The Desert of the Real

So the other day I’m chatting with a friend about Elon Musk: tech whack meme-lord, and aspiring Mars baron. Yes, we hate ourselves, clearly. Anyway, we’re debating one of his many madcap pronouncements, that wild theory he loves to trot out: this is all just a simulation.

According to Musk, there’s only a “one in billions” chance that reality is actually real. In other words, the man who builds rockets and any-minute-now self-driving electric cars, casually suggests our universe might be nothing more than an elaborate video game.

Though this is old news, my friend is wide-eyed, treating Elon’s words like gospel. And me? Well, Musk may sound bonkers, but honestly my own theories about our universe and what it’s made of are probably even wilder than his, but we’ll leave the mechanics of that to another blog post.

That chat about Elon got me thinking beyond simulations and sci-fi. It got me thinking about belief itself.

Yup, we’re going there. The grand, crazy game we all agree to play every day.

Because Musk’s simulation talk is basically a high-tech twist on an old truth: our reality runs on collective belief. It always has.

We humans are funny that way. We invent things, agree they’re real, and then live our lives by them, as if they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. Elon just took it to the cosmic level: what if even the stone tablets are running on somebody’s server?

But the truth is that long before computer simulations, we’ve been living in worlds we manufactured in our heads.

Fancy a little tour?

From the money in our wallets to the music in our ears, from brand logos to national flags to heavenly gods, it’s all here. Buckle up and welcome to The Desert of the Real.

(Yes, it’s a reference of a reference from The Matrix—did you expect anything better of me, really?)

The Currency of Belief: Money and Other Shared Hallucinations

Nothing illustrates the power of collective belief better than the paper—and pixels—in your pocket: money.

Think about it: those colourful pieces of paper or numbers on a screen have no inherent value. You can’t eat them, you can’t build a house with them, and if you showed them to a particularly unimpressed cat, it might just use them as a litter tray.

Yet, try walking out of a supermarket with a trolley full of food without paying and see how that goes. The only thing that gives money any power is the fact that everyone else believes in it too. As historian Yuval Noah Harari points out, money isn’t an objective reality at all, it’s “a psychological construct” founded on trust in “the figments of our collective imagination”. Let that one sit with you for a while…

In fact, pound notes have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in them anyway. Effectively, money is a story we tell each other, a shared hallucination so effective that we’ll trade hours of our life, even risk our lives, for a pile of fancy paper or a higher number in a bank’s database. It’s arguably the most successful fantasy ever concocted: a game of Monopoly we all agreed to play.

And money is just the first example of such phenomena. Humans are unparalleled in our ability to create fictions and then forget that we made them up. Harari calls this our species’ “truly unique trait”. Unlike other animals that just deal with raw reality, homo sapiens immerse ourselves in stories and myths of our own making..

Consider a few other everyday mass delusions we collectively subscribe to:

Nations and Borders

A neutral, not-at-all polarising place to start…

A country is basically an imagined community, as scholar Benedict Anderson famously said. Those lines on the map aren’t drawn by some galactic laser; they exist in our minds and in our laws. Yet people will cheer, kill, and die for a flag as if it were ordained by physics. The members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow citizens, “yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. In short, we feel our nation is real, so it is.

We’ve literally drawn lines in the sand and decided, yup, crossing this line makes you “foreign”. Incredible, isn’t it? An alien observing us would see one continuous landmass and a lot of primates arguing over invisible boundaries.

Gods and Religions

Oh, boy...

For thousands of years, humans have believed in all manner of invisible beings, from Zeus hurling thunderbolts, to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (praise be unto His Noodliness). We build entire civilisations around these beliefs. Religion, as Harari notes, is arguably humanity’s greatest invention for social cohesion.

The theory goes that religions are a set of common rules and values justified by something superhuman. I mean, look how that turned out... And yet, people still believe. Whether it’s ancient mythologies or modern tech cults, the pattern is the same: unprovable stories that enough people take as truth can wield enormous real-world power.

If you doubt that, consider that billions of people arrange their weekly schedules, diets, sex lives, and even politics around what their chosen sacred story dictates. Fiction? Maybe. But as long as everyone behaves like it’s true, the effects are very real.

