Notice Anything Off About Reality Lately? It’s Not Just You.
There's a feeling I can't shake lately. Not quite déjà vu, but something, adjacent? A persistent sense that reality has subtly shifted. Not in the way we've all grown accustomed to describing ("the world's gone mad" or "we're living in unprecedented times"), but something more fundamental, as if the underlying mechanics of daily life have been quietly recalibrated when we weren't looking.
I didn't want to mention it at first. Who needs another person talking about strange vibes? But then I started keeping notes.
On Tuesday, I'm walking north on Ventura Boulevard when I pass a man in a distinctive blue windbreaker heading south. I spend forty minutes at the café, head back. There he is again, now walking north in the exact same spot, same pace, same blank expression. Like someone picked him up and reset him to his starting position. I've started calling him Blue NPC in my notes.
Yesterday, a girlfriend started telling me about her friend's cheating boyfriend of a year. They were long-distance. She mentioned his name and my stomach dropped. He had cheated on her friend with me, five weeks ago. In a city of eight million people. What are the odds? It felt like lazy writing, like when TV shows introduce a character who turns out to be someone's long-lost cousin. Something A.I. might suggest as a plot point.
The time anomalies freak me out the most. On the drive to Coachella last weekend, my friend and I pulled off the freeway for Starbucks. Traffic was backed up “as far as the eye could see” (lazy). We sat through one light cycle. Found parking. Ordered drinks. Used bathrooms. Staged an impromptu photoshoot while waiting for drinks. By any reasonable measure, this detour should have consumed at least twenty minutes.
Our phones showed only seven minutes had passed. Total.
"That's not possible," she said, checking the timestamps on her photos.
I started noting other weird shit. The more I pay attention, the more the fabric of daily life seems to fray at the edges. Three cars appearing simultaneously at a four-way stop near my house, as if they'd been spawned there rather than naturally arriving.
My neighbor and I pulling out of our driveways simultaneously, then hours later, returning at the exact same moment. Four times in two weeks. If this were fiction, I'd call it heavy-handed foreshadowing.
Even music triggers it now. Last month, a horn section in a song made my friend and I simultaneously visualize what we both called "eggbeater eternity 8's." Identical mental images we had no language for until that moment. We stared at each other in silence as the song played on.
When I mentioned these glitches at a dinner, instead of being labeled the resident conspiracy theorist, I was met with hushed confessions. "I've been noticing things too." "Sometimes I feel like I'm in a simulation." "Time doesn't work the way it used to."
The evidence points to one inescapable conclusion. It sounds insane, but after analyzing, I believe we're living through the quiet phase of the most significant transition humanity has ever experienced.
The “simulation” has new management and yes, life has been TEMU’d…