He felt like giving up on the world. He felt as if he were insane. Either that or the whole world had gone crazy. For the first time in his life, he had looked at the world for what it was and despite all his efforts, he could get no idea of what was going on. He had recently started spending all his time observing and thinking about all sorts of routine events that occurred all around him and the more he thought about it the more confusing they seemed. He had tried in all possible ways, or at least all the ways he could think of, to find some answers but all the sources had fallen well short of the mark.

He walked out of his house and took a cab. He told the driver, he didn’t care where he took him. “I don’t know where to. Just take me somewhere where I can get to know the truth.” He told the cab driver, knowing well that the driver would not understand at all what he was saying and would probably think he was crazy. But he didn’t care. So he was a little surprised when the driver responded by asking “And where do you suppose that is sir?”

He figured that it was a part of the job for these drivers to hold a conversation and in this case, the question had been necessary since the driver had to know where to go. “I have no idea buddy,” he replied. “I have absolutely no idea. I have tried everything. I have asked friends, relatives, a philosophy professor, religious people. I have searched the net, watched TV, read books. The truth may be an illusion after all. It may never have existed.” He was aware of the fact that what he said was all Greek to the driver, but a part of him wanted to share his frustrations with someone who didn’t know him, someone who couldn’t understand, someone who would just listen and not judge. So he continued, “All my life I kept running after false aims, trying to reach destinations that were just mirages in a desert. I would have gone on in the same way till I died. But something suddenly awoke inside me. Something just turned on and I became acutely aware of the fact that I had no idea what I or anyone around me was doing. It all seemed false, all a bunch of lies. And now, nothing interests me anymore. Everything seems wrong and I can’t find anyone who can tell me what the truth is. So I am bound to conclude that everything, absolutely everything is false, you, me, this cab, this city, everything. There is no truth.”

The cab driver was smiling, it was not a pretend smile intended just to make him feel good, it was more a smile that depicted an understanding. He was a little confused since he did not feel that that smile belonged on the face of a cab driver. And he was stunned when the cab driver spoke.

“When you are looking for the truth, or for anything for that matter, and you cannot find it, it does not mean that it does not exist. It simply means that you have been looking in the wrong places. The world around you has been built on all the wrong principles. Only people who refuse to see it for what it is and agree to carry on with their lives pretending that there is nothing wrong are allowed to survive here. Anyone who shouts that the emperor is naked is stared at, called crazy and asked to shut up. How can you even expect any degree of rationality from the people of this world, especially the successful ones? People who have succeeded in this messed up world cannot be expected to be straight and clear in their heads about the truth.

“You don’t have to look so hard. You know the truth. You only have to uncover it. It’s just that too much garbage has piled up on and around it for you to be aware of its presence. Remove the garbage and you’ll see the truth. Remove all the garbage, remove everything.” The cab driver was still smiling when he finished.

He got out of the cab and noticed that he too was smiling. Suddenly things seemed clear. For the first time in his life, he felt calm and hopeful. For the first time in his life, he felt completely sane. And when he realized that the only useful things he had heard in the last couple of weeks had come from a cab driver and a pimp, he started laughing. And once he started he just couldn’t stop. People stared and he laughed harder. People started gathering around him and he laughed some more. He laughed because he felt free, he laughed because he felt light, and he laughed harder because finally, he felt sane.

We are funny, we humans! The way we exaggerate our own significance, it is hilarious. Everything around us is imaginary, make-believe, unreal and yet, all the time we pretend that it is not. What’s more, we also try to look for truth while obscuring our visions with fantasies all along.

Don’t see it? Okay, let me explain a little. Before I explain how everything, absolutely everything is fake, let me clarify two things. The first is a confession, and the second a clarification. The confession is that I do not consider myself a very smart person, so whatever I believe might be as big a load of shit as what you believe is. The clarification is this. Hitler supposedly believed (I think it was Hitler, if it was someone else, to hell with it, the person holding this belief is immaterial to this anyway) that if you repeat a lie enough times, it starts to sound like the truth. We humans do this all the time. But what is even more interesting is that we take something that we know with complete certainty to be an untruth (not a lie, an untruth; the difference between the two is a totally different discussion altogether and I am leaving it for some other time), and then all of us decide to believe it and from then on, it becomes the truth, just like that. Amazing(ly stupid)!

Still don’t see the extent to which these make-believe things make up our life? Hmmm! How about your name? It is not what you are. Somebody just gave that name to you and told everyone that you were ……. Mike, for instance. From that moment on, you became Mike. Even before you knew it yourself, the world called you Mike. And many years later, the world told you that that’s who you were. But you are not Mike. Sadly, this silliness becomes so ingrained in you that you start introducing yourself as Mike and never, for a moment think about who you actually are.

Take more examples. Your date of birth. The sun doesn’t rise with a signal of what day or date it is. Somebody, thousands of years ago, came up with the idea of dividing the time the earth takes to revolve around the sun, call it a year and divide it into months and weeks and days and dates. And then someone suggested that the day be divided in hours and minutes and seconds. The world agreed to believe in it and the whole concept became a truth (so to speak).

Paper currency is another example of something that depends on the fact that the whole world agrees that it is worth something (when in fact it is just what it is, paper). All the games and sports and their rules also exist simply because we have decided to agree to believe that they exist. All language too. What meaning would these symbols you are reading have if the world had not agreed to give them a meaning and then teach every next generation how to keep on giving these meanings? All education, achievements, awards, honors, contracts, relationships, absolutely everything falls in this category of fake, man-made things.

Now look at this sentence. Imran Khan (a name that was just given to him) led Pakistan (a name given to a part of the land of this planet, defined by borders drawn on the map) cricket (a game based on weird rules but which people believe in and which cause perfectly normal adults to dress up in stupid looking gear and assume pretty indecent postures holding a piece of wood while eleven others keep running and fetching a ball) team to victory in the World Cup (I am not even going to explain the untruthness of such competitions) in March 1992 (a date that does not actually exist in the design of the universe, since no date does). Not even a scrap of truth here, nor any lie. Just made-up crap.

Before you contemplate sending me to an asylum, let me just say that I don’t have any problem with this situation, only if we stop taking all this make-believe stuff so damn seriously. Nothing we believe in is real, and whatever is real, well we can’t see it with all this crap flying all around.