do you even own your reality, or is it borrowed?

So the thing about living within reality is that it often feels like a bunch of borrowed parts, you know? I mean, you wake up one day and realize half the stuff you think and do isn't even yours. It’s like waking up in a room that's been slowly filled with junk over the years. Some of it’s stuff you thought you needed, some is just leftover noise, and some...

well, you have no clue how it even got in there.

I once found myself at this weird crossroads, a kind of psychic train station, if you will. It was during one of those stints when I was technically homeless, except it was by choice because I just didn’t want to follow the expected path. Anyway, it was strange realizing that even without a physical home, I had all these preconceived notions about what I should be doing. There’s this huge pressure to take on board what everyone else tells you about who you should be, right?

But then, who does that make you actually?

You see, we're like these consciousness sponges. We absorb everything around us: society, media, families, even that algorithm I keep talking about, the one that's curating you into someone you didn’t choose to be. It's sneaky too. The algorithm doesn’t announce its presence; it just slowly rewires your reality until one day you realize the thoughts in your head aren’t really yours.

Instead, they’re pre-configured and conveniently slide into your awareness.

And the interesting thing about that is how much it complicates self-identification. You might feel like captain of your ship, steering through the seas of existence, but if your compass is rigged, which direction are you really heading? This is where the idea of reality being a screen comes in. What you believe projects onto your awareness and becomes your perception of the world.

Let's decode this a bit. So, imagine life as a rigged game, psychic tests come at you all the time, and you gotta spot the hidden variables. You ever realize how sometimes life sends notifications? Like, those little hints or signals that if you ignore, they just keep getting louder.

It's trying to tell you something. But are you really reading these updates, or have you muted the notifications?

If you're at all like me, you’ve probably realized your beliefs are kind of like your life’s operating system. We update them, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes intentionally. But do we ever hit the reset button on the default settings of our consciousness? It’s a bit like getting a new phone and never clearing out the apps it came with, cluttering the input layer of your attention.

Most people don’t even get to the point of asking who designed their input layer in the first place.

I think what most people miss is how much the outer world slips into the inner without knocking. Every ad, every snippet of the world out there can become a psychic plugin, installed quietly until one day you follow some new path that’s foreign to your original configuration. And the parameters of your life? Maybe you didn’t even decide those either.

We’re so quick to accept the default package because it's easier, right?

All this talk of subconscious setups makes me think back to my coding days. There’s something so beautifully chaotic about deconstructing the design of your existence like one does with code: unraveling nested beliefs, questioning if-then statements that control your life, debugging lines of thought. You have the power to change those parameters, but only if you’re aware they exist.

But here’s where it gets weird. Our reality tunnels, these perception filters, they’re like those virtual reality headsets that show you a world that's not really there. It’s vivid, feels real, yet take the goggles off, and you’re back to a baseline reality. But isn’t that baseline also just another layer of the game?

Maybe none of these layers are inherently real, or maybe they all are in different ways that don’t fully make sense yet.

It all boils down to whether you’ll let life configure you passively, or if you’ll sit in the driver’s seat and mess with the settings. This is not just a spiritual endeavor, it’s so practical, almost annoyingly so. It’s about auditing yourself like a developer looks at code. And then it’s about having the guts to delete the junk, rewrite the scripts, and see what comes out the other side.

And that’s kinda it, you know? If reality is yours to design, consider the design process. It’s not just adding and adding, it’s also about seeing what you’ve already allowed into your space and getting rid of what doesn’t serve you. Think about it; what are you hanging onto that isn’t your own?

Maybe next time you feel stuck, perform a self-audit. Find out if you're running on borrowed parameters or if you've actually built a life that’s truly yours.

I don’t know, man. Sometimes we need to stop looking for answers altogether and just figure out what is cluttering our psychic space. Get rid of the debris, and maybe the clarity will come on its own. Or maybe that’s just where I’m at right now.

Who knows?

But then there's also this lingering thought... what if we’ve never even scratched the surface of what’s possible? Can we ever truly own our reality, or is part of the process acknowledging its elusive nature? I don't have the answer yet, and maybe that’s the point, to keep leaning into the uncertainty because that’s where the real design happens.

What do you think?