The Things We Agree Into Being

Try to touch a country. You can stand on its soil, salute its flag, meet its officials — but the country itself, the thing all of that represents, exists nowhere you can point to. The same is true of a company, a law, a border, a brand, money. They are real in their effects and entirely imaginary in their substance. They exist because, and only because, enough of us agree to act as if they do.

These shared fictions are not a flaw — they are humanity's superpower. A million strangers will cooperate for a company none of them can see, die for a nation that is only a story, trust a number on a screen, because we can all believe the same invented thing at once. No other animal can. A chimpanzee will never accept a coin.

You live inside a thick cloud of agreed-upon fictions, and you mistake it for the solid world.

And if the things that run our lives are all imagined — which imagined thing rules the most?