Brands and Corporations

Well, I’m likely already cancelled by entire sections of society at this point, so I may as well burn my own profession while I’m at it.

I spend my weekdays working in branding, design, and software development, which means I professionally sprinkle fairy dust on made-up entities to make you feel something about them. Yes, I did just say that.

It’s a hilarious gig when you think about it. I help craft logos, names, and “values” for companies, effectively creating little mythical personalities for what are essentially legal fictions. Yes, a corporation is literally a fiction; it has no body or soul, just paperwork and a logo, yet we treat “Nike” or “Starbucks” like actual characters in our story of the world. The wild thing is how well it works.

People, and I mean me mostly, line up overnight for a new iPhone as if the Apple logo were a religious totem. Which is no coincidence: Apple fans have been called a “cult” for their fanatical devotion, and Steve Jobs deliberately infused Apple with quasi-spiritual vibes: the bitten apple logo, “geniuses” on staff, product launch sermons on stage. Well played, Steve, well played.

One tech writer put it bluntly: Apple turned technology into a religion, complete with its own gospel of “Think Different” and millions of faithful believers. And it’s not just Apple. Every successful brand in some way taps into our psyche to become more than a product: a lifestyle, a tribe, a belief.

As a brand designer, I basically help write modern mythology. Coca-Cola isn’t sugar water, it’s happiness in a bottle. Nike isn’t a trainer company, it’s the spirit of athletic valour. We even use the word “evangelist” in marketing job titles. Digital nomad. Keyboard warrior. And on it goes. If that’s not playing in the temple of belief, I don’t know what is.

The Church of the Dancefloor: Music, Emotion, and Transcendence

Let me pause here, because I don’t want to give the impression that all these collective fictions are bad or that I’m some cynical grump in the corner yelling “It’s all fake!”, especially after dropping a title like the one I just did. Far from it.

I love a good fiction, I just happen to know it is a fiction.

Nowhere is this more personal for me than with music. If there’s one quasi-religion I’ll happily subscribe to, it’s the Church of the Dancefloor.

Every year, I split my time between Manchester and Berlin and their somewhat-related-but-altogether-different club scenes, dancing like a man possessed.

The dancefloor is my temple. The dj is effectively a shaman, guiding the crowd through a shared emotional journey. When that bass drops and a wave of euphoria passes over a thousand people moving in unison, you tell me that’s not spiritual. I don’t believe the music is literally a deity, of course, but I surrender to the experience like a true believer for those moments.

It is a shared illusion in real time: we let the music take control of our bodies and feelings, we form an unspoken community, we transcend the ordinary. There’s no doctrine, no dogma; just rhythm and emotion.

In those nights under the strobe lights, I’ve seen strangers hug, cry, scream in joy, and then lose and later find themselves, utterly to sound. I’ve made some of my closest friends and experienced some of the strongest love there is on earth, on dancefloors. It’s beautiful and absurd at once: a kind of mass hypnosis we choose to undergo.

I find this collective musical high to be one of the most authentic fake realities out there. We know it’s temporary and staged, yet the feelings are real. The meaning is real to us.

In a way, that’s the crux of all belief: it’s fiction that yields real feelings and actions. Dancing in a club or praying in a church ; different music, different costumes, but there’s a similarity in the surrender to something bigger.

The meaning is real to us.

The hilarious part is, by weekday I might be crafting a brand campaign—basically writing a hymn for a product —and by weekend I’m one of the faithful on a dancefloor, letting the dj’s sermon (setlist) wash over me. I create worlds by day and dive into imaginary worlds by night, fully aware of the irony.

And I love it.

This is the dance of the unbeliever: I know it’s not objectively “real,” but I also know that subjective reality—the thrill, the emotion, the connection—is real enough.

Reality Check: Is Anything “Real” or is it Simulations All the Way Down?

By now you might be thinking, “Alright, we get it, everything is kinda made up. But surely there’s an actual reality underneath, right?”

Aha, and just like that, we return to where we started, with Elon’s wacky (or maybe not so wacky) simulation theory. What if there’s not an ultimate reality underneath? What if it’s simulations all the way down?

