Everything is made up

Before anyone starts preparing their simulation theory PowerPoint, that's not actually where I'm going with this. I can't prove we're not living in a simulation. I can't prove that this isn't all happening inside the imagination of some enormous cosmic octopus either, so I'm probably going to leave the actual nature of reality alone for today.

Not that I'd discount any theory related to that  anyway.

I'm talking about the human bit.

Because when you really start looking at how we live, an enormous amount of it only exists because at some point, somebody made it up and enough of us agreed to go along with it.

Money is probably the most obvious example.

We've collectively agreed that pieces of paper, bits of metal and, increasingly, numbers displayed on a screen have value. I can move some numbers from my banking app to somebody else's banking app and they will give me a sofa. Or electricity. Or food. Or several glasses of wine and a questionable decision.

The numbers themselves aren't the value. The agreement is.

And I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing (although personally, i dont like it, it feels unnatural). It's actually quite extraordinary when you think about it. Millions of people who have never met each other can participate in the same imaginary system because we've collectively agreed upon what it means.

But once I'd started thinking about that, obviously my brain wasn't going to leave it there.

Because what else have we made up?

Time, for one.

Not the movement of the planets or the rising and setting of the sun. Those things are happening whether we're here to name them or not. But Tuesday?

Somebody made Tuesday up.

There is nothing occurring in nature that announces that it is currently 3:15pm on a Tuesday. Someone decided how to divide a day, gave those divisions numbers, grouped the days together, named them and then somehow created an entire society in which you can get in trouble because you arrived somewhere seven minutes later than the number everybody had agreed upon.

Which, when you remove yourself from it for approximately thirty seconds, is hilarious.

Useful. Obviously.

But hilarious.

Then there are countries.

The land exists. The rivers exist. The mountains exist. We drew lines around bits of it, gave those bits names and collectively decided that crossing some of those invisible lines requires paperwork.

Again, I'm not making an argument against countries. I'm just noticing how much of the world we experience every day consists of things humans created and then became so accustomed to that we stopped seeing the invention.

Language itself is made up.

Somewhere along the enormous evolutionary journey of humans making noises at each other, we collectively decided that particular sounds represented particular things.

Tree.

Why tree?

There's nothing inherently tree about a tree.

Somebody speaking another language can look at exactly the same object and use a completely different collection of sounds, and somehow both of us are correct.

Yet those completely invented sounds can make somebody fall in love. They can end relationships. They can start wars. They can repair friendships. They can make someone laugh, change someone's mind or alter the way a person sees themselves for the rest of their life.

So clearly, made up doesn't mean meaningless.

And I think that's where this thought became interesting to me.

Because I don't think there's anything particularly groundbreaking about noticing that humans invented money or calendars or countries. Of course we did. We needed ways to organise ourselves.

What interests me is how quickly something can move from something humans created to this is simply how reality works.

We invent the structure and then eventually forget there was ever a time before the structure existed.

Marriage.

Qualifications.

Job titles.

The working week.

Retirement.

Professionalism.

Fashion.

Status.

Manners.

Property.

Success.

The correct age to have achieved something.

The correct order in which a life should happen.

Go to school. Get qualifications. Get a job. Meet someone. Get married. Buy a house. Have children. Progress in your career. Retire.

Obviously that particular sequence has already been dismantled considerably, but it still sits underneath a lot of the ways we measure ourselves.

We even invented the idea of being "behind".

Behind what?

Who are we racing?

Where's the finish line?

Who has the clipboard?

Because there must be somebody keeping track if I'm apparently supposed to have reached certain checkpoints by now.

And I think this connects to something I've been thinking about recently with relationship and family labels too.

We create a word for something because it's useful. Mum. Dad. Partner. Wife. Husband. Friend. Daughter.

Then somehow the word begins collecting expectations.

A mum should behave like this.

A partner should do this.

A successful person looks like this.

A professional person behaves like this.

A woman of a certain age shouldn't do that.

And eventually we're no longer just using language to describe things. We're using the things we've invented to tell people how they're supposed to exist.

Which brings me back to a question I've apparently become quite fond of lately.

Who decided?

Genuinely.

Who decided?

When did we decide it?

Why did we decide it?

What problem was it solving at the time?

And perhaps most importantly, does it still make sense now?

Because some of the things we've made up are incredibly useful.

I'm personally quite happy for us all to continue believing in traffic lights. I don't particularly want Gary in his Transit deciding that stopping at red no longer resonates with his authentic self while I'm halfway across the road.

Shared agreements are necessary.

We have to make things up.

That's basically how civilisation works.

But I wonder if there's a difference between the things we consciously agree to because they help millions of people live alongside one another and the things we continue doing simply because they've been repeated for so long that nobody thinks to ask why.

"That's just how it's done."

Is it?

Why?

And does it get slightly uncomfortable when we make it personal? Because it's much easier to notice the made-up things out there than the ones we've made up about ourselves.

I'm the responsible one.

I'm not creative.

I'm terrible with money.

I'm too old to do that.

I'm too much.

I'm not the kind of person who could do that.

I should be further ahead by now.

I'm successful because I have this.

I'm unsuccessful because I don't have that.

Where did those come from?

Are they actually facts?

Or are they stories we've repeated so many times that they eventually stopped sounding like stories?

And even stranger, how many of them did we not make up ourselves at all?

Maybe somebody told us who we were when we were eight years old and we've been diligently maintaining their version ever since.

Have we experienced something once and created a rule from it?

Maybe somebody else's fear became our limitation.

Absorbed expectation from our family, our culture, our school, our relationships or the world around us that we never realised we'd accept.

That's the bit I can't stop thinking about and if you've followed me for long enough, you'll know that's what I call 'human conditioning', and thats what I've been actively trying to reclaim for myself. The feeling before I learnt who to become.

Because once you realise how much of human life is constructed from shared stories, definitions, agreements and expectations, it doesn't make everything feel pointless.

For me, it almost does the opposite.

It makes meaning itself much more interesting.

A wedding ring is just metal until we decide what it represents.

Money is just material and numbers until we agree upon its value.

A word is just a sound until we attach meaning to it.

A birthday is another rotation of the Earth around the sun until we decide it's worth celebrating.

Humans make things matter.

We are meaning-making creatures.

And perhaps that's why it's worth occasionally looking at the things we've given meaning to and asking whether we still want to.

We probably don't need to reject every social structure, abandon calendars and start roaming around the countryside refusing to acknowledge Wednesday.

Although Wednesday has always seemed suspicious.

Just because maybe some of the things we experience as fixed aren't actually fixed at all.

Maybe they're agreements.

Maybe they're inherited stories.

Maybe they're definitions somebody else wrote.

And if that's true, perhaps we're allowed to question them.

We're allowed to keep the ones that work.

We're allowed to change the ones that don't.

And when it comes to the things we've made up about ourselves, perhaps we're even allowed to make something else up instead.

Because if we're going to spend our lives inside stories anyway, it seems worth noticing who's holding the pen.

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