My Birthday

     Today is my twenty-eighth birthday. It doesn't really feel like I've accomplished a lot for being a decade into (legal) adulthood, but a lot has happened since my eighteenth birthday. I went to college. Fascists took over. I got an AA degree. I started Blogging regularly. Twitter collapsed. And now I'm writing about how I think the only way forward is to accept, on a global level, that society isn't inherently real and we have to find ways to keep it real, and that means accepting that the Infinite exists and that it's up to us to protect one another from seeing it. 

    The way I see it, when your world collapses you can either fall into depression and stop believing in anything ever again, or you can come up with the thing that you believe in and fight with all your heart to make it a reality. I'm fighting for a new reality because I can fight for a new reality. I'm a writer who studied science a lot in college, loved learning about scams, dabbled in economics and anthropology, and has a fascination for the world of magic and psychics. Ever since I was small, I've been obsessed with the line between reality and fantasy, and I've devoted most of my life to figuring out how you can tell one from the other. Anyone who's even glanced at a quantum physics textbook knows that the line between reality and fantasy is a lot thinner than we like to think that it is. 

      I'm no physicist, but I truly do believe that the drive to make a world real connects everything in our Universe together. Every atom, every star, every planet, sentient or not, is trying as hard as it can to keep the world around it real. I can't prove this, but I genuinely believe that one day we're going to discover that the only thing keeping physics together is some strange atomic version of belief, that gravity, speed, and space time only work the way they do because at some point the collective consciousness of our Universe decided that the way that things are made some sort of sense. 

      I could be totally wrong, and a lot of me hopes that I am. I'm still human, after all, and like anyone in a Universe I want a world that will stay real without my involvement or input. I want to be able to do what I want to do without hurting anyone or making the world worse for everyone else. The problem is that now that I've figured this out, I see it everywhere I look. All around me are people trying as hard as they can to keep their world together through any means necessary, and until we grapple with that fact I think we have no way of getting out of this mess. 

      Right now, I think the only thing that we can do is try to imagine a future that we want, and then talk about that future to anyone we can find. If we want to go somewhere, we need to figure what, exactly, it is we want first. We need to figure out who wants to keep the old system, who wants to tweak it, and who wants to discard it altogether. Then we need to push. We need to push like nothing else. We need to sacrifice what we have now so that we can push for what we want, if anything. I know that it won't be easy, but we need to believe that the more we push for a world that's shaped like the one we want to have, the more the world around us will be shaped to our will. Because it will. Our world is only real so long as we believe that it exists, and everyone knows that. So they'll change. They'll let themselves be shaped by us, so long as we let ourselves be shaped in turn. Our future depends on us taking our reality back from those who will never know our names.