Let’s indulge the thought, because honestly I live for this level of philosophical nerdery: Suppose our world, with its money, nations, religions, brands, and pop stars, is itself a giant MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) being run on a supercomputer by entities we can’t fathom.

It sounds like stoner talk, and that’s on top of that entire bit about music being a religion, but, here’s the kicker: serious folks have considered it.

The Seductive Comfort of “It’s All a Sim”

Elon's idea got a boost from philosopher Nick Bostrom’s famous paper on the simulation hypothesis, and even guys at NASA and Oxford have debated the odds that we live in the Matrix. It’s got to the point that respected scientists are designing experiments to test if our universe is “pixelated” at the smallest level. Wild, right?

But here’s the thing: even if we are in a simulation, how would we know? And would it change anything? We’d be characters discovering that the rules of our world were coded by some teenager in a higher universe. (I really hope we’re not some alien kid’s science project. Or if we are, I hope they at least got a good grade for us. The jury is out.)

Of course, this puts our earlier revelations in a new light: if money is fictional, nations are imaginary, and so on, is it because reality itself might itself be an illusion?

As Slavoj Žižek surmised about The Matrix films, maybe the so-called real world is just “the desert of the real”—another level of the simulation.

In the first Matrix movie, Neo wakes up from one fake reality into a “real world” of ruined cities and robot squids. Žižek suggested that in the sequels we’d learn that even that bleak world was just another matrix, a deeper layer of illusion. He was basically saying: once you start doubting reality, you fall down an infinite rabbit hole. Take one red pill, you end up needing another and another. You question the fabric of everything. It’s a “vertiginous scepticism” where any stable reality melts away.

Our reality runs on collective belief. It always has.

That’s the frightening and freeing place we’re in now in real life. The more we learn (quantum physics, multiverse theories, simulation ideas), the more “reality” sounds like a provisional storyline. Today’s scientific truth could be tomorrow’s Pokémon lore. We might find out in 50 years that the universe is a computer program (and cue the biggest “I told you so” from Mr. Musk). Or perhaps we’ll find out nothing of the sort and continue as we have, with our human-made belief systems piling on more layers (hey, metaverse, I see you one day, maybe).

Trust Mathematicians to Crash the Party

But then, just as we’re coming around to “we’re in a sim”, along comes Dr Mir Faizal and colleagues with a paper that basically says: no we’re not—and not just “probably not”, but “mathematically, we can’t be”.

Their argument, in massively reductive terms, goes something like this:

• Modern physics increasingly treats space and time not as fundamental, but as things that emerge from a deeper layer of information—a kind of Platonic, mathematical realm.
• You might think, “Cool, information = code, so it’s all computable, therefore: simulation”. But they drag in some heavy hitters from maths; things like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, to show that not all truths about that information can be captured by algorithms.
• In other words, there are aspects of reality that are non-algorithmic: real, but impossible to fully express in step-by-step computational rules.
• Simulations, by definition, are algorithmic. They run on rules expressed in code. If the fundamental layer of reality includes non-algorithmic understanding, then no computer, however fancy, can fully simulate it.
• Conclusion: if the bedrock of the universe can’t be written as pure code, then the universe itself can’t be a computer simulation.

So, rather than confirming Musk’s “we’re in a video game” concept, and indeed my own back-of-a-fag-packet pseudo-science, this research does something more unnerving: it tells us reality is too weird, too deep, too non-computable to be flattened into a simulation at all.

Reality is Stranger Than a Simulation

On the face of it, that might sound like it trashes the whole vibe of this piece. No simulation? No Matrix? No cosmic GPU humming in the basement of a higher universe?

But for me, it actually strengthens everything I’ve just said:

• That what we call “reality” is layered, constructed, and heavily filtered through belief;
• that our money, borders, brands, religions, and status games are all fictions we’ve collectively agreed to treat as real;
• and that once you see that, you start living differently.

Faizal and co. aren’t saying reality is simple and solid; they’re saying it’s even more mysterious than the simulation bros imagined. Not less strange, more. There are truths about the universe that can’t be captured in code, which means no final, perfect model; no ultimate “Theory of Everything” that behaves like a spreadsheet.

