Real Life VS The Imitation Game

in which we question the shadowy nature of reality

Is it a foreign policy or is it cake?

I put a bar of Amatller Spanish drinking chocolate in my husband’s Christmas stocking this year, and we’ve really savoured the process of cutting up the squares, measuring milk and letting them simmer together on the stove. The bars come wrapped in green and cream paper, with instructions for preparation printed inside the wrapper. It takes time, more time than putting some powder at the bottom of a mug and hoping for the best, but I think the results speak for themselves—a couple of sips in and you realise that there’s something different going on. The liquid is thicker and more velvety than normal, and the drink has (pretention alert) dimensions to it. By the time you’ve drunk half the mug you’ve tasted cinnamon and cream and then the savoury cacao note hits – slipping down and soothing you in a way that a Options or Cadbury’s equivalent could only dream of. Once you’ve finished you realise that it’s a completely different drink. Drinking the Amatller chocolate has made me wonder if I ever actually enjoyed the powdered version in the first place, or whether it was something I drank because I’d been conditioned to think of it as ‘hot chocolate’.

This whole experience reminded me of a Netflix show I’ve seen a couple of times called Is it Cake? The premise is simple: bakers compete against one another, producing cake replicas of inanimate objects that can hopefully fool the judging panel into believing they are the real thing. The host wanders around with a knife, plunging it into whatever ‘object’ the panellists think is actually cake. Nike Airs are revealed to be nothing more than vanilla sponge and icing, as are Prada handbags, Rubix cubes and ice creams. ‘There are people saving lives’ explains one contestant ‘and I am making cake look like other things’. Needless to say, the format wears thin pretty quick.

But this uncanny dichotomy, between the real and the fake, is something that I’ve felt more acutely aware of recently. In almost every aspect of my life I am surrounded by things which purport to be one thing, but are in fact, poor imitations, several lightyears removed from their original form. The problem with this thought is that once you start noticing this phenomena you can’t stop. It starts with hot chocolate and cake, but it extends into other fora; politics, culture - our relationships with each other and ourselves. It is becoming clearer to me that the vast majority of us are living lives that are not necessarily the ones we would choose if the true nature of our reality was something we were able to grasp.

In The Republic Plato uses the allegory of the cave to explain the difference between perceived (false) reality and reality itself. It goes like this: imagine that there are a group of prisoners chained up in a cave who are unable to turn their heads; all they can see is the cave’s wall. Although they are unaware of it, there is a fire behind their backs which some puppeteers are walking around so that shadows of various things (people, animals, objects) are cast onto the only wall that the prisoners can see. The prisoners assume that the ‘shadows’ are reality – because they do not understand that the shadows are actually puppets, and not ‘real’ in the truest sense of the term.

Real life VS Imitated Life – the problem of disconnection

It is now common practice for fast fashion brands to dupe designs, swapping materials and cutting the processes of production down to their base in order to increase profit margins. It leads to situations where we throw clothes away because they fall apart. We scroll and click and they appear on our doorstep without us giving it a second thought. As a consequence, we waste things all the time because we simply have no connection to them.

Just before Christmas I cast off a wool jumper that had been on my knitting needles for a year and a half. It’s dark navy, with a high collar and cropped fit. I decided to make it because I realised that I serially gravitated toward a jumper that I’d bought from Topshop about a decade earlier. It wasn’t a pure wool jumper and with every wash it felt a little bit more plasticky. There were other things about it which bugged me too - the collar was too short, and the sleeves were never quite the right length. Now that I’ve finished my ‘real’ version of the navy jumper I feel deeply connected to it. I want to wear it and take care of it in a way its poor Topshop relation never seemed to warrant.

One of the major counter arguments levelled against ‘real things’ is that they cost too much, and to hold them up as a superior choice is to impose a prejudiced standard against people who simply cannot afford them. I’m sure there are people for whom affordable clothing is an absolute necessity, and whose lives are not designed in a way that they can make their own jumpers from scratch. But this logic overlooks the rest of us who have grown accustomed to having an extensive wardrobe made affordable to us on the basis of cheap labour and overproduction. Do we need multiple versions of the same dress? What would a wardrobe that you really cherished and cared for look like? The answer will differ for all of us. For me, it involves a small collection of simple items that I wear and repair repeatedly. It’s something I’m working on, but it’s a slow process.

