Is reality a rhetorical question?

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Last night, when I was making dinner, I decided there were too many pots on the stove. Only one of them had anything in it—a Penang-style Thai curry with spare ribs—while the rest of them were drying out after their afternoon run through the dishwasher. I started gathering up the clean ones to put them away, when suddenly I yelped: The 2-quart IKEA pot I’d grabbed had been sitting too close to the curry, and its handle had heated up to the burning point. I couldn’t just drop the thing on the tiled floor (or my toes), so I held on a second longer to get it back to an empty spot on the stove, then darted to the sink to run my right thumb, which got the worst of it, under cold water.

After a minute or two, once the pain and swelling had subsided, I turned off the faucet and continued cleaning up—and promptly burned my left thumb putting away the lid of the pot that hurt me in the first place.

I’m an idiot.

But you knew that already.

Now, as I write this three hours later, only the right thumb is even a little tender. By tomorrow, it will be back to normal, as if nothing had ever happened—or, if I’m lucky, a bit more leathery, which will help with my rock climbing. In a month, in a year, I might not even remember this moment, or how it felt: the pain, sure, but also the shame, the frustration, the maddening sense that although I will establish error-checking algorithms in my own head to prevent this from happening again, it will in all likelihood happen again. Those are all familiar sensations, at least for me, and possibly so familiar that it becomes difficult to perceive them, or to tie them to events I experienced. Their specificity—their reality—will be lost.

Except that now I have the above paragraphs, set in digital stone, to encapsulate that experience. The context, the comedy, the aftermath—they’ve been laid out in words that, while maybe not the most striking I’ve ever written, have a compact quality that gives them endurance. It works like a meme—man burns his right hand, says “Gotta be careful, don’t want to do that again,” then burns his left hand—because it is a meme, self-contained and mildly amusing.

But is it real? Did any of this take place the way I described? And if it did, were the emotions I experienced the precise ones described above, with the same intensity of feeling? Or did the writing of the incident create the incident, fixing it in all our minds as a comic interlude that reveals some of the writer’s insecurities, his culinary confidence boiling over into error after error to shake that confidence?

For me, it’s both. These things did happen, in more or less the way I described above. The lingering pain in my right thumb is surely proof. At the same time, my story of the incident is now, for me as it is for you, the definitive tale, the primary interpretation, and the only way I’ll really remember what happened, even if doubts and questions may remain. The words have superseded whatever the reality might have been.

I did this just two days ago! In “I went to a concert,” I wrote about how alone I felt while living in Vietnam in the mid-1990s, and how the music of Portishead got me through those sour times. My friend Ian, who appeared in the essay, read it and texted me, “I had no idea of your loneliness in Saigon and how this music held you.“ Which made me begin to wonder: Was I really as lonely as I wrote, or has loneliness become the defining atmosphere of my Vietnam experience because those were the words I put down?

It’s been this way for a long time now—let’s say 20 years, since I embarked in earnest on a career as a writer. In my heyday, when I was traveling constantly, I had to turn around articles about my adventures often mere hours after those adventures had ended. On my summer-long Frugal Traveler trips, I would gather experience Wednesday through Sunday, then file a story by Monday evening and work on edits Tuesday before the piece was published Wednesday. (Sometimes I’d also have to script and pre-edit a video.) In other words, I had to convert experience—recall details, interpret events, process emotions—into language almost immediately. I don’t mean to suggest this led to my making errors in the conversion, because yeah, I probably made errors, but that being on that kind of schedule compressed and conflated the living and the writing. After a while, the words would come to me in the middle of the experience itself. I’d be browsing a market in Lyon or at a meditation retreat in Colorado, and the sentences would form themselves—a grippy lede, a clever kicker—overtaking reality before reality even had a chance.

When I look back on those stories now, I can remember little apart from what I wrote. It’s as if I’m now you, my dear reader, trusting innately that the sentences correspond, as closely as possible, to some form of objective reality. We imagine that if we could rewind the video, it would play out more or less as I’d described, emotions and all.

It’s not wrong or childish to think this way. This is how language, both written and spoken, works: We make a leap of faith. We tie the words to the reality we know, and though we understand there may be some gap between them, we trust that in general it’s narrow—else how could we function? Completely untethered, we would not know what was real and what was not. The gap would become an abyss, and we all know what befalls those who gaze too long into it.

