The Matrix, a movie from 1999 made by the (by then brothers, now sisters) Watchowsky, is one of my favorite movies of all time.

It plays with deep spiritual and philosophical topics, dressed up in action with last-generation special effects and a cyberpunk aesthetic.

A key aspect of the movie is the separation between the real world and the virtual world or the Matrix. A conventional reality against a purely faked one, a duality of being.

My argument is that the human experience is not limited by a single virtual perception or set of lenses but many, bounded by spaces, mindsets and user interfaces. We become different people as we move through these realities to the point of developing parallel personas.

In the modern digital era of remote work and smartphones, denizens transit from one virtual world to the next in an effort for maximum performance or pure evasion not so distant from the crackhead and the junkie pushing chemicals through their veins and blowing their minds into outer space.

First is the reality of their work laptop, then a couple minutes of Instagram while the the code compiles, the pipeline runs or the upload pushes gigabytes of data to a remote server. After work go watch the TV (which for most of us is our smartphone), maybe walk to the gym while listening a podcast, maybe start up a game in your console of choice and become someone else in a simpler reality.

Each distraction of my phone is a cigarette for the mind, an escape from one reality of symbols and user interfaces to another, all of them artificial and equally cancerous for focus, for presence.

The answer lies beyond getting away from electronics. When the phone is not around, the world gathers to talk about institutions and abstractions such as the state, the law, national identity, sports or any other topic living in our cultural noosphere.

This is the problem of over-abstraction of advanced civilizations. The more ingrained you are within the system, the less real everything becomes, including your actions to survive within it.

You are so disconnected from the real productive capacity that your work and the immediate needs of your flesh are completely disconnected.

I push code over a terminal over the Internet, somehow I get paid money for it after the value I provide gets realized through a series of market exchanges that go deep from where I am into the real productive framework of my civilization.

With that money I can buy this wrapped salad with meat, in the Berlin area that is called a Dürüm. I have no idea where the ingredients come from or the life that meat had or the species it was before being deprived of its original form. The only certainty is its taste.

I go to the kitchen and open the faucet to fill myself a glass to drink. There is a whole industrial infrastructure to deliver clean drinking water to my home that somehow has been running for almost 100 years.

Awareness of ignorance is probably the best form of knowledge, an awakening of consciousness that inevitably leads to being humble at best, insecure and anxious at worst due to the absolute lack of control we apparently have over all these systems from we depend upon.

But even culture and a civilization have their own architecture. There is a simple model developed by Vinay Gupta called 6WTD or 6 ways to die, for resilience and disaster recovery, state failure, end of the world and beyond. Pretty good prepper stuff if you ask my opinion.

As if it wasn’t enough, the reality of my work is limited by a set of corporate policies and professional social norms that leads to further detachment from the work itself, also known as Layer 8 in social engineering circles.

In Simulacra et Simulation from Jean Baudrillard, one of the inspirations behind the movie Matrix, the central idea of hyper-reality is discussed, where representations become so dominant that it is difficult or even meaningless to distinguish them from what we call real.

Baudrillard explains that there is a psychological progression from a real thing to an image, which is then distorted over multiple layers of indirection until it becomes something completely artificial or a simulacrum, without any apparent reality behind it. You may call it a dream, although I believe that dreams are as real as anything else can be with its own set of rules.

The code I write on my computer will be converted somehow into a series of 1s and 0s that transistors at a nanometer scale in my processor will interpret at a rate of change in which reality distorts beyond the comprehension for must of us without a degree on physics.

Each change is one of a billion moments within a single second of execution, an eternity from the point of view of the transistor.

Then that needs to be composed and aggregated into meaningful movements of information that eventually are converted into images, sound or electrical signals over the wire.

For those that do not know, the OSI model is a fundamental tool used in general for computer networking to understand a layered architecture such as the Internet where every single protocol is modeled from the physical layer to the application (or social) layer. It is one of the few tools at our disposal to somehow fix things when things fail or how to build new things upon existing ones.

There are moments where the latency of the feedback loop of my work is not bounded by the results of a 30 minutes integration pipeline and I can actually enter into flow and enjoy it.

This usually comes when editing, applying or executing things fast, with no mistakes or with almost immediate feedback. A simulacrum or my own creation and my own choice where I feel joy.

This is why we should put attention into customizing the virtual environments we spend most of our waking life such as browsers, desktop environments and operating systems. In the Linux world this is what ricing is all about, to create a system customized to your particular needs and workflows.

In the virtual world we spend most of our time either interacting with files or the web.

This is where learning to use a text editor becomes indispensable (either vim, emacs or some other inferior variant such as vscode), for most people this means mastering editing software for making video, images or handling documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs or Microsoft Office.

Interacting with the web, means benefiting from using web browsers and their plugin ecosystems or protocol specific tools such as SSH.

Interacting with your phone means customizing it towards something more intentional via Apps, shortcuts and building a dashboard of plugins or installing a custom ROM with root permissions in order to do whatever you want with it.

Most people use their phone for an increasing number of activities, which sometimes makes me feel stuck in the early 2000s for preferring an actual computer.

You can go further and write your own tools or develop your own automations via low code systems to transform between data formats such as cyberchef. You may also ask the AI to build full blown utilities for you, which might or might not work on the first shot.

In the physical world this is the process of organizing and customizing spaces with intention and purpose as Casey Neistat puts it into this video or his brother Van in this one.

Some of these custom modifications might look like symptoms of some obscure mental condition of sorts, but the point is that it works for the ones that need to use them.

But this is not so much about coming back to reality as it is about regaining control of the hyper-reality being imposed over you.

There is a weird sense of silence for those of use that are able to pull our minds away into the hard direct perception of the concrete.

There is a name that gen-z’s use for going through “something” without distraction, without music, without a podcast, social media or Netflix called raw-dogging, which is a term also used to expressing the act of having sex without a condom.

The term is as obscene as it is precise, it is to experience pure sensorial reality as it is, without the interpretation in a pure wild form only bounded by our biological imperatives and social conditioning. Bullshit fades away and only the unavoidable truth of the present moment remains.

It is not as easy as it seems, as any experienced meditation practitioner knows, distractions and interruptions to the present come from our own thoughts, the hyper-reality of our minds fights to brings us back into the world of abstraction, maybe as a defense mechanism from some deep seated emotion of remorse or grief from the depths of our nervous system, or maybe out of pure boredom.

To stay grounded in the present is an act of warrior-like discipline, a constant fight against the entropy of our minds, which you might as well call temptation or illusion depending on the spiritual tradition you subscribe to.

The solution for me is going to retreats or being completely present with the motorcycle on the highway, where you can only focus on riding well or face your own painful termination at high speed against the asphalt, people or other vehicles.

Sometimes coming back to reality is just watching the deep white of the walls of my room as my burned out brain cools down from a excess of caffeine and hyper-activity of a 12-hour workday as I keep what remains of my sanity and try to complete the expected activities of a normal functioning adult.

Sometimes it is just staying in silence while I wait the voice of God after a confession, a question or a prayer sent into the void.

Some days it means just going for a walk at night while I watch my breath and feel the cold breeze on my face. Watching the night sky with the awe that God intended us to see it.

It is to be in a point in time after the other, nanosecond after nanosecond, feeling the pass of eternity as that transistor in a gigahertz processor.

TL;DR: Just get the hell out of the house and touch grass from time to time without having that damn phone on you.