Richard Lam
I remember when my friend chatted me up one day and asked me whether I thought we lived in a reality or a fantasy. It was rather an odd question to ask out of the blue, but I had thought of the question before. I came to believe that whether we live in a reality or a fantasy all comes down to where we feel most alive. In my case, I feel most alive when I’m not in front of a screen playing games and watching TV. Instead, my attention and focus is the highest when research and working. But this doesn’t mean I don’t play games or watch TV or that I despise doing these things; it means that I put work higher up on my priorities list. In other words, I love playing games and watching TV, but I love researching and working more. For some other people, they live reality in games and TV. They can be professional gamers or couch potatoes, but since they have their attention and focus in games and TV, that is where their reality is. So whatever we love and care about as something important to our lives is our reality; practically everything else, our fantasy, where we think and act to take a break from reality. But the line between our own reality and fantasies are not always clear. There are many things to choose from to be part of each one, not just games or work. Sometimes we don’t know how to choose and we get stuck. Then, we’d have to get off the road, pause, and give ourselves time to think. My friend and I spoke about this for a while, thinking about if there were any exceptions or holes in our logic, but it really didn’t matter. We were taking a break from reality. We weren’t working to become philosophers. This was only a short stroll in our fantasies.
