"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"
About this Quote
Philip K. Dick draws a hard line between belief and what endures. Reality is the stubborn remainder, the thing that resists wishful thinking, ideology, and private fantasy. Stop believing in gravity, and you still hit the ground. Walk away from a debt or a diagnosis, and the consequences keep advancing. The definition is crisp but not naive. It does not claim that reality is simple or transparent; it claims only that something remains when our narratives fail.
That insistence runs through Dick’s work, where counterfeit worlds constantly tempt his characters. In Ubik, order itself seems to unravel; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, empathy tests and synthetic animals blur moral and material boundaries; in A Scanner Darkly, addiction distorts perception until self-recognition fractures. Behind the paranoia lies a moral project: to separate the durable from the delusory, not by authority but by collision with what stays put when attention and faith are withdrawn.
He wrote the line in an essay late in his career, after mystical experiences and bouts with hallucination had made him acutely aware of the mind’s powers and limits. It is both a joke and a lifeline. The joke is that reality is a kind of prankster that refuses to take the hint. The lifeline is that we can test what is real by letting go of it. If it is merely a story, it will dissolve; if it persists, we must accommodate it.
The thought anticipates the scientific habit of falsifiability and the everyday wisdom of checking what bites back. In an age of deepfakes, conspiracy loops, and curated feeds, the line feels practical: close the tab, log off, and see what is still there. Reality’s persistence is not just a metaphysical point; it is an ethical one. It demands humility toward facts and compassion for embodied suffering, those human truths that keep asserting themselves long after belief has emptied out.
That insistence runs through Dick’s work, where counterfeit worlds constantly tempt his characters. In Ubik, order itself seems to unravel; in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, empathy tests and synthetic animals blur moral and material boundaries; in A Scanner Darkly, addiction distorts perception until self-recognition fractures. Behind the paranoia lies a moral project: to separate the durable from the delusory, not by authority but by collision with what stays put when attention and faith are withdrawn.
He wrote the line in an essay late in his career, after mystical experiences and bouts with hallucination had made him acutely aware of the mind’s powers and limits. It is both a joke and a lifeline. The joke is that reality is a kind of prankster that refuses to take the hint. The lifeline is that we can test what is real by letting go of it. If it is merely a story, it will dissolve; if it persists, we must accommodate it.
The thought anticipates the scientific habit of falsifiability and the everyday wisdom of checking what bites back. In an age of deepfakes, conspiracy loops, and curated feeds, the line feels practical: close the tab, log off, and see what is still there. Reality’s persistence is not just a metaphysical point; it is an ethical one. It demands humility toward facts and compassion for embodied suffering, those human truths that keep asserting themselves long after belief has emptied out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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