A few years ago, the tech bros couldn’t stop chattering about the possibility? certainty? hogwash? that we were living in a simulated reality. You still hear about it and you can find snippets all over Youtube if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
They all had their arguments honed clearly enough to pretend expertise. Theories about technology, consciousness, advanced future versions of us, and the varying probabilities that what we call reality might not be as “real” as we thought.
Something landed in me as I entertained the idea. To me, the general theory that we were living in a simulation was almost beside the point. If we were living in a simulation convincing enough to feel like ordinary life, then knowing it wouldn’t immediately change the fact that I still needed to make breakfast, answer emails, and move through the day with a body that insists on being fed, rested, and occasionally taken seriously.
What interested me was what happened inside me when I viewed life through the prism of that idea. Not believed it. Not adopted it. Not built a new cosmology around it. Just…entertained it.
I began to imagine reality as something like an extraordinarily advanced video game. I’m not a gamer, so this may be a wildly inaccurate metaphor, but in my imagination, there were levels, rules, avatars, hidden permissions, and inherited programming. These systems seemed permanent only because the characters inside the game had never questioned them, or, even if they had, still treated them as the underlying rules of the game.
I started wondering, What if some of the rules I had been living by weren’t reality at all?
What if they were simply part of a program I was trained on?
Almost immediately, I started feeling the inherited moral structure I had absorbed growing up begin to fall away. For me, that structure was primarily religious, though it was also social, cultural, and familial. It wasn’t just a set of beliefs I’d consciously held—I’d spent years questioning those. It made up the structures that lived deeper than that, shaping my neurons and nervous system as a filter that categorized what was good, bad, right, wrong, possible, dangerous, selfish, holy, shameful, allowed.
I’d spent years trying to dismantle those structures intellectually, questioning, analyzing, arguing with them, feeling I’d outgrown them and even rewritten them to something more empowering. But inherited reality doesn’t politely leave because the mind has filed a change request.
The stories that structure our personal and collective reality live beneath thought. They live in the flinch before the sentence. In the guilt that appears before we know what we supposedly did wrong. In the reflexive sense that someone else’s authority must know better than our own inner compass. In the suspicion that freedom will be punished. In the old idea that goodness requires obedience to an authority structure that rewards and punishes.
So when I imagined that my perceived reality might simply be part of the simulation—one belief system among many, one operating system among many, one storyline the game had handed me—I felt something inside me click. Not rebel or replace one belief with another.
Just say, “Huh, I wonder…”
From that slight distance, I could see the structure more clearly.
That is where the simulation idea became useful to me—not as doctrine, but as a thought experiment. The trap would have been to decide, “Ah, yes, we definitely live in a simulation,” and then organize myself around that belief with the same obedience I’d once given to other belief systems.
That would have felt freeing, but structurally, it would have been replacing one altar with another.
We do this all the time. We leave one authority structure—and it feels great, freeing, like we’ve woken up after binging a bottle red Matrix pills. Then we replace it with another reality construct that feels powerful at first, seems to have the answers to the “real” game, how to play it, who is winning, and how not to get it wrong.
But rewriting the stories we live by isn’t simply trading one absolute for another. The deeper invitation is to notice where we have given away our authority to a story so completely that it feels like reality itself.
A belief can be useful. A framework, a spiritual language, a cultural tradition, a psychological model, or a philosophical lens can help us make meaning. But the moment a belief becomes more real than our own direct knowing, something in us begins to organize around it. We become the one who must submit, comply, prove, defend, or be saved by the thing we have made larger than ourselves.
This can happen with nearly any system or structure: religion, politics, family systems, trauma narratives, wellness cultures, productivity myths, gender expectations, class assumptions, national stories, and even the sleek modern belief that we should all be endlessly optimizing ourselves into better personal brands with hydrated skin and inbox zero.
Any story can become a reality structure if we stop seeing it as a narrative thread that holds together one idea of reality.
That is what made the simulation thought experiment so freeing for me. I didn’t believe in it as a new view of reality to organize myself around. The idea of it loosened the grip of the invisible inherited reality I’d lived by, from a “truth” to one available narrative in a tapestry of narratives.
When I imagined my inherited moral structure as optional programming, I suddenly felt the cold chains of authority it wrapped me in. I could see the places where it had been running silently in the background, deciding what I was allowed to want, what I was allowed to trust, how much ease I was allowed to have, and what kind of life counted as legitimate.
Even after years of inner work, some part of me was still consulting a rulebook I thought I no longer believed in. That realization was humbling enough that it made me shake—and liberating.
Because once I saw the rulebook as programming, I didn’t have to keep arguing with it as though it were God. I could ask better questions.
Who installed this story in me?
Why did some part of me still believe I needed it to survive?
What would become possible if I stopped treating it as the final authority on my life?
This doesn’t mean reality is whatever we decide it is. We live in bodies, cultures, histories, economies, families, weather patterns, and group texts. We’re shaped by forces much larger than ideas and preferences.
Still, the reality we experience is shaped by what we have been taught to notice, fear, value, obey, and ignore. This doesn’t mean reality is fake as much as it is layered within us as narrative programs that need to be excavated one at a time.
For me, imagining reality as a simulation helped collapse an old authority structure that had survived my conscious rejection of it. I could stop treating those rules as sacred architecture and start seeing them as code—old code, powerful code, code that had shaped me, but not code I had to keep running unquestioned.
It fractured, but didn’t disappear entirely. It still shows up in threads: a reflex here, a hesitation there, a sudden tightening around choice, pleasure, money, visibility, desire, rest, or self-trust.
But the difference is that I no longer experience it as an authority. I can recognize it as a remnant. A pattern. A story that once claimed reality but no longer gets to govern the whole kingdom.
That is why thought experiments can be so useful. They let us approach hidden structures sideways. Instead of attacking an old belief directly—which often makes the nervous system tighten, and the mind start defending old arguments—we get to ask, lightly, “What if?”
What if many of the rules you have been living by are not eternal truths, but optional programming?
What if the shame, fear, obligation, perfectionism, scarcity, people-pleasing, or inherited moral contracts that shaped your life are not the laws of the universe?
What if they are scripts? Old scripts, perhaps. Sophisticated scripts. Scripts reinforced by family, culture, religion, school, media, and survival. But scripts nonetheless.
If you imagined reality as a simulation with interchangeable stories programming you as an avatar:
What would loosen in you?
What would you stop bowing to?
What authority would return?
The point isn’t to decide once and for all what reality is—and if your mind is already defending your entrenched belief structures, take a few deep breaths to break that mental/emotional chain. The point here is to walk more lightly with the stories that claim to define reality, of living in an orientation of “what if…?”
This is where rewriting begins: not by pretending anything is possible in a consequence-free way, and not by replacing one rigid belief with another, but by seeing the old code still running behind the scenes—and realizing that what once felt like reality may only have been a script waiting to be questioned.
BTW, I talk about my simulated reality thought experiment in this conversation with Henry L Sullivan III
Peace, Kristine
PS—Need a little escape from so-called “real” life? Check out my novel God in Drag and/or read the first chapter for free
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