The next 50 years

I have decided that I need to start considering the world around me as unreal. To stop seeing the figures around me as people.  To stop giving a damn about the stories that leak in from this weird shadow world of strangers with whom I cannot engage. If I can't engage with them, they are functionally not real.  So it's irrelevant what they think is real because they aren't real. I havent' decided what this means in terms of my personal behaviour.  I do expect the game engine to continue to react and dole out punishment shocks when I break rules. But i really think I need to remember they're all fake. Every last one of them.  Fake people.  Not actually people, just virtual reality figures with AI programming peopling the scenery.  Why I'm in this simulation is anyone's guess but I am quite certain that's what it is.  When it started, if there was ever life outside of it, why I'm in it, no idea. But nothing is real, of that I am becoming sure.  ...

I need to start understanding something important. My sister hated me because she thought I was better than her. My BFF Valerie did too. My friend Tom also was jealous.  My mother is jealous. The unnamed woman across the alley was jealous.  It probably is a lot longer list, and certainly I've been told "she hates you because she's jealous" by others. I just found the idea too preposterous to believe.   But in retrospect, viewing images of myself from earlier days, it becomes more apparent.  I really was that pretty and smart and confident and charismatic and so since I wasn't also ruthless, I got taken down repeatedly ASAP wherever I arrived.  It wasn't only once I've been told I couldn't work in some place because I was too pretty. The women would resent me and the men would want me.  Again, I found the idea silly and assumed i was being flattered. All those years people kept trying to direct me into motherhood or whoredom, nothing else was allowed du...