You Are Living in a Copy of a Copy (And There's No Original Left)

This Will Rip a Hole in Your Brain (And You Won’t Want to Plug It)

The shirt you’re wearing? Not real.
The room you’re sitting in? Not real.
The news you scrolled this morning? Definitely not real.

Not in the way you think.

We’re not living in reality anymore. We’re living in a copy of a copy of a copy — with no original left to return to. Jean Baudrillard saw this coming in the 80s. He called it simulacra and simulation — a world where signs no longer point to things… they point to other signs. Where meaning collapses under the weight of endless content. Where a TikTok dance holds the same emotional gravity as a war zone. Where your Instagram profile is you — more than you are.

And here’s the terrifying part:
It doesn’t matter if it’s real.
It only matters if it feels real.

This isn’t sci-fi.
This is your Tuesday.

The Four Levels of Losing Reality

Baudrillard mapped how we got here:

The Faithful Copy — A photo of your birthday. A painting of a king. Tied to something real.
The Distorted Copy — Filtered. Staged. Airbrushed. Still linked to reality… barely.
The Mask of Absence — There was no birthday. No king. But the image looks so real, we pretend there was.
Pure Simulacrum — The emoji 👑. The Nike swoosh. The Disney princess. No original. No anchor. Just floating signs. And you? You treat them as gospel.

Welcome to Level 4.

Walmart Is a Cathedral of Simulation

Walk into Walmart.

Notice the produce — unnaturally perfect, uniformly red, waxy, plastic-feeling. Not because that’s how fruit grows… but because that’s how fruit should look, according to the simulation.

You don’t want “real” carrots with dirt and asymmetry.

You want the sign of a carrot — the hyperreal version you’ve seen in ads, in sitcom kitchens, in stock photos.

Walmart doesn’t sell groceries.

It sells signs.

It’s a hypermarket — a temple where every product is a symbol pointing to an idea: convenience, abundance, normalcy, Americana.

Reality? That’s messy. Uneven. Unbranded.

Simulation? Clean. Predictable. Satisfying.

You Are a Simulation of Yourself

Your social media profile.

Your LinkedIn headline.

Your dating app bio.

Your “personal brand.”

All of it — a curated, optimized, algorithm-friendly version of you.

Not the messy, uncertain, contradictory, beautiful human being who wakes up at 3 AM with existential dread and laughs too loud at bad jokes.

No — that person doesn’t perform well.

So you smooth the edges. Filter the flaws. Craft the narrative.

And slowly… the simulation becomes you.

You don’t post to reflect your life.

You live to post.

We’re Addicted to Simulacra

Fake meat. Fake grass. Fake influencers. Fake outrage. Fake intimacy. Fake purpose.

Our dopamine receptors don’t care if it’s real.

They only care if it feels real.

And simulations? They’re engineered to feel better than real.

More satisfying. More predictable. More controllable.

We’ve sold our souls to the hyperreal.

And we did it with a smile — because the simulation told us to.

Can We Go Back?

Baudrillard didn’t think so.

Once the original is gone… it’s gone.

The Ephuafago tribe of Papua New Guinea had a word for this: “tiramasu” — the moment when the copy becomes more real than the original. When the village storyteller’s tale becomes more vivid than the actual hunt. When the ritual mask holds more power than the spirit it represents.

They understood what we’ve forgotten: once you cross that threshold, there’s no returning to innocence.

Discover how anthropologists accidentally turned an entire tribe into a simulation of themselves and 5 ways to carve out pockets of the real in your own life →

But maybe — maybe — we can carve out little pockets of realness.

A genuine smile from a stranger.

A meal cooked slowly, with no photo taken.

A walk with no podcast, no playlist, no step count.

Art made for no reason other than the making.

Moments where the simulation flickers… and you remember:

You are nature.
You are not a brand.
You are not a profile.
You are not a consumer.

The most radical act today?

Slow down. Unplug. Touch grass (the real kind).

Not to escape the simulation.

But to remember — you were here before it.

And you can still feel what’s real.

Even if you can’t prove it.

Don’t Let the Simulation Win Alone

This isn’t doomscrolling. This is awakening.

And if you’re ready to go deeper — to get weekly mind-bombs like this, unpacked with even more intensity, plus tools to navigate the hyperreal world without losing yourself — then you need to join the inner circle.

Every Sunday, I send out one piece of writing that will:

Rip open your assumptions
Reconnect you to what’s real
Give you tactical ways to resist the simulation

No fluff. No spam. Just truth bombs and quiet rebellions.

👇 Join thousands who are waking up — before the simulation forgets they existed.

P.S. The more certain someone is — including you — the more you should be skeptical.
Because certainty? In a world of simulations?
That’s the biggest illusion of all.