There have been many times when I felt that an idea or an emotion is something that only really in fiction and irl people just play along like they feel it or it exists because of social convention.
Ah... That old chestnut.
Subjective reality. What is "true"? For example, I'm a cloud of spite and eyes.
Am I?
Let's say everyone said I wasn't. Everyone looked at me and saw I was a normal human. Everyone else believed I was a normal human. Nothing I did could prove to them otherwise. I'd be labeled "insane", would I not?
But let's reverse that.
If everyone thought I was a cloud of spite and eyes and I really was a human, and nothing I did could prove otherwise, everyone would still think I was insane.
Sanity, for the most part, is a subjective thing. It is something that can only exist as part of a society. Any intelligent entity alone with no one else to communicate with "goes insane", because they have no society to be a part of. You drift away from EVERYONE and EVERYTHING. You become unmoored, adrift in a sea of madness, because you have no point of reference.
Society. Connections. Relationships. Communication.
Most concepts are a social construct, but that doesn't make the concepts any less "real". Love exists. Love is real. Love is many things and is quite wonderful. Love for a human is elevated levels of oxytocin. "Being in love is just chemicals in your brain! It's not real!"
Bullshit.
So under what conditions would you define "love" as "real"?
The problem is with people who learn that "Love" and everything involved with it can be detected and quantified by measuring your brain's hormone levels. They claim that just because you understand the process it isn't "real". So if you were a program living in a Simulation, would it be "real" then?
You know, if God was a man on an infinitely long beach, and he had an infinite number of pebbles, he could line up the pebbles on the beach. Then, in his head, he would work out a very complicated mathematical formula to simulate all of reality in binary code. Then, he could walk down the beach. As he did, he could move each rock to the left or to the right to represent ones and zeros, and in the process, it would be the binary code that represents all of reality. Each time he walks from one end of the beach to the other, one single Planck moment passes. He then walks back to the start of the line of pebbles and continues the next calculation for the next click of the cosmic clock.
Inside the equation, we wouldn't know what was really going on. We'd think reality was "real" when all we would be was pebbles on a beach, and one OCD god with an insane amount of time on his hands. If this is the case would "love" be real?
People who worry about this shit are complaining about the OPERATING SYSTEM.
Love could be something that originates in your "soul". Love could be just the release of oxytocin that elevates your dopamine levels thus causing you to pair bond. Love could just be the result of electricity flowing through microchips in a supercomputer run by hyper-advanced aliens who are simulating an entire universe for shits and giggles. Love could be nothing more than a few trillion pebbles on a beach.
Just... operating systems.
Love is real.
Understanding the HOW and WHY and the mechanisms behind something just takes away the mystery, it doesn't make it any less than it was. This is the problem I think you might be having. You feel like X isn't "real" and people are just "playing along" because you know the way the world works. Feelings are just chemicals, after all.
YES. YOU ARE BIOLOGICAL. Of COURSE, your operating system works on fuckin' chemicals! How STUPID is it to dismiss something just because it doesn't use an operating system you like. YES, it'd be great if feelings, emotions, thoughts, memes, and all that metaphysical crap existed in a platonic realm of the ideal and that love was a form of MAGIC.
Hate to make the universe a little smaller for you, but science is just magic we understand. Understanding something just takes the "wonder" away.
This is why you feel people are just "playing along". You think it's not "real" because you understand the operating system and... it's kinda ugly. Love isn't this magical force that lets the prince wake up sleeping beauty with a kiss. Love isn't what allows the mother to find superhuman strength and lift a car to save her child. It's two glands sitting on top of your kidneys that dump a whole lot of "
BURN ALL AVAILABLE FUEL AND IGNORE DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS" hormone into your pressurized circulatory system.
But we call that "love" because it is Love.
It's a chemical reaction AND a feeling AND a social construct. The trap is when you try to pin it down and think it can only be ONE of these things. Love is a word. It's four letters in English. It can be a heart-shaped emoji. It's a concept. It means many things and includes many things and excludes things depending on other things or even which thing is feeling the thing.
