A strange & unconventional look at The Truman Show Delusion

josephustgu (33)in #truman • 7 years ago

Hi fellow Steemers!

On this post I will be discussing a so called delusion/mental disorder known as "The Truman Show Delusion". This subject has fascinated me for quite some time now and today I will be sharing my thoughts on this strange concept.

Many of you have probably seen the famous 1998 movie called "The Truman Show", starring Jim Carrey. I won't explain the movie in this post, so if you have not seen this masterpiece yet please do, but just to give you a summary, it's basically about a guy named Truman Burbank who lives what he believes to be a pretty normal life with a regular job, a loving wife, a loyal best friend and overall a simple life in a nice small town.

Throughout the movie, Truman starts noticing patterns and predictable events that lead him to question his reality and everybody else around him, including his wife and best friend. He then continues to pursue his suspicions until he finds out that in fact his entire world has been fabricated and recorded under the largest movie studio in the world. So in a nutshell, the creators of the show have been recording his every move since the day he was born and broadcasting it to millions of people.

According to Wikipedia.com, people who suffer from this condition believe that their lives are staged plays, that they are the stars of a reality TV show or that they're being watched by cameras in general. It is a very rare condition and not to many people have been identified as having this type of "delusion".

The reason this fascinates me is because when I look at the world today and see all the technology around us, as well as the reach of this technology, I can't help but wonder the possibilities of a Truman Show scenario taking place in the near future. I'm 32 years old and when I was a kid, we didn't have smart phones, laptops or even the internet (at least they were not available to the masses), but new generations grow up with this technology from day one and if we take a look at the capabilities of these devices, in the sense that they could easily be recording without our knowledge, it just makes me wonder if this is possible.

So imagine for a second, if a group of people or a company managed to develop the capability to hack all the smart devices on the planet and turn on the microphones and cameras so that they record 24/7 and all that data could be stored on huge data centers. Couple this with cities such as London that have over 420,000 cameras, averaging about one camera per 15 people and you suddenly have millions of Trumans walking around. Now imagine if that hack was to take place today, that means that our children and future generations would not be aware of this, creating a perfect scenario for such a plot.

So if you consider the above, suffering from the Truman delusion won't be that uncommon in the future, especially for someone who happens to watch this movie and is aware of the technology that surrounds them and wouldn't it be kind of cool if our kids someday find out that they are the TV stars of various shows to people from another universe? I'll stop here and leave the multiverse theory for another post.

I hope you enjoyed this post and remember...