We Live In a Simulation

    It was still my senior year of high school, and I was walking from lunch with a friend of mine. We were about halfway back to class when we realized she was still holding the empty bottle of her drink. This may seem like a rather mundane, unimportant detail, and it would have been if I hadn’t watched her throw the same bottle away only a minute earlier. We laughed off the situation at the time in spite of our bewilderment and confusion, joking about how we must be living in a simulation or something. 

    We were only messing around, of course, but since that day the thought has lingered in the back of my mind. What if we are living in a simulation? We rely completely on our senses to show us the world around us, and it’s been proven numerous times that they aren’t the most reliable. The world is comprised of chemical combinations, sound, and light, and our brains are tasked with making sense of it all. We aren’t capable of perceiving everything around us exactly as it is without error.

    Once, my phone glitched and started autocorrecting my spelling to match UK English. Words like “realize” kept autocorrecting to “realise” and I thought I was going crazy. Could this have simply been another glitch in the simulation? How did a UK English keyboard even get on my phone? Is Apple working with the people controlling the simulation?

    It’s not incredibly far-fetched to believe that we live in something like The Matrix. Sometimes we catch glimpses of error within it, like when you’re sure you moved that sock off the floor yesterday, but now it’s there again. Why does my alarm clock end up five minutes behind when I aligned it properly the first time I set it up? Don’t try to talk to me about the science behind clocks; these are the lies we’ve been fed to keep us blind to the truth–to stop us from questioning things. 

    You’re telling me there’s a chance that when I smack a table, the atoms will align so that my hand goes through it, and I’m supposed to believe that this isn’t some sort of simulation glitch? Don’t even get me started on the concept of Bluetooth. Electricity and code are working perfectly to deliver the sound of instruments and a man’s voice in a song recorded in the 80s directly to my ears? Sounds like The Matrix to me. 

    While we want to believe in the world around us, the concept of it all being false is interesting to explore and ever-present. Am I real? I think I am, but is that enough proof for you to believe me? Do my thoughts make it truth? Who’s to say that anything we see or know is really, real?