For many of us, the way to handle this disjunction is irony. At least, this was the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s contention, which I may of course be misremembering. His idea, which he drew from what he saw in Socrates, was that one could acknowledge that gap between what is said and what is meant and what is real—its breadth and its fathomless depth—and make that leap anyway. One could choose to trust that those whats were all fundamentally connected, and just carry on as if they were. You could gaze into the abyss for a while, then hop over it and go out for smørrebrød and a round of aquavit.

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The problem in 2025 is that this faith is so easily abused. It feels tedious to enumerate those abuses, but I will anyway, for the record: There are fans of AI who mistake grammatically correct sentences for accurate descriptions of reality, and for wise insights into that reality. There are politicians and oligarchs who rail against imaginary bogeymen, deploying terrifyingly empty initials and willful misinterpretations in order to enrage, and thereby enslave, their supporters. For them, reality really is what they say it is, and by eroding the ties of language to a universe we can all see and feel and hear and taste¹ , they make it impossible to argue otherwise. Our brains are too poisoned already. They’re setting Kierkegaard’s gap at the edge of a Flat Earth, with a leap of faith leading nowhere but the void.

That’s the easy accusation to make. The harder one is this: I do it, too. Over the decades of writing, I discovered that I was a better writer than a reporter. That is, while I could certainly dig up a story—do the research, conduct an interview, observe a scene—I was not particularly dogged or energetic. And so, quite often, I’d sit down to write an article and discover I was missing something. A good quote. A historical reference. A full set of contemporary data points and an expert to interpret them for me. All of these I could have assembled, had I the time or foresight (mostly the latter).

But in the end, it almost never mattered. Because I realized I was becoming a good enough writer to write around those faults. I could erect a narrative, full of suspense and drama, alive with voice and details, that would weave carefully if effortlessly past the holes. You would be so enmeshed in the story I had constructed for you that you wouldn’t even know what I didn’t know. Unless I told you, which I did occasionally, because those humble, apologetic asides and confessions of inadequacy or sloppiness only served to make you trust me more, to take that leap of faith into my writerly arms, never noticing how precariously I was teetering next to the abyss.

I don’t regret that. Hell, I’m probably doing it all through this essay. But I do question it: At what point do the craft and the art of writing hurt the goal of representing the world? Or, by insisting that we’re just showing one reality, or our own highly personal interpretation of reality, is that another form of laziness? We might think it absolves us of that burden, but it can feel like a ploy to get ourselves out of more challenging work. The concept of objective journalism has taken a lot of heat in recent decades, and I won’t defend it except to say that as an aspiration, it’s one I believe in. To transform words—infinite in supply, free to all—into a true representation of the universe, one that inspires and rewards a leap of faith, is a responsibility I take seriously.

Let’s just pretend for a moment that we are not living in a simulation. The cosmos that surrounds us is real, and the laws of physics, whether we understand them or not, apply, universally and indifferently, to the workings of the flesh in which our consciousnesses reside. How do we communicate that with our sloppy, flappy tongues? No: How do we even understand it apart from the language we use?

I won't even begin to answer those questions, which linguists, philosophers, and theoretical physicists have worked on for generations. They’re also not really the kind of questions I can quickly and adequately address in a hastily typed email before bed² .

I also don’t have an answer yet for how to bridge the gap between those of us who accept reality and those who babble it out of existence. That may come later, but I hope not too late.

Me, I’m more concerned with how to get by in this era when reality, however we attempt to describe it, feels ever more unreal. For now, for me, and maybe for you, the goal is not to understand the universe but to appreciate it in all its tactile splendor. I can run and feel the breath in my lungs—that is real. I can cook and eat the food my family and I enjoy—that is real. I can hug my daughters and listen to the house sparrows peep outside my windows at dawn—they are real. Those experiences have an immediacy that circumvents my instinct to turn them right then and there into words and sentences. They hit at the core of what it means to be human in a time of strife and lies, and I like to think I will remember them all just as they’ve happened, just as they will continue to happen, even if I never write them down. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: Spoiler Alert, Ending Explained

1  Ableist, I know!

2  See, here I am again, confessing to an inadequacy that I hope will make you trust me more!