Reality

We all live in our own versions of personal realities, sort of like bubbles all our lives and thoughts and even imaginations are trapped in. Reality is that we can't know the reality. We'll always live in one bubble or other. Best you can do is choose your bubble, and switch from time to time. More bubbles you observe, better your chances are to not get locked in one.

Everyone is living in a bubble. Some are aware of it, most are not. People see through lenses they wear over time. With time the lenses get different shades, get thicker and thicker. At the end of it, your whole life is a fucking opinion.

People in fact, live in more than one bubbles. Bubble of "ethics" given by your parents, religion and society, the "professional" bubble most get caught in when they taste the thing they think is success for first time (this one is easiest to detect, look around, ask people why they're doing what they're doing), the "love" bubble you get trapped in from movies and fairy tales, and many more.

You have no control over your life. Life is not yours to control, it is not real. Everyone around you is carrying their own reality, overlapping and interfering with yours. Best chance you've got is a chance. If you want to make something happen, you can only increase its probability of happening. Doesn't mean you should lose hope and go home (if you thought that, you probably should give up and go home), if you wanna make something happen, you gotta keep increasing the probability of its occurrence until the probability is 1. Or spend your 80 years of misery trying to do so.

When I see people around, I try to think of them as different realities. Every single one of them is living in their own reality. You'd be surprised to find out how easy it is to manipulate someone (read bend people to your will) once you can empathise with their reality.

The only way to observe a (wo)man's reality is to observe it from the outside. Like I said, it is not the reality, it is a bubble. Most people are hardcoded in their bubbles. Bubbles are like games (or is it my bubble kicking in?), bubbles have rules too. Like every game has its own rules of physics, bubbles have their own rules. Even if you can't live another person's bubble, you can read their rules. If you can do it well enough, you can tell exactly what other person is thinking and what he's going to do in next 5 minutes, or 5 years.

You know the couples which live together (happily) can communicate without talking, can tell what's up in other person's mind. My theory is that by being close for long enough time, their bubbles start overlapping. Like Van diagrams, there is that area in which they think exactly same things. They don't need words anymore to communicate, because they know what other person is feeling (and hence thinking, wanting to say or do or whatever, old people creep me out).

It's not confined to couples, neither you need to live with someone for a lifetime to be able to observe their bubbles. It is a skill, an art perhaps. Some people are damn good at it.

It is easy to observe others' bubbles. The basic and most difficult requirement is already met. You are already outside the bubble, now all you have to do is study it from inside without entering it. Easy, huh? Look for the reflections. Make them talk, don't listen to what they say, look for the patterns. Patterns tell you the rules of their worlds. Try to imagine how it is to see through those eyes. That is a whole different world that person is seeing, it is, fascinating to say the least. (Fuck I just told you my mind reading trick, I think I should stop blogging)

You need the right set of tools to think in. Like in software it's all about the right abstractions. This whole "bubbles" thing is just that, a tool to think in. Ultimate goal is to be able to look at the world exactly as someone else, find out the patterns, and hence the rules. And of course ultimately play the rules for fun and profit.

Or you can take the script-kiddie way and jump to finding rules, skipping the hardest first part. But that route involves lot of trial and error, failure may result in bitter relations for life. Plus, you lose all the scope for creativity and flexibility when you take the latter way.

These "personal realities" can (and are) actually be used for manipulating people to do what you want.

People live in many bubbles; many people live in similar bubbles. Bubbles have rules, similar bubbles have similar rules. The textbook tricks salespeople do lie in that domain. The whole range of tricks an Indian sales person use everyday, won't work if he move shop to US. The whole mutual reality his customers live in just changed. (There are of course certain universal rules which work with almost all humans. How many years of evolution was it again?)

That's rudimentary though. Personal realities can actually be created. You are a sales guy, imagine if you could create a world where people think they need your towels although they don't ever bath or wash their hands (nasty people, I like 'em already). You can do that for one person at a time, or N people at a time where N is the number of people who watch the news you control, or (be less dramatic) people who watch your advertisements. Again there are different levels of sophistication with which this can be done. More you know about someone (that's why you make 'em talk), their habits etc, easier it is to manipulate and fabricate entirely new realities for them. Imagine how fun the life would be if you were Facebook or Google. I've heard Facebook knows even when and how many times you go to poop everyday.

You didn't think I was all evil trying to teach you how to manipulate people as I do, did you? Well that's certainly a perk, but the goal is to be able to identify the realities from induced realities, and fabricated realities (there's a difference). See I was trying to save you all this time, you silly! I am no evil! Come on now jump in my van already, I have tinfoil hats too.

I'll probably talk about this in depth later some time, about the different tools I've figured people using, some unused ones I've discovered through experimentation, and other delusional shit.

I could write a book about it, but I gotta go watch that movie everyone on Reddit has started talking about all of a sudden.