Reality is Fake

(and other observations from 2025)

I think we might be existing on an alternate timeline that started back in 2016 when Donald J. Trump defeated the seemingly undefeatable juggernaut of the Clinton Machine. Between that, the global lockdowns, the so-called “mostly peaceful” summer of love, the beyond-bizarre 2020 elections, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the atrocities of October 7^th, the four agonizing Biden years, as well as the surreal events of the 2024 elections.

With all that said, I have increasingly come to think reality is fake.

Don’t believe me?

Last winter, a bizarre atmospheric event rolled across multiple states and continents. Dense, lingering fog with a strange odor drifted through places like Florida, Texas, and even the UK, leaving a greasy residue on everything it landed upon. People everywhere were reporting sudden sneezing fits, fatigue, burning eyes, and breathing issues. No clear cause. No official explanation. Just…fog that didn’t act like fog.

How about the mysterious light flickering phenomena that appeared all over the world? Just random streetlights and building lights flickering for no apparent rhyme or reason for months on end. Even car lights began doing it.

And then there were the mysterious drones and orbs which began appearing over farmland, suburbs, and cities from late November through January. Unnaturally silent. Unbelievably organized. Sometimes glowing. Sometimes stationery for hours. Other times, darting in geometric patterns like they were mapping something. Authorities remained silent. Eyewitnesses remained confused. Countless videos began circulating for a couple of months before the next anomaly swallowed the news cycle.

Which was…the firestorm that nearly consumed the greater Los Angeles area. Between January 7 and January 31, 2025, fourteen major wildfires ripped through the Los Angeles metro area and parts of San Diego County. These fires were fueled by severe drought, extremely low humidity, dense overgrowth from the previous winter, and hurricane-force Santa Ana winds reaching up to 100 mph. Natural anomaly—perhaps. But the true oddity was the sheer level of incompetence by state and city officials. We all know stupid is as stupid does, but they seemingly took stupidity to preternatural levels.

By the time the last blaze was contained, the fires had killed between 31 and 440 people (estimates vary depending on missing-person reports), forced over 200,000 residents to evacuate, destroyed more than 18,000 homes and structures, and scorched over 57,000 acres of land. It wasn’t simply a wildfire event—it was a regional catastrophe that left entire communities looking like they had become co-opted by Hollywood as the backdrop for a new apocalyptic television series.

We hadn’t even gotten to 3I/Atlas, with all the oddities around this intergalactic interloper. No, the real oddities are with NASA and their bizarro reaction to it. It reminds me of the Leslie Nielsen meme of him trying to calm everyone by calmly stating, “Nothing to see here, folks, move along!” while chaos and mayhem break out behind him.

Yet here we are, closing out 2025, and all of that feels like ancient history; events so distant in memory they might as well have happened in the 1970s rather than earlier this year. Not because they were localized or even random events, but because the pace of the ongoing world-shaking ever since then has been relentless. Reality itself feels like it’s accelerating, compressing, and slipping through our fingers, one news cycle at a time.

I digress.

Happy Thanksgiving, America!

For non-Americans, Thanksgiving was designed to be our national pause button, a holiday built on the ideals of gratitude and family, celebrated just hours before we mob into stores and ruthlessly chase Black Friday deals.

Again, I digress. (Lots of digressing going on these days with myself)

Anyway, Thanksgiving is in fact a holiday where, for a few hours, Americans carve out time for family, football, and copious amounts of delicious food. But since 2016 (maybe a little earlier), the nation’s widening waist and deepening polarization have turned even simple gatherings into a minefield of potential family conflict. The careful avoidance of any topic that might end the meal early has become an art form of sorts in our stuttering, post-modern society.

Everyone from large families hopes for peace at the table—or at least a fragile, Balkan-style peace achieved by not wearing the wrong clothes, saying the wrong thing, or heaven forbid, misgendering someone. In a nation this fractured, you’re lucky if the conversation can stay safely parked in the neutral zone, which is where the inanity of football comes in; the weather used to be a safe topic as well until all the weird stuff started happening, and even that, somehow, gets blamed back on the ever-shifting, enigmatic “climate change,” as if somehow justifying the great prophet of environmental religion, the prophet Al Gore.

Pass the rolls. Avoid meaningful conversation. Pretend we’re fine.

However, beneath this seasonal ritual of implied normalcy, something far deeper has shifted in the American psyche, a shift that traces back at least to September 11, 2001. It is more than political upheaval and more than cultural fragmentation. It is a widening sense of unreality, an intuition that the world we live in is glitching, as if reality itself were a computer program infected with a virus intent on corrupting its code.

For the non-computer folk out there, it feels like a blanket that was once thick and warm but has grown thin and threadbare, its seams beginning to show as the fabric pulls apart. Something beneath the surface is off, out of alignment.

Moreover, events no longer feel isolated or unrelated. They seem connected, as if they are pieces of a larger pattern, hinting that all is not well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Patterns overlap. Anomalies stack. People sense something gathering at the edges of perception, like pressure building in the spiritual atmosphere and pressing into our physical reality. The world feels thinner than before, more brittle, as if the boundary between the seen and unseen has worn down to a fragile membrane that could tear open with one more poke.

Because whether people want to admit it or not, we are living through the early winds of a greater storm—one that has not yet arrived, but whose edges are already touching our world. The Apostle Paul summarizes this sentiment in Romans 8:22 by saying, For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now…

Normal is an Illusion

“We live on the edge of a mystery, normal only because we have forgotten how strange it really is.” —G.K. Chesterton

Every day, most people go about their lives assuming everything is stable. Businesses operate, schools teach, economies wobble but hold together, criminals do what criminals do, armies threaten, and billions of human beings wake up each morning largely believing tomorrow will look roughly like yesterday.