If anything, that pushes us further into the desert of the real: a place where there is a reality, but it’s partly beyond calculation, beyond neat explanation. A place where our stories and beliefs will always be partial, approximate, and a bit ridiculous. To further the desert analogy, reality is real because it’s a mirage.

And that, weirdly, makes my stance feel even more grounded. If the universe itself refuses to be fully reduced to equations or code, why on earth would I expect any human-made system—money, religion, capitalism, nationalism, “personal brand”—to have a monopoly on truth?

It does make you wonder: if reality is that brittle, what’s a humble human to do? Curl up in existential dread? Join a cult? Deny everything?

Here’s an alternative:

Not a Nihilist, Just an Unbeliever (And That’s Okay)

After all this talk of simulations, illusions, and collective delusions, you might think I’m advocating full-blown nihilism: the belief in nothing.

But here’s the twist: I’m not a nihilist; I’m an unbeliever.

Unbelief, Not Despair

What’s the difference? To me, nihilism carries a kind of despair: “nothing has meaning, so why bother?” An unbeliever, in the sense I’ve come to embrace, is different. It’s not that nothing has meaning, it’s that meaning is not handed down from on high or inherent in objects. Meaning is made, not found. I simply don’t believe the default stories blindly. I question them, I poke at the fourth wall of the cosmic stage, but I’m not depressed about it, rather, I find it empowering and even playful.

Being an unbeliever means I get to choose, very carefully, which elements of the belief machine I participate in. I’m aware that society is a big construct, a game of make-believe we’re all playing. But instead of sitting in the corner sulking that the game isn’t real, I’d rather be the cheeky player who knows it’s a game and still enjoys it.

I dance with the illusions, but I don’t kowtow to them.

Choosing Your Fictions on Purpose

For example, I know money is a trick of collective trust, so I’ll never confuse having money with having value as a person. I still use money; I have to, to live. I just see the magic trick behind it, which keeps me from worshipping the coin.

I know brands are basically corporate fan fiction, so I’ll create and enjoy them with a wink, but I’ll drop them in a heartbeat if they conflict with deeper values.

I know nations are imaginary, so in theory I’d wave the flag during the World Cup (in practice, football brings me out in a rash), but I won’t buy into jingoistic exceptionalism as if “we’re inherently superior” because I remember it’s a shared fantasy, not an empirical truth.

I dance with the illusions, but I don’t kowtow to them.

I don’t believe in gods, but I can find transcendence in a saxophone solo or a sunset or a lover’s embrace.

In other words, I pick my beliefs the way a dancer picks partners: consciously, fluidly, and with both eyes on the fun of it all. I don’t see it as a sad thing that “it’s all made up”.

I see it as freeing.

You see, knowing it’s ridiculous gives me a kind of lightness. Like we’re all dancing on a stage that could collapse any minute, so we might as well have a killer time and help each other in the process. I don’t worry about not believing in the Ultimate Big Story (be it religion or nationalism or whatever), because I’ve made peace with the desert of the real. In that desert, nothing is given: you bring your own water, your own shade, and your own purpose.

Small-T Truths That Are Big Enough

I’ll leave you with this personal revelation: When you stop searching for The Truth with a capital T, you start noticing all the truths that are already here. The smile of a friend is true. The goosebumps during your favourite song are true. The pride after doing good work is true. These experiences don’t need grand cosmic intervention or validation. They matter to you and the people around you, and that’s the game.

I mightn’t believe in an eternal meaning of life, but I believe in moments that feel meaningful. I believe in love, in creativity, in curiosity; not because some holy book or guru told me to, but because I choose to.

So no, I’m not nihilistic. I’m just not signed up for any single, sweeping belief system. I’m an unbeliever with a grin on my face, playfully juggling the fictions life throws at me. If one drops, no biggie, it was just a ball in the air; I’ll pick up another and keep the show going. In the end, whether or not we’re in a simulation, whether society’s constructs are flimsy or strong, one truth remains: We are story-making afficionados.

We might be living in the desert of the real, but we carry an oasis of imagination within us. I say drink from that oasis, dance by it, just don’t trick yourself into thinking it’s the only water there is.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear the distant thump of a bassline calling. Reality or simulation, I’ve got some dancing to do.