The Existential Poetry of Reality's Apathy
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." — Philip K. Dick
You can't reason with reality. Reality doesn't negotiate. It doesn't care about feelings, intentions, or illusions. It just is. It doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care about what you think is fair. It doesn't care about your dreams, your morals, or your sense of justice. You can try to deny it, escape it, distort it—but in the end, reality always asserts itself. It is the inescapable law. The brute fact. The God of Gods. It is neither good nor evil; it simply exists.
People create Gods because they want reality to be fair. They want to believe that if they do the right things, life will reward them. That if they suffer, there's a purpose. That there's some force watching over them, ensuring balance. But that's a human fantasy. Reality has no fairness built into it. There's no invisible hand making sure good people win and bad people lose. No universal justice that ensures effort always pays off. No guarantee that suffering leads to growth. You can do everything "right" and still get nothing. You can be kind and still get betrayed. You can be brilliant and still be ignored. People pray because they want certainty, but reality doesn't deal in certainty. It deals in chaos, randomness, and probabilities.
People pray for a God that listens, that intervenes, that cares. But the real "God"—reality itself—is merciless. People create Gods, meaning structures, and ideologies to cope with reality's merciless indifference. But reality itself doesn't care whether you believe in it or not. If you jump off a building, reality doesn't care why you did it. If you ignore the truth about yourself, reality doesn't let you escape the consequences. If you waste time chasing things that don't matter, reality will show you, eventually, that none of it meant anything.
A person can live their life with perfect discipline, eat the healthiest diet, exercise daily, and still get a random terminal illness. Another person can smoke, drink, gamble, and die peacefully in their sleep at 90. You can love someone with your entire soul, do everything right, and they can still leave you. You can work tirelessly for years, only to see someone else with half your talent and effort surpass you in an instant due to luck or connections. You work hard not because success is promised, but because it increases your chances. You treat people well not because they will return the favour, but because it might shape better relationships. You take care of your health not because you won't get sick, but because it lowers the risk. The best you can do is stack the deck in your favour, knowing that even then, there's no certainty. You can do everything right and still lose. But doing nothing guarantees failure.
People like to think that suffering earns them something. That because they've struggled, because they've endured, because they've been wronged, life will eventually reward them. But suffering isn't a currency. There's no bank where pain deposits turn into future happiness. Reality doesn't keep a ledger. Reality doesn't care if you've already suffered. You can suffer once, you can suffer twice, you can suffer a thousand times—if reality deems that suffering is the natural consequence of your circumstances, it will happen again. There is no limit. There is no mercy. There is no invisible force balancing the scales, saying, "Alright, you've had enough." In contrast, you can do everything wrong, make every reckless choice, ignore every rule, and if the probabilities and randomness align in your favour, you win.
Reality doesn't care if you're tired, if you're broken, if you've hit rock bottom. It will push you further down if that's what circumstances dictate. It won't look at your pain and decide to cut you a break. You could lose everything, barely recover, and then lose it all again the very next day. And what will reality say? Nothing. Because it doesn't say anything. It just is. If suffering is the result of the conditions you exist in, it will keep happening. If the world around you is structured in a way that leads to suffering, it will continue. And unless you take deliberate action to change those conditions, to increase the probability of a better outcome, reality will keep crushing you. Again, and again, and again.
To stare into reality without delusion is to strip away every illusion of control, fairness, and purpose. This isn't about chasing some pre-existing meaning or pretending reality has some inherent purpose. It's about understanding that meaning is a construct—something we create, not something reality provides. Once you see the mechanistic nature of reality, you realise that nothing comes with meaning attached. There's no divine script, no cosmic justice, no grand narrative guiding events.
There's no negotiating, no pleading, no divine intervention. Reality does not care about your narrative. It doesn't care if you were on the verge of greatness, if you had a mission, if you had something "important" to do. It doesn't care. Understanding this doesn't mean you live a meaningless life. In fact, it's the opposite. The moment you realise reality is indifferent, you become the sole architect of your own meaning and gain a level of existential clarity that many do not get until they're on their death beds. The only real control you have is over probabilities. It is to understand that reality does not owe you anything—it's to play the game as efficiently as possible, to optimise the probabilities in every way you can. You can never guarantee an outcome, never force reality to align with your desires, never ensure fairness—only shift the odds in your favour. You can outwork other people, but you can't outwork reality.