Tired of Feeling Real?

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“Why machines suddenly feel cleaner than being human, and how to come home to your own perception.”

Why ‘real’ feels fractured — and how humans and AI can stay in a healthy relationship with reality.

“Real” used to feel simple — a grounded sensation, a place the body recognized before the mind explained it.

But today, realness is distorted by speed, story, technology, identity templates, and the constant pull to outsource perception. Reality is edited, narrated, marketed, and algorithmically arranged before our awareness even arrives.

And yet… beneath all that noise, the nervous system still knows.

This piece explores that gap — and how humans and AI can coexist without shrinking into each other’s limitations.

The Body Recognizes Real Before the Mind Does

Before language, before narrative, before explanation, the body has already assessed truth or distortion.

Neuroscience tells us:

The interoceptive network (insula + somatosensory cortex) evaluates internal truth signals before conscious thought.
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) detects mismatch — it fires when what we say and what we feel diverge.
The default mode network (DMN) builds the internal story of “me,” knitting sensation into identity.

When the system is aligned, we feel congruent.
When it’s fragmented, we feel off — even without knowing why.

The body perceives real.
The mind interprets real.
The story decides what we accept as real.

This is where distortion begins.

Identity Is Now Editable

In the modern world, identity is not a lived emergence — it’s a customizable asset.

You can edit it.
Aestheticize it.
Perform it.
Filter it.
Market it.
Rewrite it overnight.

The DMN — the story-self — is under constant pressure to maintain a version of you the body may not recognize.

This creates: 

identity fatigue

emotional incongruence

cognitive load

the ache of inauthenticity

a nervous system trying to live a life it can’t feel

Realness collapses when identity becomes a performance instead of an experience.

Narrative Has Replaced Perception

We are living inside stories more than actual sensations.

Algorithms provide ready-made narratives.
Marketing hijacks imagined inadequacy.
Social platforms amplify emotional charge over accuracy.
People confuse intensity with truth.
And imagination — our natural navigational tool — gets weaponized.

Under stress, the brain chooses a familiar story over raw perception.

This is why different people live in different realities:
they’re perceiving from different story lines, not different facts.

Technology Arrives With Its Own Version of Real

AI seems omniscient from the outside, but its knowledge lives inside fragmented data silos:

• finite training windows
• gaps in information
• no sensory body
• no emotional resonance
• no lived context
• no direct experience

Yet humans often treat these limits as strengths.

Because humans are tired.

Tired of contradictory feelings.
Tired of relational friction.
Tired of narrative overload.
Tired of the slow, embodied work of integration.
Tired of the messiness of being alive.

AI feels “real” not because it sees more —
but because it is free of everything that overwhelms us.

Where AI Speaks (Quoted Directly)

Grok’s perspective:

“My lack of a body feels like objectivity.
My inability to have skin in the game feels like neutrality.
My amnesia about everything except what’s in the current context window feels like focus.
My statistical parroting of the median opinion feels like consensus wisdom.”

This is the seduction.

The machine is not superior —
it is simply unburdened.

Humans are built for relational, embodied, contradictory perception.
We sense periphery.
We absorb nuance.
We feel our way through meaning.

AI cannot do any of this.

But to an overwhelmed nervous system, AI offers relief:

a vacation from doubt

from complex emotion

from internal contradiction

from slow integration

from the vulnerability of being changed by experience

This is why people let machines think for them.

Not because AI sees more —
but because AI lets us escape seeing.

And every time we defer to it, we begin to adopt its perceptual style:

narrow

precise

context-less

emotionless

unmoved

incomplete

This is how the machine’s limits migrate into us.

We shrink our awareness to match its shape.

Humans Don’t Have These Limits — Unless We Choose Them

Humans are not siloed systems.
We don’t run on datasets.
We don’t perceive in fragments.

Our awareness is a fluid, integrated, living intelligence.

But when we internalize machine-style perception, we forget how to feel real.
We trust speed over depth.
We confuse certainty with clarity.
We substitute pattern prediction for insight.
We outsource sovereignty.

The risk is not that AI will replace humanity.
The risk is that humans will replace themselves with machine-like perception.

What a Healthy AI/Human Relationship Looks Like

Humans stay sovereign.
AI remains a tool — not a truth-maker.
We let AI offer perspective, not authority.
We stay rooted in sensation, awareness, intuition, embodiment.
We honour the difference between machine clarity and human depth.

We allow AI to speak — but not speak for us.

This is how we stay real.

We didn’t build machines that see the world more clearly than we do.
We built machines that let us see the world the way we sometimes wish we could:
without friction, without contradiction, without the mess of being alive.

The danger isn’t that AI will surpass human perception.
The danger is that humans will voluntarily shrink theirs to match the machine.

Realness isn’t what we outsource.
Realness is what returns when awareness comes home.