And I'm just using love as an example. You could apply this to any emotion or concept. It all comes down to the society you live in, and the connections you have. The universe is an amazing place. We've figured it out from the smallest quark all the way up to the great Galactic Walls made up of GALAXIES.
Imagine that. There is a WALL where GALAXIES are the "bricks".
It's easy to get lost in the weeds. To try and find a way to process all this. To try to figure out what is "real". Are people just going through the motions? Is anything in society "true"?
DUH.
The hard part isn't figuring out what's "Real". The hard part is figuring out what is FAKE.
Love is real, but is an individual's love for YOU "real"? Now that's a hard question to answer.
The most vivid example would be romantic attraction and friendship. When I was a kid I thought that everybody pretended those existed and I had to play along with them. Frankly, to this day I don't really get it but I am more or less certain these exist.
I'm sorry you don't "get it". However, maybe you do. I think that you are worried about "the operating system". I used to be the same way. I think you're really smart. I mean intelligent. I'm not complimenting you. I'm just saying that this sort of existential crisis usually happens to smart people.
My wife is very smart. Maybe smarter than me. Certainly has more wisdom than me. However, I can't help but remember the time that we went to Niagra Falls and we were stuck in traffic. We were almost there. She couldn't see the Falls because there was a park blocking our view. She kept trying to get a look and cried out in frustration.
"HOW THE HELL CAN I ENJOY THE BEAUTY OF MOTHER NATURE WITH ALL THESE FUCKIN' TREES IN THE WAY???"
(My wife is Wiccan, BTW.)
Am... Am I getting my point across?
The most recent revelation of what I imagined people acted like existed but really didn't but it ended up existing (yes, my english is amazing, how could you tell?) was the feeling of responsibility for one's work. All my life I lived and did tasks without this feeling and thought it was just flavour text and then I stopped for a moment to think about it and realised that it probably actually exists.
I get ya. Felt exactly the same way, once upon a time. Trust me. It actually exists. It's all real. Your concern is with the HOW it exists, not THAT it exists.
Everyone enjoys sausage, right up until they learn how sausage gets made.
A mind-blowing revelation, I know.
Ah, but it is. A similar example:
Familiar with the Ship of Theseus? The broken broom proverb? It's the same concept.
Take an old broom. You sweep with it, the straw falls out. You replace the straw. You sweep, more falls out, the binding breaks this time, so you replace it. You sweep a bit more, you trip, you break the handle. You just replaced the binding and the straw, so you take that off, get a new handle, and put the straw and binding on it. So...
At what point does it stop being your broom and it becomes a new one?
What's this got to do with me?
I mentioned in the past I got beaten into a coma. I have progressive memory loss. Mostly to the explicit memory part of the brain. I can retain implicit memories, but by definition, those aren't "Real". You CREATE implicit memories. Explicit memories are all "Live recordings."
Explicit memories are what make you... you. It's an out-of-control enzyme. Everyone has it. It's supposed to shut off at age 25. It's the enzyme that "prunes" away your childhood memories. Think of it as a woodsman who trims away the underbrush so the mighty sequoias of your personality can grow.
Your feelings, emotions, your preferences, all that is shaped by your explicit memories.
So one day I forgot what flavor of ice cream I like.
The original memory, gone. Deleted. My "woodsman" won't stop "pruning". I have forgotten most of my childhood. Oh, I remember STORIES about my childhood, but I don't remember the original event. I don't remember my mother. What she looks like, sounds like, anything about her. I remember being in the hospital room the day before she slipped into the coma and died. I can tell you all about the room, the window, the layout, but when I mentally turn my "mind's eye" to her, I can't see her.
So I tried to bring her back.
I went through every old photo album. I looked up old videos. I did everything I could to revive the missing memories.
