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Livin’ the dream

When someone says they’re “livin’ the dream,” they abolish the distinction between wishful fantasy and mundane reality, proudly or gratefully asserting the two are indistinguishable for them—an enviable synchrony! When we tell someone they need a “reality check,” we’re suggesting there’s a dangerous discrepancy between what they believe and what’s actually happening in their lives. When our time spent in motorcycle-related activities gets construed, by ourselves or anyone else, as an “escape from reality,” the implication is we can somehow leave behind a world of unwelcome constraints and impingements in favor of an unreal refuge. All such figures of speech beg the question how any of us determines what’s real and what’s not.

Photo (and sign) from TTEC.

Since we’re rarely confronted with the need to reflect on this profoundly fundamental issue, we normally don’t question it. Reality gets taken for granted on the basis of our accumulated observations, with little or no regard for the importance of contextual factors or the inherent vulnerability to distortion of human perception and interpretation. We cruise through a constant stream of sensory inputs and largely unconscious processing of same as though most everything can simply be taken at face value, without noticing the countless influences on how this seemingly obvious and singular metric gets defined within each of us, idiosyncratically. It’s a daunting project to seriously consider the post-modernist emphasis on inescapable subjectivity, which leaves us all occupying separate realities with no appeal to an objective, universally applicable Truth with a capital “T;” there are only small-t truths for each of us individually, shaped by our unique constitutions and experiential histories, the social/cultural/historic contexts in which we live, and the limited information and psychological tolerance available to us at any given moment, among many other variables.


Listen to this column as Episode 31 of The Ride Inside with Mark Barnes. Submit your questions to Mark for the podcast by emailing [email protected]. This episode will be available starting 1 August 2023.


Nobody can navigate a world wherein everything is uncertain. Merely conceptualizing such an existence is impossible. Hence, our typically uncritical acceptance of whatever definition of reality we’ve settled upon serves an essential function in allowing our movement through the day. If I had to wonder about the very existence of any chair I might want to sit in, not to mention its ability to support my weight, life would slow to such a crawl I’d get nothing done, and it would feature perpetual and grave insecurity on every front; I’d be paralyzed. This is completely unacceptable, regardless of any considerations of veracity. To function at even the most rudimentary level of adequacy, I need to take things for granted all day long, including my perceptions of physical objects, my understanding of how specific things and the world at large operate, my expectations of other people, and myriad additional domains of routine existence. Although many of my assumptions may be wrong in one way or another, this approach works well enough most of the time—but what about those inevitable errors?

Even a cursory appreciation of the limitations of subjective consciousness compels us to keep in mind our own fallibility. Our view can be inaccurate, incomplete, or both. In fact, the clear implication is it will always be both to some degree. If we truly believe this, the only viable compromise is to recognize the practical necessity of trusting somewhat erroneous ideas, while maintaining the flexibility to reconsider any that become extra-suspicious upon the arrival of conflicting data. If we cling to our perspective too tightly, we risk running aground on some disavowed feature beyond the frontier of our own personally defined reality. While we’re incapable of knowing everything with complete accuracy and comprehensiveness, we can certainly keep expanding our horizons and modifying our views to better approximate the realms around and within us—or can we?

Our capacity for this type of incremental enlightenment is also limited. Some ideas are too emotionally painful to accept, no matter the weight of evidence in their favor. Change is disturbing on numerous levels, including our vulnerability to frightening disorientation and the challenge to future self-confidence embedded in any admission past views were incorrect or incomplete. That’s before we even get to the potentially arduous problem of altering our lifestyles accordingly. It can be upsetting to simply acknowledge ours is but one perspective among the eight billion currently populating the planet. As preposterously arrogant as it would be to insist on our absolute correctness—that ours is the one True take on things—this is our implicit conviction during most of our lives, largely because we’d otherwise be plunged into an intolerable chaos of relativity and doubt. Human beings crave certainty and regularly sacrifice accuracy and comprehensiveness to secure it.

Despite these difficulties and threats, it still behooves us to pry open our minds, if only a little bit. We needn’t unleash a Pandora’s Box of infinite confusion; we can just question assumptions one at a time and curtail the process before overwhelming ourselves with an existential crisis. We might think about the multiplicity of realities as (partially) a function of the narrowness of our attention. Consider the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh:

I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t recall the passage clearly, or even remember where to look it up, but Pooh and Christopher Robin are together on a bucolic hillside. The boy is reading his newspaper very seriously, learning about the latest disasters plaguing the globe. The bear is lying on his back, happily watching a butterfly. Pooh asks Christopher, “What are you doing?” The boy replies, “I’m finding out what’s going on in the world.” Pooh thinks to himself, “Hmmm. That’s what I thought I was doing.” Who’s right? Of course, they’re both correct, albeit with their respective foci in different places. It’s easy to see how they inhabit non-overlapping realities as a result.

