Real Reality Water

The world is confusing. Which feels like an understatement right now.

Could we be living beneath a cosmic ocean shielded by a mysterious dome? Are the chemtrails overhead actually controlling the weather? Is the fluoride in the water turning the frogs gay and lowering testosterone?

While it is easy to laugh at questions like these, high-five ourselves for how rational and informed we are, the environment that allows such ideas to bubble up from the cultural soup reveals something more insidious about our political and psychological ecosystem.

We all know things are bad. Between the worsening effects of climate change, the precarious job market, and the creeping sense that AI is about to eat the world, it doesn’t exactly feel like a golden age. Yet we struggle to make sense of precisely why things have a seasick feeling to them. Which makes it hard to do anything about it. So we oscillate between anger and despair.

Meanwhile, we are gaslit by authorities, from economists to politicians to CEOs, assuring us that everything is getting better. “Why aren’t you happy? Line goes up!” But when your groceries cost a small fortune, your energy bill looks like a ransom note, and you are bombarded by images of war and ecological disaster, there is a growing sense of dissonance. It is as if the story we are being told and the world we are actually living in are diverging.

This is the space where philosopher Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, makes a crucial distinction between Reality and The Real.

Reality, for Fisher, is the ideological map capitalism draws for us, a narrow framework defining what counts as possible, acceptable, or even thinkable. It is not reality in the everyday sense, but the official version of reality, the one we are meant to live inside.

The Real, on the other hand, is everything that does not fit. The unassimilable remainder. The contradictions and truths that capitalism cannot fully symbolise or manage.

Fisher suggests that capitalist realism survives by denying The Real. Confronting it, even momentarily, destabilises the entire system’s sense of inevitability.

Think of it like we are swimming in a vast body of water. Reality is that water, warm, buoyant, and seemingly infinite. It feels like an infinity pool overlooking a sunset. Then, for a moment, we glimpse The Real and realise we are actually sitting in a lukewarm bath, staring at mouldy tiles.

We catch flashes of The Real all the time.

In the rising seas and burning summers of climate change, crises continually recontextualised through attempts to manage or monetise them without ever addressing the contradiction between infinite growth and a finite planet.

In the mental health epidemic that quietly defines our age, where systemic alienation is reframed as individual pathology, and the cure is more productivity, more self-optimisation, more of the thing that caused the illness.

In homelessness, precarity, and the quiet humiliation of life under flexibility, all reminders that capitalism’s promise of meritocratic fairness was a story told to keep the machine running.

Even in the philanthropic work of billionaires. Their donations do not disrupt the system; they launder it, materially, emotionally, and ideologically. They make inequality feel charitable.

We encounter these as realities every day: through headlines, data, charitable campaigns, and political speeches. But encountering them as The Real would be something else entirely, a rupture and a shock to the system. It would mean truly seeing the water we are swimming in. And that is traumatic, because it exposes the limits of the world as we know it.

Trying to solve these crises from within capitalism as it currently exists is like trying to dry yourself with a towel while underwater. You can make the motions, convince yourself you are doing something useful, but you are still soaked. The towel does not fail because you are not trying hard enough, it fails because you are still in the water.

Capitalism’s genius lies in its ability to fold everything, even its own failures, back into its Reality. Climate disaster becomes an investment opportunity. Therapy becomes a subscription service. Inequality becomes a motivation problem. The Real is endlessly translated, repackaged, made consumable. The system survives by metabolising its contradictions, ensuring we never have to confront what they really mean.

That is the core of capitalist realism: the constant denial that there could be any alternative. The Real threatens that illusion. To encounter it is to risk breaking the spell, to feel the ground give way beneath the stories that sustain us.

It is to realise you are sitting in a cold bath, thrashing to maintain the fantasy of an infinity pool in the tropics.

But maybe that is where change begins, in those unbearable moments when the towel stops working, when we finally feel the weight of the water, and start wondering what it would mean to climb out altogether.