The memories are not forgotten, or suppressed, or hidden. The Enzyme DELETES. It is 404. File not FOUND. So when I tried to bring her back, what I succeeded in making was a chimera of images of my mother. When I try to remember her, I see her in black and white, old yellowing, old, young, grey hair, black hair, short hair, bald from the chemo, grey hair. It all is MASHED together in a horrific shifting blob.
Just typing about it is rather nauseating.
Well, at the time, I kinda panicked. I could tell my personality was slipping away. Your emotions and preferences are shaped by your explicit memories. Well, I can feel things, but all those "preferences" were being replaced by white noise. Image your emotions as a painter's palette. My emotional palette was being replaced with White.
I started to keep a diary. I started to review it every day to FORCE myself to remember everything I was losing. (this started when I was 30, btw) And then... one day...
I forgot the day I learned I was suffering from progressive memory loss.
On that day, all my fear of losing my personality disappeared. I also learned that I am no longer afraid of dogs, heights, or pie. Oh, I can still feel fear, I just forgot all my phobias. I have become a very bland person, emotionally. Because I really can hold about six months of personal history now.
I am a living Ship of Theseus
Every aspect of my personality has been deleted and replaced multiple times now. The person I am at 50 is nothing like I was when I was 20. Hell, I'm not the same person from two years ago, although the more radical shifts are basically over. I'm just... nothing. Some very strong emotions have continued through. The love of my wife has endured, but unsure what will happen when she dies, and she will die long before I do. Chances are I'll live to see a hundred. She's unlikely to live to see 60.
I don't miss my mom. Because nothing of her remains in my head. I met my father at the family reunion last summer. I had forgotten what he looked like.
But to return to the example of the Broom.
For the longest time, I obsessed about that damn broom. When did it stop being the original broom? When did it stop being mine?
I remember asking a guy I worked with that question and you know what he said?
It stopped being yours when you no longer used it to sweep.
I was always worried, when do I stop being "me"? Personality-wise, there aren't any of the original "parts" of me left. Am I "real", or just a copy of a copy of a copy of the original?
But that's not the right question.
The right question is: At what point did I stop sweeping?
So the answer is, I'm still sweeping.
Anyway, this ever happened to you? Do you ever feel lile everybody's just playing along?
Friend, I live this, every single moment, of every single day.
I used to think I was just "playing along". I was just the latest "copy". I meet people who I have completely forgotten, even though we worked together for years and I have to bluff through the conversation trying to figure out who they are, when we met, and how I should "feel" about them because they CLEARLY remember me, but it's been two months and that might as well have been two centuries.
But that's okay because I'm still sweeping.
Stop being so fixated on all this existential bullshit. Trust me. Take it from someone who knows...
IT DOESN'T MATTER.
Make the world a better place than you found it.
Try and find someone who loves you. Encourage that person to find someone who loves them. With any luck, that will be you.
The ends never justify the means, because there is no end. People who claim this are just taking an arbitrary snapshot of the world and assuming that they can use that moment to "balance the books". It doesn't work that way. YOLO means you only live once, so don't fuck it up. Instant gratification is fleeting, but stupidity has a half-life of three trillion years.
This world is great. I mean it. You have no idea how great this world is. Even with all the problems and nightmares and governments fuckin' everything up, there is no better time to be alive. If you were to objectively step back from your life and somehow turn the whole thing into an equation, I have no doubt your life would be a net positive. Trust me. I can make the world "fair" with one statement.
You had it coming.
Don't obsess about making the world "fair" because people who claim that either will wind up dragging themselves down, or use it as an excuse to drag someone else down and steal their shit. Stop trying to make the world fair and cheat like a bastard. Make the world unfair by making things better for everyone around you, even the ones who don't deserve it. Nobody deserves anything, so just create order out of chaos and karma can go fuck itself. Nobody lives happily ever after, because that assumes the story ends. There is no end to this story called life. The only thing that you need to worry about is how long you get to play a part and what you leave behind. Just live happily until your part is over.
Then fight like hell to be happy, just a little more.
And never stop sweeping.
I wasn't quite sure. 
