Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
Steve Jobs brought this thunder to me when I first stumbled upon the video1 on YouTube. It was shocking and yet liberating at the same time when I first heard this line around 2010.
A few weeks ago, I read Sapiens, an interesting book. The author took me on a short trip of human history, covering most major events and attempting to provide a bird’s eye view of the evolution of the human kind. Each chapter can become a PhD thesis in archeology, history, economics etc, you name it. But if I can only take away one thing from this book, it’s this concept of imagined reality, echoing the thunder brought by Steve. Again, I felt terrified in the sense that whatever we have is a house of cards. At the same time, it’s also liberating, in the sense that we can definitely shape our future if the reality is merely made up.
Some say we are at the fourth turning2 of the American history. I’m afraid that’s an understatement. It’s not just America.
The entire world is at a turning point. Dickens’ the best of times, the worst of times feels almost an inadequate description of
what we shall experience in our life time.
Many of our collectively imagined realities shall collapse and be reborn. My words can’t describe the euphoria and the agony, the glory and the shame, the triump and catastrophy, that are yet to come. Let Rammstein’s Deutschland3 music video be the poetic rendering of the wildest dream of one nation. Caution: Rammstein is a heavy metal band.