Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening…that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time…[Y]ou live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.
-Andy Warhol
This thing that Andy Warhol has described applies not just to America but to everyone everywhere. There are two distinct worlds and we live in them simultaneously. We have what is real and what is imagined. No matter where you are, you’re there, but you’re also some place that nobody can ever physically be. That is, you are always in a physical location as well as in a philosophical location. We can escape neither, and we can be pleased or displeased, honestly dealt or mislead by either one.
We can become discontented with our surroundings due to a mental comparison with a romanticized image of somewhere else. We can feel like we’re in a good place compared to how we envision everywhere else. We can hold the real and the imagined to be separate. We can fall into a pattern of inability to differentiate the two. What we think is there but can’t see, while imagined, plays a very real role in our lives. Like the man says, every reality is a custom made hybrid between what is and what isn’t but nevertheless exists in our experience.
Sometimes the fantasy does us good. Sometimes it does us damage. But no matter what we do, it’s there. And no matter where we are, we should not begrudge it or try to escape it based on a fantasy, but rather do our best to get as much as we can out of it regardless of how we happen to feel about being there in the immediate reality of it all.
What a personal reality is cannot be nailed down, as it is fully subjective, permanently transitory, and varies hugely from person to person. Objectivity is a lie. No conscious entity lives soley in the real. Every judgement made by every person is innately personal. One cannot detatch oneself from himself. Nor should he try. The whole of judgement and commentary sprouts directly from the hybrid reality each of us entertains.
I get the feeling we could do some interesting things if more people would come to terms with this.