Which will you choose?

Getting back to the notion of motorcycling as an escape from reality, we could ask which is “the real world?” Is the relentless grind of work and domestic chores or the emotional strain of fraught interpersonal relationships somehow more legitimately “real” than negotiating the laws of physics on a canyon road or taking in the fresh air and scenic beauty on a tour of the countryside? Is suffering the defining characteristic of reality, with everything else cast as living in a fantasy world? No doubt, some people hold this view. Their lives have contained such horrors any relief is mistrusted as a fraudulent distraction that would set them up to be blindsided by the next nightmarish onslaught. Other folks may be skeptical of respite on moralistic grounds, considering its use lazy, selfish, or cowardly, and condemning it as a self-indulgent denial of all-too-real responsibilities. If they don’t feel permission to enjoy a break, then nobody else gets to have one, either!

We can go further than insisting our immersion in a motorcycling reality is just as valid as time spent dutifully fulfilling our obligations elsewhere and tending to the tedious tasks of adulthood; maybe riding is actually more real. Much illusion gets baked into people’s conceptions of “necessity.” Neurotic anxieties based on exaggerated imaginings of dire consequences for defying social expectations are a subset of such distortion. One reason The Matrix achieved blockbuster status was its resonance with the common experience of inhabiting a world that allows us occasional glimpses of its own fabrication. We might live with a rigidly held conviction dire catastrophes would immediately ensue without our continuous control or endless self-sacrifice, only to find nothing much changed when our efforts were involuntarily interrupted. It can be quite humbling to discover everything carried on fine without us. Or we might anticipate disastrously explosive reactivity when we finally launch a long-procrastinated confrontation, only to find the other person graciously understanding and apologetic. We could have had peace of mind much sooner. We often live within the confines of unrealistic demands and inhibitions we perceive as coming from the outside world, but which are actually self-imposed. Alternatively, we may have reasonably accurate expectations about what will happen if we cross some line, but grossly overestimate the subsequent impact or underestimate our resilience; we survive intact when we thought we’d be devastated. Vast swaths of society live within an artificial jungle where all sorts of initiatives are prohibited for fear of paper tigers. Is that the “reality” we’re supposedly escaping? Are those considerations more real than the interactions of gravity, traction, and momentum we contend with mid-corner? Which is really the dream world?

Photo (and tiger) by Full Focus.

In psychological assessment, reality contact is measured by the conformity of a person’s perspective to statistical consensus. If I present you with ambiguous stimuli, you’re supposed to see what most people see. If you consistently don’t, I may deem you out of touch with reality—at least the reality of those who established the consensus. Obviously, it’s advantageous to be able to view the world as others do, since this allows us to easily empathize with most other perspectives and accurately anticipate how those around us will think, feel, and behave. Yet it’s also an asset to be capable of divergence, which allows us to “think outside the box,” create novel art, and surprise a foe, to name just a few possible benefits. Being trapped in either hidebound conventionality or an utterly idiosyncratic vantagepoint is deeply problematic. It’s vital to have good range of motion, psychologically speaking, with both an appreciation of how most of our peers view things and an ability to shrug off convention when it proves too constrictive.

We need the freedom to change which reality we occupy, recognizing the lines between them are (at least somewhat) arbitrary. In a different time, place, and culture, we’d consider wood sprites the unquestionable cause of our village’s woes. The fact we all believed this would have qualified it as consensus-based reality then and there, but we wouldn’t accept it as a realistic explanation here and now. Likewise, elements of life we currently agree are readily apparent will be drastically revised in the future; history indicates this is inevitable. Even when determining what’s real for us today, whose consensus are we referencing? It certainly can’t be everyone everywhere.

We could conclude there are so many arguably valid realities, it’d be pointless to try to determine which is “most real;” they might as well all be dreams. If reality is up for grabs, I’ll pick the one I like best, as long as I don’t have to ignore incoming information to maintain my chosen perspective. Now, please excuse me while I go for a ride and switch the channel on my dream machine.


Mark Barnes is a clinical psychologist and motojournalist. To read more of his writings, check out his book Why We Ride: A Psychologist Explains the Motorcyclist’s Mind and the Love Affair Between Rider, Bike and Road, currently available in paperback through Amazon and other retailers.