
Truth. That elusive bastard we’ve been chasing since we got out of the cave, looked up at the stars and thought, what the hell is all this?
It’s the prize that always dances just beyond your grasp, like some sick joke.
You claw for it, bleed for it, scribble miserable poetry about it in the dead of night, and still, it just laughs in your face.
Truth ain’t some pure, untouchable idea waiting for you to figure her out. No. Truth is that scruffy, chain-smoking drunk in the back of a dive bar, reeking of cheap whiskey, giving you a look that says, You don’t know nothing about nothing, and you never will.
We like to think truth is out there—clean, absolute, objective. But let’s get real. Truth doesn’t give a damn about us.
It’s buried deep in our skulls, cobbled together from secondhand sensory scraps, biases, and wishful thinking.
As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
He was talking about love, but hell, it applies to everything, especially truth.

The Neuroscience of Lies We Tell Ourselves
You see, all knowledge comes through the senses. Aristotle said it thousands of years ago, and today’s neuroscientists nod along like they just came up with it.
The brain? It’s a hermit, locked in a dark, silent room, never stepping outside. It relies entirely on signals from the eyes, ears, nose, and skin to piece together a picture of the world.
But here’s the kicker: the picture is a forgery.
Imagine you’re reading The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald paints you a lush world of green lights, champagne-soaked parties, and empty dreams.
But do you really know Gatsby?
Or are you just projecting your own images onto his shiny suits and tragic ambitions? Same with the world—it’s a novel we’re all reading, each with our own biased interpretation.
Take a moment to think about it.
You’re sitting in a room right now, reading this, but how do you know it’s really there? I don’t mean in some existential, “Is this all a dream?” kind of way—although, yeah, that’s a rabbit hole we could dive into.
No, I mean, how do you know you’re really seeing the same thing I am? You could be looking at the same object, but the color you’re seeing might not be the same as the color I’m seeing.
And don’t even get me started on how we all hear things differently. One person thinks a joke is funny, another thinks it’s just a bad pun. Reality, as we know it, is a subjective mess—one big illusion we’re all desperately trying to agree on.
And I don’t even have to get all highfalutin on you to prove this.
Think about the last time you went to a movie. You watched the same scenes as everyone else, right? But did you experience the same movie? Nah.
I remember going to see The Dark Knight back in 2008. The whole theater was buzzing when the Joker made his entrance, but there was one guy a few rows ahead who kept turning to his buddy, shaking his head, and muttering, “This isn’t what Batman’s supposed to be.”
What the hell, man? We’re all watching the same damn thing, but his brain couldn’t process it the same way. He had this version of Batman built up in his head, one with less psychotic clowns and more righteous crime-fighting.
And here’s the kicker: I wasn’t wrong, and neither was he. We were both just projecting our own mental models onto the screen, each getting a slightly different version of the same thing.
When I was younger, around 25 or so, I had this friend—let’s call him Pete. Pete was the kind of guy who’d talk about philosophy like he’d discovered it on his own.
We’d sit at dive bars, getting drunk off cheap whiskey, and he’d hold forth about how the world was all an illusion, how reality was just a dream we couldn’t wake up from.
We all laughed it off. Until one night, Pete had this big epiphany. He was looking at the flickering neon sign outside the bar, and I swear, the guy stared at it for a good 10 minutes, looking like he’d just seen the light of God.
“Man,” he said, taking a drag from his cigarette, “you ever think that the neon sign isn’t really the sign?
That the light is just… our perception of it? What if the sign’s not even there—what if it’s just some random bunch of lights and our brains just slap some meaning on it, make it fit into the world we understand?”
I stared at him, and for the first time, I realized: the guy wasn’t wrong. He was just ahead of his time—or way too deep into his whiskey and philosophy. Either way, we were both seeing the world in different ways, projecting our own baggage onto it. Hell, maybe the sign was just a sign, but for Pete, it was an existential crisis waiting to happen.
Look, this is all basic neuroscience. We know that the brain doesn’t directly perceive reality; it just makes up its own version.
It’s like watching a movie on a scratched-up DVD—some details get lost, others get distorted, and what’s left is the version of reality you can stomach without going insane.
And sometimes, the movie’s a comedy, sometimes it’s a tragedy, and sometimes it’s just weirdness that leaves you wondering what the hell you’re supposed to make of it.
But there’s no denying it: the world you think you know is as fake as a Hollywood set.
You think you’re seeing the truth, but you’re really just watching the brain’s director’s cut.
The sooner we admit it, the easier it gets to stop pretending that we know what the hell is going on.

