thinking about what is true, and what is real, what is fictitious and illusory helps bring some perspective as we ponder how we spend our time and what’s valuable to us. In my own search, I find it helpful to distinguish between truth, reality and fiction in the following terms.
Truth is absolute, universal and self-referential. It’s what is—rather than a representation of something. It’s beyond time and space. It is always true. And it’s true for all, not just for some.
Reality is temporal, relative and subjective. It can be experiential and it has a felt component as it relates to states of experience. As Albert Einstein said:
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Anything that is not always occurring, that we haven’t always been or felt is real but not true. You may be anxious, depressed, unhappy; an entrepreneur, a girlfriend, the captain of a sport’s team. But have you always been these things?
Our feelings and thoughts are real, but they come and go, and as such are not the truth of who we are. Unless we’ve always been something, it’s real but it’s not true.
Fiction represents something other than what it is. It’s founded in language, as opposed to the natural world, it’s man-made and invented. It is not the thing itself, but a reference to the thing. Language, money, nations, religions and institutions are fictions. The word is the fiction, the tree is the reality.
Fictions divide the whole into parts (e.g. humanity into nations) and reduces the expansive into something smaller than what it is (e.g. the ocean into separate oceans; the land into countries).
We have or belong to fictions, but we don’t experience them. We often identify with fictions, too—as it relates to any national, racial, professional affiliations, for example.
Contemplating what we spend our time on, how we spend it, and what we stand for in the context of some of the fictions and realities of our lives can provide some valuable insights.
We don’t need to get rid of the realities and fictions we live in, but seeing them for what they are can be helpful. Seeing our thoughts and fears as something that occurs in the realm of the temporal rather than the ever-present helps. And sometimes just pondering the nature of who we are, helps bring us closer to our essence, with more peace and presence in our lives.
“If you can recognize illusion as illusion, it dissolves. The recognition of illusion is also its ending. Its survival depends on your mistaking it for reality. In the seeing of who you are not, the reality of who you are emerges by itself.” – Eckhart Tolle