Soup or Salad?

As I progress through Reality Hunger, I start to ponder about what truly is reality more and more. However, I am yet to experience any hunger while reading it. I guess I'll have to get further in the book in order to allow it to live up to the second part of its title, but who cares about my bodily functions anyways. You are here for the main dish: reality, a meal that in this post will be divided into three courses. Are you getting hungry already? Well, hungry for knowledge that it. If you are feeling the other type of hunger, go make yourself a sandwich and come back. I'm not going anywhere. That is unless your computer gets stolen.

Anyways, let's start this meal with a fragment 197 where it is stated that "Humans are hardwired to deceive... Deception is more the state of nature than not deceiving." An interesting point taking into consideration the fact that deception is one of the basic animal instincts. Whether it is the chameleon changing colors in order to blend into its surroundings or the venus flytraps sending of odors in order to attract their prey, deception is something found repeatedly in the animal kingdom. This is because it is an essential part of survival. In defense or attack, you need every advantage you can get even if it involves getting your hands, paws, whatever bugs have, or flippers dirty. Dodos couldn't fool anyone. Dodos are now extinct. Do you want to share their fate? No? Then go out there and lie to everyone. I'm glad to see that this message is starting to reach the masses via media. We must all learn from Gossip Girl or The Lying Game if I am to judge them by their title.

Moving on to the second dish, we have fragment 243 which states that "We're overwhelmed right now by calamitous information. The real overwhelms the fictional, is incomparably more compelling than an invented drama,"a statement that I agree with. I mean, I might tell you the story of Luke from Star Wars and you'll be like, "Yeah, he's Darth Vader's son (spoiler), whatever, " but if I tell you that a freaking meteorite fell in Russia, you'll be like, "Yeah! I know! It's so cool, right? Have you seen the videos?!" Ironically, there's just something mystical about the non-mystical. This is the reason behind the immediate change of tone we experience in our heads during a film when the words "based on true events" pop up. Then, we start questioning this claim, but that is a course from another meal.

For dessert, we have fragment 256: "Facts have gravitas." Now, this is a fine dessert. This means that it might be small, but it is quite dense. First of all, you might not know what the word "gravitas" means. Me neither, until I looked it up and found that it means dignity, seriousness, and gravity. We live in a world where we can't really take things seriously unless there are facts that prove its reality. This change is most evident in videos since anyone can record something for an audience which cannot settle for ambiguity and has to know whether a video is fake or real. It's like in that video where an eagle picks up a baby and people harassed the maker until he declared that the video was in fact fake. But it's not like the viewers had no reason to want to know the state of the video. Before the declaration the video was in a thin line between a funny video where an eagle is edited in in order to appear to pick up a fake baby and a horrifying video where an endangered species nearly hurt an innocent, defenseless baby. We have to know which one it is. Why? Well, we don't have anything better to do before the next hilarious cat video comes out.