Literature’s Warped Mirrors
Great literature loves to toy with this idea. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the narrator says, “I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
That’s the underground man for you: bitter, self-aware, and painfully honest about the chaos of perception. He knows the truth is a rigged game, but he plays it anyway, sipping his tea while the world crumbles.
Or take Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The old knight tilts at windmills, convinced they’re giants. Is he mad? Sure. But aren’t we all, in our own way?
We’re all Quixotes, seeing monsters where there are only shadows, crafting our truths from the scraps of our delusions.
Still not getting!? Let’s fix this.
“Imagine everyone’s wearing a pair of glasses, but each pair is tinted a different color. You’ve got red, I’ve got blue, that guy over there has green. Now, we’re all looking at a white wall. You see pink. I see purple. The other guy sees puke green. Who’s right?”
“No one?”
“Exactly. But here’s the twist. The wall’s still white, right? It exists. We just can’t see it as it really is. That’s perception. Now, truth?
Truth’s like trying to agree on what color the wall is despite the glasses. It’s messy. And most of the time, we just end up arguing about who’s less blind.”

What If The Universe is Just Another Magician
What if the world’s a magician, and we’re the suckers in the audience, clutching our tickets and craning our necks.
You ever watch a good trick? The kind that makes you swear reality just bent over backward?
The magician knows you’re not in on it. They’ve got the whole thing wired—sleight of hand, smoke, mirrors, a wink you’ll never catch.
That ace up their sleeve? Invisible. The rabbit in the hat? Never existed. You’re not seeing the trick; you’re seeing the lie they sold you.
Now, take that same trick and stretch it over your entire life. Every sunrise, every touch, every stupid little laugh—it’s all part of the setup.
You think you’re seeing the world, but what if it’s just the magician’s razzle-dazzle? What if you’re too blind, too distracted by the glitter, to notice the gears turning beneath?
The stars twinkle, the grass sways, and we clap like fools, never questioning if the magician’s just flipping a switch backstage.
But here’s the crazy part: even if you could pull back the curtain, would you really want to?
Sure, you’d see the wires, the pulleys, the sweat dripping off the magician’s brow. You’d get the “truth,” but it wouldn’t feel like magic anymore.
It’d just be a guy in a cheap tuxedo, grinding out tricks to pay the rent. Maybe that’s why the universe keeps its secrets. Not for itself, but for you.
It knows that once you see the trick, the magic’s dead. And without the magic? What’s left?
Just some empty stage, a rabbitless hat, and you, wondering why the hell you asked.
Voices Against Subjectivity
Not everyone buys this circus of subjectivity. Rationalists like Descartes believe there’s a truth out there, independent of perception. “Cogito, ergo sum,” he said—I think, therefore I am.
But Descartes never explained how thinking proves the color of the wall.
Then there are the religious folks. They all claim to hold the absolute truth. But try asking two priests from different faiths about the same moral question. You’ll get three answers and a debate that lasts until Judgment Day.
And let’s not forget the scientists. They’ll tell you truth is measurable, observable, repeatable. But what happens when the instruments we use are tainted by our flawed senses?
Even data can lie if the observer doesn’t see straight.
Table 1: Perspectives on Truth
Philosophical Camp | Belief About Truth | Criticism |
---|---|---|
Pragmatism | Truth is what works or has practical value. | Reduces truth to utility, ignoring deeper meaning. |
Rationalism | Truth exists independently of perception. | Relies on abstract reasoning, not lived experience. |
Empiricism | Truth is based on measurable phenomena. | Assumes flawed perceptions can still yield truth. |
The Dark Mirror
Nietzsche nailed it when he said, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” If we can’t even agree on the color of a wall, what hope do we have for deeper truths—about love, justice, or the meaning of life?
But here’s where the light creeps in, faint but undeniable.
Camus, the master of absurdity, told us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Pushing that boulder up the hill, knowing it’ll roll down again—there’s a strange kind of triumph in that. We may never find the truth, but we can choose how we live with the search.
Table 2: The Hope in Choice
Philosopher | Key Idea | Takeaway |
---|---|---|
Nietzsche | Truth is subjective and fluid. | Embrace the chaos and find your own meaning. |
Camus | Life is absurd, but we can rebel against it. | Find joy in the struggle, even if the goal is unattainable. |
Sartre | We are free to choose our truths. | Your choices shape your reality. |

You still here?
And so, we stumble forward, fumbling for meaning in a universe that doesn’t care. Kafka’s characters would understand—they bumbled through meaningless bureaucracies, chasing answers they never found. Yet they kept moving, kept searching.
Maybe that’s all we can do. Truth isn’t always something we find; it’s something we make, a raft we build from the flotsam of perception and delusion.
The ocean’s dark, and the horizon’s a lie, but the choice is ours: sink into despair or paddle like hell toward whatever light we can imagine.
Your move.
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