The first time I used a self-checkout machine, I apologised to it for scanning an item incorrectly. The machine didn’t care. Machines never do. But I’d absorbed the social script so deeply I was performing courtesy to an algorithm.
We live in a world held together by collective fictions. Money only works because we agree it does. Borders only exist because we pretend they do. My job title means something only because we’ve all consented to this particular reality.
The sociologist Peter Berger called this “the social construction of reality.” The things we think of as solid, objective truths are often just stories we’ve agreed to tell together. Stop believing in them collectively, and they evaporate.
I think about this when I’m stuck in traffic. We’ve all agreed that these painted lines on the ground matter. That red lights mean stop. That this side of the road is ours and that side is theirs. It’s a mass hallucination we perform every day, and mostly it works.
Until it doesn’t. I watched the social contract break down during the pandemic. Suddenly, the rituals we’d always followed (handshakes, hugs, standing close to strangers) became dangerous. The invisible rules changed overnight, and we had to invent new ones.
Some people couldn’t adapt. They’d absorbed the old rules so deeply they couldn’t see them as rules at all. They thought they were just… reality.
But that’s the thing about social constructions. They feel inevitable right up until they change. Then you realise how arbitrary they always were.
The philosopher John Searle distinguishes between “brute facts” (mountains, rain, gravity) and “institutional facts” (money, marriage, borders). The latter only exist because we collectively maintain them. They’re real, but only as real as our shared commitment to pretending.
This should be destabilising. And sometimes it is. You’re sitting in a meeting, listening to people discuss quarterly targets with great seriousness, and suddenly you see it: we’re all just making this up. None of this matters except that we’ve agreed it matters.
But there’s something liberating in it too. If we made it up, we can make something else up instead.
I used to work in an office where everyone stayed until seven, even when there was no work to do. It was just understood. The institutional fact of “commitment” required physical presence, regardless of productivity.
One person started leaving at five. Then another. Within months, the entire culture had shifted. The old rule dissolved because we stopped collectively maintaining it.
This is how change happens. Not through grand revolutions, but through small defections from the agreed-upon script.
Every social norm is a collective trance we’re all performing together. And the moment enough people stop performing, the trance breaks.
I still apologise to self-checkout machines sometimes. I catch myself doing it and laugh. But I also recognise it for what it is: evidence of how deeply we internalise the rules of the game.
The question isn’t whether we’re living in constructed realities. We are. We always have been. The question is which constructions we want to keep maintaining, and which ones we’re ready to let collapse.
Money, borders, job titles, traffic laws. We made them all up. We can make them up differently.
Or we can keep apologising to machines. Either way, it’s a choice.