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Two words I wish someone had told me when I was 22.
Choose delusion.
Because every single thing you think is “realistic” about your life is actually just someone else’s delusion that you’ve agreed to live inside.
I spent my twenties being smart. Practical. Realistic about my chances. I followed the rules because the rules made sense. I accepted limitations because grown-ups told me they were real.
I was living inside a collective hallucination and calling it wisdom.
Here’s what broke my brain when I finally understood it: Nothing about how the world works is actually how the world works. It’s just how the world works right now because enough people decided to keep doing it that way.
Money? Made up. Your job? Made up. The idea that you need permission to start something? Made up. The belief that some people are naturally more capable than others? Made up.
The eight-hour workday was impossible until some delusional person decided it wasn’t. Democracy was insane until it became normal. Flying was fantasy until two delusional bicycle mechanics proved everyone wrong.
Every breakthrough in history happened because someone chose their delusion over consensus reality.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you: Reality fights back.
Not because it’s actually real, but because other people need you to believe their version of reality is real. Their power depends on you accepting their limitations as universal laws.
When you start acting like the rules don’t apply to you, people get uncomfortable. When you stop asking for permission, they tell you you’re being unrealistic. When you refuse to accept “that’s just how things work,” they call you naive.
They’re not protecting you from disappointment. They’re protecting themselves from having to question their own choices.
The moment you realize that most constraints are just collective agreements that can be broken, everything changes.
That industry standard everyone follows? Just a story that benefits whoever created it. Those barriers to entry everyone respects? Just agreements that can be ignored by anyone willing to ignore them. That career path everyone takes? Just one way of doing things that someone made up.
Reality is just consensus opinion that’s gained momentum.
And consensus can change faster than you think when someone commits to changing it.
Every time you act like something impossible might be possible, you’re running an experiment in reshaping what everyone else thinks is real. Every time you refuse to accept a limitation, you’re weakening the collective hypnosis that keeps that limitation in place.
Most people don’t understand this because they’ve never tested it. They’ve never tried living like their personal delusion might become everyone else’s reality.
But the people who reshape the world? They understand it perfectly.
They’re not more talented than you. They’re not more connected than you. They’re just more committed to their delusions than you are to yours.
Choose your delusion wisely.
You can keep living inside other people’s successful delusions and calling it being realistic. You can keep accepting their limitations as your limitations. You can keep asking for permission to do things that don’t require permission.
Or you can start testing which rules actually matter and which ones are just stories that haven’t been challenged by someone committed enough to prove them wrong.
The world is more malleable than they told you because they needed you to believe it was fixed.
Stop being realistic about what exists. Start being delusional about what could exist.
The person who understands this has an unfair advantage over everyone who doesn’t.
That person might as well be you.
Thanks for reading,
Scott
Scott D. Clary