Real Life VS Virtual Life – the problem of dependency

We already know that we are addicted to algorithms which are designed to deprive and distract us from our real lives, sacrificing our attention spans at the altar of clicks and short form content. It seems almost inevitable that the dawn of ChatGPT and other AI driven media will take us further away from ourselves and each other, replacing human dependencies with virtual ones.

I came across a thread on Reddit the other day which made this exact point. The poster explained that her best friend was using ChatGPT ‘to the point where they can’t go a day without it.’ The poster then continued …

The other day, she asked me for advice on whether or not she should give out her personal Instagram to people she will be networking with as part of her job. I told her it probably wasn't a good idea and gave my reasons for it. Then she goes "You know what, I'll just ask ChatGPT when I get home later to see if it's a good idea." At that moment, I realized she trusted ChatGPT more than me. We've been friends for more than 11 years.

Unsurprisingly, the knock on cultural consequences of algorithmic practices are not pretty either. In a recent column for The Times, literary critic Johanna Thomas-Corr wrote about the rise of new SEO-driven literary genres which she described as ‘Cozy Kink’ and her worry that ‘selling popular fiction to a digital generation can be a matter of gaming algorithms, weaponizing search words, popping up in people’s feeds and materialising in their online baskets before they have quite had a chance to think.’ She finished the piece questioning ‘where this SEO-friendly Frankenliterature will end’. Will every new meme produce a new wave of ‘Cutest Cat True Crime?’

Perhaps the algorithm is the contemporary chain that keeps us in place, looking at the back of the cave instead of at the world around us. ‘This is a good book’ says the algorithm, which tracks our digital habits and serves us adverts at the moments we are most susceptible to them. We order it in one click and twelve months later lament the pile of neglected books that we at one point thought we wanted. Eventually we begin to realise that we no longer feel confident choosing books for ourselves, and are instead dependent on the priming techniques of the algorithm to decide what we will enjoy.

Real Life VS Imagined Life - the problem of delusion

Perhaps my biggest worry is not to do with material things or virtual things, but the spiritual dynamics that underpin these relationships. By effectively castrating our sense of autonomy, and our ability to perceive what is real and what is fake, we are bound to confuse our own realness with an imagined self. This is a self who has fallen down the rabbit hole, and lacks any awareness that the world they occupy is not really the world as it is. For this person, the real world may be both better and worse than the one they believe in, but they do not properly exist within it, for their existence is dictated by the levers I have described above.

‘Think about what would happen if they were released from these chains and these misconceptions’ asks Socrates in Plato’s Republic. ‘What do you think his reaction would be if someone informed him that everything he had formerly known was illusion and delusion, but now he was a few steps closer to reality, orientated now toward things that were more authentic, and able to see more truly?’

Socrates goes on to explain the discomfort involved in moving closer to reality. To come out into the light is a disorientating process, as our eyes are only adjusted to the darkness of the cave. Over the past eighteen months I’ve felt as if the true nature of our political reality has become much clearer in my mind - the extent to which racism is baked into the UK’s foreign policy decisions in Gaza, and British politics writ large, for example, feels undeniable. Also the extent to which ‘justice’ is a word which no longer has real meaning for our government; it’s just cake.

I believe that we all exist somewhere on this spectrum. Some of us are already on our way out of the cave whilst others remain firmly chained in place, quite happy to look at the shadows on the wall and accept them for what they are. Perhaps, like me, you can no longer drink the cool-aid and want to experience a real life too. I consider this to be a spiritual enterprise as much as it is a political one. It is a process of reconnecting to ourselves and each other, and rediscovering our material world in a grounded and humble way.

These are the thoughts which I am carrying into a new year.

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Recommendation Corner: unplugged edition

1. Sadly Amatller drinking chocolate seems to be out of stock pretty much everywhere in the UK. I bought ours from Labour and Wait.

2. I made the Petite Knit Louvre sweater using Sandnes Garn Peer Gynt and purchased a pattern through Ravelry.

3. Our very quiet new years eve was spent watching Conclave - a papal thriller based on Robert Harris’s novel. Stanley Tucci and Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini - what more could you want?

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Thank you for reading. If you are new here, welcome and happy new year. The Murmuration is a biweekly newsletter that digs beneath the topsoil of life. It’s written by me, Grace Pengelly, an editor and writer who lives in Somerset. Its existence is supported by paid supporters who occasionally receive extra witterings from me, but are mostly enabling everyone to enjoy these essays for free. If you would like to support The Murmuration then please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.