For many years I spent pretty much all of my holidays walking toward Santiago de Compostela. The twelfth Camino ended a few days ago.
Walking for hours does strange things to your head. Sometimes you think, sometimes you pray, sometimes you just stare at the road. And sometimes, with ten or twenty kilometres left before the next albergue and your legs already complaining, you need something to listen to. This year, for reasons I have never fully understood, one of my favourite Camino activities became listening to podcasts about dystopian futures. Not the soundtrack you would design for a pilgrimage. I know. Every now and then, however, I listened to something else. One of those detours stayed with me: a talk by Arthur Brooks at the ARC conference in London this year, with the cheerful title Your Phone Is Destroying Your Sense of Meaning.
Brooks teaches at Harvard and builds on Iain McGilchrist’s work on the two hemispheres of the brain. Short version: the left one handles information and complicated problems, the right one deals with mystery and meaning. The phone keeps dragging us to the left, and then we are surprised to find ourselves starving for purpose, love and faith, which live on the other side. What interested me was less his argument than what it triggered while I was walking. We have replaced enormous portions of experience with representations of experience, and somewhere along the way we started confusing the two.
Think about an ordinary morning. You wake up because a device tells you to wake up. Before speaking to another human being you have already looked at a screen. Messages, emails, news chosen by an algorithm, photographs of people you know and opinions from people you have never met. Then you open the laptop and spend eight or more hours moving information around other screens. Dinner arrives through an app, the series through another app, a scroll on Instagram.. You might even go looking for love by swiping through photographs of strangers.. And we call all of this life.
Of course it is part of life. But only a part, and I keep wondering whether we have forgotten that. AI speeds the whole thing up. We can now outsource writing, thinking, imagining, advising, even company. The simulation is getting very good. Good enough to make us forget that it is a simulation.
The more I walked, the more it seemed to me that we no longer live in one world. We move between different versions of reality all day long, usually without noticing the border. I ended up giving them four names: Trueville, Falseville, Fantasyville and Zenville.
Trueville is embarrassingly simple. It is the physical world. Talking to the shopkeeper, having dinner with friends, walking without headphones, getting wet because it started raining, arguing with someone across a table, getting lost, cooking, sweating, laughing. It is falling in love with a person instead of with a profile.
Trueville has friction. People interrupt you. The weather changes. Trains are late. Bodies get tired. Conversations do not have an edit button, and nothing here can be tuned to your preferences, which is probably what makes it real. The Spanish have a word for one of its best moments, sobremesa: the time you stay at the table after the food is finished, with nowhere to be. There is no app for that. For most of human history, Trueville was simply called life. We needed a name for it only after we invented somewhere else to live.
Falseville is that somewhere else. Algorithms, feeds, notifications, dating apps, Instagram messages, LinkedIn posts, endless scrolling, and more and more AI-generated everything. Falseville is not false because everything inside it is a lie. That would be too easy. It is false because it is a representation of reality that has started to pass itself off as reality. Your Instagram feed contains real people, and it is not real life. A dating profile may describe a real person, and it is not that person. A WhatsApp conversation connects two human beings, and it is still not the same thing as sitting together. An AI can simulate empathy, creativity and intelligence well enough to move you, but simulation and experience remain two different things. What makes Falseville so strong is that almost everything in it was designed to keep you there. There is always another notification, another profile, another video, another piece of outrage, another small injection of novelty. Falseville never ends, because an ending would be terrible for engagement. We created tools to help us deal with reality, and ended up building a reality around the tools.
There is another unreal world, and I do not want to confuse it with Falseville. Fantasyville is imagination. It is where you went as a child when a cardboard box became a spaceship. It is what happens when you read a novel, look up, and thirty minutes have disappeared. Daydreaming, inventing stories, imagining a future that does not exist yet, playing with possibilities. Technically unreal, and deeply human. This is where the distinction starts to matter. Falseville hands you simulations made by somebody else. Fantasyville is made inside you. One eats attention, the other one grows it. We need Fantasyville because almost everything humans have ever created existed there first. Cathedrals, companies, symphonies, scientific theories…. All of them were once not real. Until somebody made them real.
Then the strangest of the four. If Falseville moves outward toward noise, Zenville moves inward toward silence. It is the territory you approach through contemplative prayer, meditation, certain Zen practices, and those rare moments when the commentary inside your head finally shuts up. Different traditions call it radically different things. The mystics say God. Others describe a presence that does not survive translation into words. Anyone who has walked alone for long enough knows something about it. There are moments when you stop thinking about the road and simply walk. No podcast, no notifications, no internal monologue, no performance. Footsteps, breathing, wind. For a few seconds, sometimes minutes, there is very little distance between you and the universe. There are things the body knows that the mind will never learn. That is what I mean by Zenville.
None of these four is as clean as I have made it sound, and the borders are messy. Take dreams. A dream is made inside you, like in Fantasyville, except you are not the one making it. I still cannot decide where they belong. And if I read the same article on paper instead of on my iPad, have I moved from Falseville to Trueville? Obviously not. Spotify is digital, and a song can still put you back in a room you left twenty years ago. And what about a video call with your mother?
I guess the medium alone does not decide the world. The better question is what a technology is doing to your relationship with reality. Is it bringing you closer to people, experience, imagination and awareness, or is it standing in for them? Paradoxically, technology can be a bridge to Trueville. The trouble starts when we build our house on the bridge.
Another thing. I first thought of calling Falseville Digitalville, then dropped it, and let me tell you why. I wanted to emphasize that how easily we forget there is something underneath the digital world. We are living inside a Matrix that gets better every year, except nobody forced us into the pods. We walked in on our own, one notification at a time. And AI will make Falseville far more seductive. The people may be synthetic. The photographs may be synthetic. So may the voices, the articles, and eventually entire relationships and experiences. Everything will look real. The only question left will be whether we still care about the difference.
So what do we do? So far, I am not throwing my phone away. I post on LinkedIn most days, pay with credit cards, reply to emails, and use AI models for work. Most of that is not optional. But here is what I propose: spend a little less time in Falseville, and remember that Falseville is not reality. Go somewhere without documenting it. Have a conversation that leaves no digital trace. Get bored. Especially get bored. Boredom may be one of the last uncolonized territories. We treat it as a malfunction and reach for a device, when for thousands of years it was one of the doors through which reflection, imagination and creativity came in. Then visit Fantasyville again. Read a book and make the pictures yourself. Walk. Talk to strangers. Touch things. Go back to Trueville.
I find it ironic that I needed thousands of kilometres, a pile of podcasts and several digital devices to arrive at a conclusion this primitive. You are probably reading it in Falseville, and I wrote it there too. But primitive is the point. Underneath the technology, the algorithms and the artificial intelligence, there is still a human being trying to work out what is real. We are not leaving Falseville any time soon, and we can at least remember that there are other places to live.
Chapter sixty-four of the Tao Te Ching, one of my favourite books, says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The more literal translations say it begins under your feet, which after twelve Caminos sounds about right.
One step. That is the whole instruction, and nobody has improved on it since. Look up from the screen, and the road to Zenville is already under your feet…
