What’s Real After Everything Else Isn’t
Astrology isn’t real. Manifestation, tarot readings, MBTI, maybe none of it is real in a literal sense, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work in people’s minds. Sometimes belief itself is powerful enough to change how we see the world, how we act, even what we notice. The mind is strong enough to create meaning where there is none, or maybe to reveal meaning that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. It’s like a placebo effect for reality. Nothing physically changes but instead we do.
That pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.
Your name is part of it. Watching the scene in the movie Project Hail Mary where Rocky said the name of his girlfriend made me think that our names are just a sound that someone gave us. You didn’t choose it, but you got used to it until it started feeling permanent and like it belonged to you. And now, when someone says it, you respond automatically even if it’s just repetition and a shared agreement. Its something that tells us who we are.
Money works the same way. It’s paper, or numbers on a screen, yet it controls almost every decision we make. Where we live, what we eat, how we move through the world. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, people used what they called “Mickey Mouse money.” It became nearly worthless later because the system behind it collapsed and people no longer trusted it as a stable way to trade value. Even though it was real paper money, it lost its value when people lost trust. This shows that money only works when people collectively agree it is important and believe they can use it to buy things. That’s what gives money power. Not the material itself, but the collective belief.
There’s a moment in The Little Prince where a man claims to own a star because no one owned it before him. He sits and counts his stars, writes the number down, locks it in a drawer. The Little Prince finds this completely absurd. And once you see it, you start noticing the same thing everywhere. When you step back, it almost feels surreal — like watching adults seriously argue over something a child would question immediately.
We do the same thing with land. The ground existed long before any person did and yet someone can own it, so that others have to pay simply to stand there, to build there, to live there. If you really think about it, the ground doesn’t know it belongs to anyone. It’s just there. We’re the ones who decided to divide it until it started feeling like the natural order of things. And then we drew lines on maps and called them countries. Invisible borders we treat like walls. You’re born on one side and suddenly that shapes your language, your passport, and your opportunities.
From there, it becomes easier to see how we extend the same logic to people.
People reduce entire groups into inherited labels or group identities, as if those labels could contain the full complexity of a person’s life, thoughts, or humanity. People can’t define others by stories written about people before them or by assumptions tied to others who merely share a similar appearance.
Yet, once a label exists, it starts shaping how people are seen. Who people assume belongs or is important. Who gets noticed or overlooked. People begin to sort each other without noticing. Into useful and not useful. Into valuable and replaceable. It doesn’t always look like open hostility. Sometimes it just looks like indifference. But indifference can also be a way of erasing someone without realizing it.
And when that way of seeing grows larger, it doesn’t stay small. It scales. People take that habit of reducing others into categories and expand it into something much more serious, where they stop seeing entire groups as individuals and start seeing them as a single idea, a side, a problem, or a threat. Into something that makes it easier to distance from their humanity. The mind protects itself by simplifying what it cannot fully hold but that simplification comes at a cost. The moment someone is no longer seen as fully human or as someone with a life as detailed and real as your own, the weight of what happens to them begins to feel lighter than it should.
No one is born inherently above anyone else. No one is born below. Those ideas only appear after systems are built—systems of power, economics, survival, fear. And once those systems exist, people start using them to organize the world, even if they quietly distort what a human being actually is.
If you trace that further, you start to wonder what is actually real underneath all of this.
If you strip away the systems, the money, borders, labels, status, you don’t actually find nothing. You find consciousness, memory, emotion, experience—the small, unmeasurable things that don’t exist in systems but exist in life. Those things don’t come from systems. They come from being alive.
Maybe a lot of what we treat as “real” is actually just shared agreement. But the way we treat each other inside those agreements is real in a much deeper way, because it has consequences. It shapes how people feel about themselves and how they move through the world. It leaves marks. That’s why it matters.
Because even if names are invented, money is invented, borders are invented, people are not. And what we do to each other inside these inventions becomes lived experience. It becomes memory, pain or care or distance or connection.
Maybe nothing is real in the way we think it is.
But people are real. Our connections, our feelings, our memories and experiences are real.
And maybe the only thing we’re truly responsible for is not letting the systems we invented make us treat the real parts like they don’t matter.