But that stability is an illusion propped up by scale, distance, and distraction.

For example, right now, as you sit comfortably in your chair reading this, you are:

• spinning at 1,000 mph at Earth’s equator

• orbiting the sun at 67,000 mph

• riding a solar system racing around the Milky Way at 490,000 mph

• and hurtling with the Milky Way through space at 1.3 million mph

That’s 1.8 million miles per hour, and yet everything feels still. The cosmos hides its violence behind the calm surface of our daily familiarity. If you were strapped into the pilot seat of a spacecraft and suddenly hurled through space at that speed, nothing about it would feel stable or normal. You would be overwhelmed, maybe even terrified beyond what your body or mind could endure. That’s how it is with our world presently. If you were to bring someone forward in time from, say, the year 1925, the world today would be chaotic, weird, and wildly out of control. But here we are, enjoying the bath like good frogs in our own cozy kettles.

One thing I’ve noticed is the complete oblivion most people have to the fragility of our reality. People move through life as if the universe existed solely to help them build a better stock portfolio, plan their next vacation, or enjoy an incredible sports season with their favorite team. Granted, the wider world at large does not care about a lot of those materialistic things…they’re just surviving hand-to-mouth.

Nevertheless, both the oblivious and the survivalist are still on the same boat, rushing down a raging river with canyon walls so steep that we have no way out other than to go forward. Disturbingly, the farther we travel, the faster the current becomes. I think most people hope the destination of said river is some sunny beach in the Gulf of America, complete with coconut drinks outfitted with little umbrellas. But it’s not. The river ends at a mind-numbing freefall, plunging its contents into the vast and unavoidable Gulf of Eternity.

Normalcy bias has devastated untold billions of people throughout mankind’s short stay on this little blue planet. How many societies, cultures, kingdoms, and empires thought they were the be-all-end-all civilization that would endure for all time? Most of them.

“The life of nations, like that of men, is limited. History seems to indicate that great nations, like individuals, are born, grow up, and decay.”
— Sir John Glubb, The Fate of Empires

What makes us any different than the Babylonians? The Persians? The Greeks? The Romans? The Spanish? The German? The Russian? The British? In one sense, the first four no longer exist in any real way other than by ancient influence. The latter four still exist but are shadows of their former glory. Nevertheless, all of it, including the hundreds to thousands of others not mentioned, is still on the same boat, heading to the same destination: the Day of the Lord.

This present world was never meant to last forever. From the moment mankind fell in the Garden of Eden, creation itself was placed under a curse—set on an irreversible trajectory of gradual decay that would eventually reach its end.

But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

2 Peter 3:7

In the days before the flood, Satan attempted to accelerate that collapse through corruption so pervasive it threatened to erase humanity altogether (See Genesis 6). God intervened, corrected the course (See Genesis 7-11), and established divine guardrails to prevent such total destruction from happening again…at least until the appointed time, to which, this author, yours truly, believes is our generation.

We are now drawing near to that prophesied time known as the Day of the Lord. The signs are everywhere. Nations openly celebrate wickedness. Cultures treat immorality as progress. Right is wrong, and wrong is right. Up is down, and down is up. Evil is called good, while good becomes evil. Adding fuel to this particular fire, technology and genetic manipulation have advanced at an exponential pace, promising to improve humanity while simultaneously creating the means to extinguish it. The world is rushing toward a future where “humanity” as we know it is no longer recognizable.

And herein lies the greatest theological problem of all: Christ died for mankind—for the human race as God created it. Not for augmented hybrids. Not for genetically altered post-humans. Not for artificial life or cybernetic fusions masquerading as evolution. Whatever abominations science intends to unveil cannot receive what Christ alone came to redeem.

And unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved; but for the elect’s sake those days will be shortened. Matthew 24:22

And we should be thankful that our reality is a façade. It’s the same reason why God put Cherubim angels with flaming swords to guard the way to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden after the fall of mankind. Had mankind eaten from that tree in a state of decay, mankind would have endured a hell beyond comprehension, never having the possibility for redemption, while remaining in a fallen state of decay for all time.

Conclusion

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. 1 John 2:15-17

Still, many other passages in scripture speak about the temporal nature of our reality. For example:

2 Corinthians 4:18, Hebrews 8:5, 9:23-24, 10:1, 12:27, 13:14, Psalm 102:25–26, Isaiah 51:6, Matthew 24:35, Luke 21:33, 1 Corinthians 7:31, 1 Peter 1:24–25, 2 Peter 3:7, 10–12, Romans 8:20–22, Philippians 3:20–21, Colossians 3:1–2, Revelation 21:1, etc.

I suppose the point of all this is to say, don’t fall in love with this present world, because for all its trappings and pleasures, it is slipping through our fingers no matter how tightly we seek to grip it. We can’t slow down time. We can’t reverse aging or go back in time as much as we wish we could. We only have the present, and frankly, that is weird enough.

So be thankful this year, especially that the Lord has allowed us to live in times such as these, times the prophets longed to see, but could'’t. Love those who are with you. Be a little extra kind. You never know when you’ll get that second chance to say the most important things, or do the most important things to those special people in your life.

And while this life can certainly be challenging and painful (to whom this may apply), remember, as a believer, this is the closest to Hell you will ever get. Conversely, to the unbeliever, this crappy version of reality (Temu reality if you ask me), this is the closest to heaven you will ever get.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18