WHAT IS REALITY?

So recently on twitter, I happened to have come across a bunch of videos. At first, these videos were essentially fun considering the level of creativity that had gone into them and I got exhilarated as I watched this particular thread. It was heavenly. If you have been on the internet lately, then you definitely might have come across them. Time for the unveil, drum rolls please…….. CAKE videos😂.

At first they were awesome, but the more cake videos streamed in, something started to change and I could definitely feel it, now they were not amazing, they were just.. you know, cake videos, to mean, they were “FINE” if you truly know what that means and then now they just started to creep me out.

https://twitter.com/Uncle_savage00/status/1283304682895618048?s=20

Let me try and describe these videos as best as I can. Some bakery had a fun idea to turn everything into cake, that about sums it up. Like making a cake that looks exactly like an iPhone, or headphones. You would go try to put on your shoes and then boom!! its cake, or go pick up a coffee mug , but guess what!!It’s cake😑.Now this really started to freak me out and thus heightened my trust issues and for the first few days every time I see something on social media , I start to immediately doubt if its true or whether its just another cake. In fact the one that really got to me was this particular one , where I see a super healthy looking steak, Holy cow, the steak was juicy and voluptuous for lack of a better word and then comes the surprise, guess what? It is a freaking cake!!!!!! Ouch! that has got to be very annoying.

https://twitter.com/2icyy/status/1283128703766212608?s=20

This then triggered something deep within my brain tissue. What is real and what is not? How can I tell what is real and what is not? Do I even understand the concept of reality? Am I even real? Okay , what is going on right now?

Okay, I think I blacked out for a second there. Now I am on a quest to answer one fundamental question. WHAT IS REALITY?

Now if there is one thing I have learnt to trust in my entire pathetic life, it is that there no such thing as an absolute anything. Absolute is just a word that was invented by people seeking to bend things to their will because they were not smart enough to understand what was going on in the first place.Let us take for example, the speed of the earth. Take for example, a group of scientists at some point came together and did the math and finally decided conventionally decided that the earth revolves around the sun at a speed of 30 kilometres per second

Now for the record, I do not dispute this, I am just saying that there are a lot of variables in play , so much that people do not understand, so instead of incorporating these complex enough variables, human beings choose to clear out the noise and focus on a specific idea or goal that they intend to achieve.

For example, I would love to extract a page from a new series that I came across named Devs. In this show, a billionaire loses his wife and daughter to a car crash. He cannot help but blame himself for what happened and therefore he builds an entire company and hires the smartest people on the planet to help in his secret and classified project. He aims to simulate the universe using code and a super powerful quantum computer. This will therefore entirely enable them to see both the past, present and the future because he wants to see his daughter Amaya. but there is one problem though, the entire algorithm is aimed at using fragment data from this universe to recreate this event but in truth, we do not live in a single universe but rather a multiverse. When he finally accepts this, everything is simulated perfectly.

What this teaches me is simple, just because we do not understand something yet, shouldn’t be an excuse to dismiss that it exists. And that my readers is what human beings have perfected. Now I will apply this theory to my own quest to find out what reality is.

Now if you search for the meaning of reality in philosophy? it is described as the totality of a system both known and unknown which can be interpreted as the state of things as they actually exist as opposed to an idealistic idea of them. Now this description is perfect.

But what if I told you that man has evolved and that reality has ceased to be one uniform concept and instead has taken my earlier idea. Reality has become relative as opposed to one single idea that is acceptable.

You do remember me saying earlier that nothing exists absolutely, right? Yes this is same for reality. Now as right as the philosophical definition for reality sounds , sadly that cannot be the case because there exists a million variables that are unaccounted for, too many gray areas.

Let me walk you through a few of these variables that make reality relative instead of absolute. The simple fact that earth exists among nine other planets in a solar system that exists among other systems within the milky way galaxy that is just but an infinitesimal part of the massive universe is already proof enough that reality cannot be absolute.

Let us take it closer to home. The once uniform pangea underwent tectonic shifts to create the new world as we know it, the continents. Different people say a different number of continents but we are not here to argue about that, are we?

Africa by virtue of being the last to get industrialized is already true definition of a different reality from the European dickheads who came to colonize it in the first place.

The African reality before the Invasion by Europe was simple. Probably wake up, men go hunting, women build the community housing and take care of kids, peacefully dance around a fire, make love and bear a great many children. That was their reality because that was all they had ever known.What colonization did to native Africa was to integrate a new reality into the existing one which from all I have learnt is next to impossible.

In order to change their reality, they had to stay long enough not to convince the existing folks but rather, the posterity, the people born after the Invasion were definitely more likely to accept this concept because they were born into a new reality, the one where the White man was in control and all they said and did was the law.Therefore , two different generations with two different realities, I hope you see where I am going with this.

Let us bring this closer to home. For a country as young and as small as Kenya, there exists a rather enormous derivative of these reality points, for the record, that is what I call it.The reality is that the grandchildren of the Late Moi, Mzee Mwai Kibaki and President Uhuru Kenyatta have a different reality from someone like me, the son of a peasant.They attend prestigious schools where they get to choose to learn different languages , different forms of art, like the piano, they are driven to school, they get to attend school trips abroad and they do not worry about half of the things I have to worry about, instead they worry about things like who they will take to the dance, what dress they will wear to the annual end of the year party.That is their reality.

For the children of peasants and struggling middle class and low income wage workers, they have to worry if the parents will pay school fee on time for them to write their exam, or where they will get money to get a new suit for job interviews or whether the landlord will add rent money.They have to actively think about where food will come from next. And sadly, this is the reality for minimum wage income workers in Kenya for a long time.And as the economy continues to take a hit, it gets worse for the middle and low income workers but gets better for the rich. I hope by now I am starting to convince you that reality may actually be a scam.

We all know about The United States of America. America is a country built on the blood and sweat of slaves. Lately there has been protests all across America about the killing of an innocent black man ,George Floyd.Now this is just but many of the incidents that have been going on in the country. Reality is different for a black folk when he faces the police than a white person.

A typical black person arrest sounds like a tactical nuke even for innocent black civilian let alone those involved in petty crimes like pick pocketing. That is the reality for the black folks in America and they have to live with it.Images most certainly surfaced showing cops arresting a white man who was guilty of murder of twelve people versus arresting George Floyd who was suspected of forging receipts. The white guy is handled with care , given drinking water while George Floyd ends up dead. And that my readers is the reality of black folks and white folks in America.

So let’s define reality again. “Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them”.

Now this statement is right because things exist differently for different people.On the other hand, it is wrong because reality as we have discussed is also what people see it as.

My conclusion therefore is , the entire concept of reality is flawed.Therefore this entire discussion about reality is all a moot point.

I might even stop this article by saying ,that there is no such thing as reality!