If It's Real Why Doesn't It Feel That Way?

The question "If it's real, why doesn't it feel that way?" captures a belief that what we've been fed by "them" is really not real. 

Too vague? Okay, we're drifting into a kind of head space here that could make us dance on the edge of sanity-insanity if we're not careful. But upon second thought, the sentence does capture an ongoing theme of these posts, doesn't it? 

But instead of simply droning on about this, we instead will bring in some thoughts from a source we've found intelligent and insightful over the years, Charles Hugh Smith. We'll see things from his perspective. That perspective, added to our own, will ideally enlighten us more about this "feeling" some of us (most of us?) may be experiencing.

His thoughts, and therefore his writing, tends to be well organized. In this case, he begins with a "top down" perspective (bold in original): 

We all know that geopolitics, the stock market, AI, the unemployment rate and all the rest of what's presented as "explaining" everything is "important," but all these analytic abstractions ignore what we actually experience. 

And here he pinpoints that "feeling" we may be experiencing:

The basic idea is that there's a widening gulf between what we actually experience and what we're told we should be experiencing, and this disconnect is inescapably deranging.   

Some possible encouragement for us here. It would seem that more folks than might be apparent are having the same feelings, an emotional expression of a belief:

But everyone else doesn't actually believe it, either; they're just going through the motions.  

 Here we see why the joy and wonder of the world as presented to us clashes with our inner feelings. There's a "gulf" - and it's a wide one - that has apparently begun now to manifest itself more clearly:

The gulf between what we're told is joyful and wondrously promising and our lived experience is now so wide that the cracks are showing. 

To be clear, the feelings we have are instigated by a belief, which Mr. Smith attempts to explain based on facts, or, reality. What has been and continues to be presented to us is not reality, indeed a fantasy. This can not only "derange" our personal thoughts and feelings, but now has ascended to the level of our society, or civilization, as a whole.

And the constant "feed" has force fed us into functioning according to a way of seeing the world that is, well, not the real world.

The next paragraph incorporates that way of functioning, one based on imbibing "metrics" (e.g., statistics that purport to indicate a healthy job market, mild inflation, a humming economy, healthy, rational financial markets, etc. We fall into the trap of living our lives as "economic" men and women, striving for goods and utilizing services we don't really "need," convinced that we want them, rather than whole persons who have healthy mental, emotional, and spiritual lives. 

Rather than live a full, rich life of the soul, we instead focus on "takin' care of business." (see below) 

Well, this takes us into another facet of that "unreality" that we don't have time to expand upon today. Rather, let's conclude with Mr. Hughes words or wisdom:

The cornucopian fantasy of AI generating super-abundance is the joyless pantomime taken to the highest level of civilizational psychosis. The more we strive to optimize ourselves and everything around us, the more we rely on metrics as guides to "living our best lives," the more we strive to work harder and work smarter in the hopes that more stuff and more transactions will finally become fulfilling, the farther we drift from ourselves and our own experience.  

 Source: Charles Hugh Smith - Source: https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-joyless-pantomime-of-optimizing.html 

Off to what we hope will be restful, fulfilling weekend! 

Now here's one band's vision of "takin' care of business" from the 1970's - a personal favorite.