The Death of Shared Reality: Why We’ve Stopped Inhabiting the World

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]I don't usually talk about politics on this channel, but this video isn't about politics. Well, not really. It's about storytelling, but perhaps they're two sides of the same coin. Good evening. My name's Edward King Thompson, and welcome to another video. Please excuse the bad haircut.

[00:00:17]>> Yeah, they hang 18. Hangar 18, right?

[00:00:20]I've heard that as well, but I don't know. I haven't looked into it yet.

[00:00:23]>> Okay. All right. All right. Well, we're waiting for it. We saw aliens. We saw aliens.

[00:00:28]>> I don't think they're I don't think they're aliens. I think they're demons anyway. But that's a longer discussion.

[00:00:32]I think they're demons anyway. I think they're demons anyway. I think they're demons anyway. When I hear about sort of extra natural phenomenon, that's where I go to is the Christian understanding that, you know, there's a lot of good out there, but there's also some evil out there. One of the devil's great tricks is to convince people we never existed.

[00:00:48]>> I think they're demons anyway. So, I think they're demons anyway. This is the vice president of the United States publicly stating that he believes UAP are controlled by demonic forces of biblical proportions and that they are an active physical threat against the USA and the rest of the world. That is a very bold claim. Hank Green has an excellent video discussing this subject in more detail, but I think it serves as a poignant example of just how fractured and disperate our individual narrative identities have become. So what do I mean by narrative identity? I mean the story we tell ourselves about our own existence. Our interpretation of reality as determined by the input from our five senses. The idea of a fractured narrative identity is not a new one. I would argue that it was the universal standard from the birth of civilization until around the midentth century. For a period of around 70 years, beginning after World War II, long-distance communication, commercial air travel, and mass media culminated to create what we might call a cultural mainstream, at least in the Western world. During this time, the majority of people, whilst disagreeing about what action was to be taken about certain issues in society, could at least agree that those issues and society itself actually existed. I'm not saying that this agreement upon reality was some profound truth about the universe. The point I'm trying to make is that people were by and large on the same page. But that ship has sailed.

[00:02:18]The rise of independently produced media in combination with aggressively personalized algorithms has fractured mainstream culture so severely that everyone has a profoundly unique grasp on reality that is constantly and fiercely reinforced by nearly every piece of media that they are exposed to.

[00:02:35]in online space. These are our new universal narratives and each of us has our own uniquely tailored to our own desires and moral standing. I think what I find particularly frightening about the dissolution of the cultural mainstream is that it was really abnormal when it did exist. Our individual narratives about the world have arguably been desperate since the birth of civilization. People lived out their entire lives in staggeringly small bubbles of space. Nor did most have the slightest idea about the lives or even existence of those not within this tiny area. People's narrative identities would have been utterly alien to one another outside of their tribes, communities or religions. The account of Spanish concisador Bernal Diaz del Castillo upon his entry to the ancient Aztec city of Tenoshedlan goes some way to illustrating this point. It was also wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, never seen, and never dreamed of before. Except in centuries past, our ancestors weren't having their every thought validated by 10 meticulously selected short form videos, nor did they have a global platform to instantly share their radical belief systems. Our narrative identities are not an objective measure of reality.

[00:03:47]They alone will not lead us towards peace nor truth. They are mythology.

[00:03:51]They are legends. This is where our folklore has gone. From knowledge tied to the land to a sea of information fragmented by algorithms in digital space. And unlike our ancestors in the days of Yore, these stories no longer aid our survival. In fact, they may ultimately result in our demise. This is Canary Warf. At its heart, it is a gargantuan construction of metal and steel. The construction of which is motivated almost entirely by industrial capitalism. It has frequently been described as a soulless dystopian landscape or corporate hellscape. There is nothing of character or even of narrative to this area. It's so incredibly uniform, functional, and indistinct that it doesn't even seem human. I think these feelings stem from the fact that it entirely serves the machine of industrial capitalism, which, let's be honest, is human adjacent at best. It doesn't matter what the physical space here conveys on a human level. It's merely a skeleton to support a world of corporate transactions which exist somewhere else. There is no space left for storytelling or human connection or even the history of what stood here before. You may argue that any artificially constructed landscape is and always has been built with these similar functional motives. But this simply isn't the case. To give an extreme example, this is the village of Ulm in South Oxfordshire. It was established in the 15th century by the Duke of Suffk and his wife Alice Chicer, granddaughter of famous poet Jeffrey Chicer. And what was it that they established here? A church, a schoolhouse, and a row of alms houses for the poor and elderly to live in. All of which still exist and serve the same function today as they did 550 years ago. Over time, industry organically flourished around this village with water crest beds being planted and harvested in the nearby chalk stream.

[00:05:38]And the spirit of Alice Chicer lived on in folklore. Her ghost being cited around the thriving but intimate community she established all those centuries ago. Through these legends, the history of Ulm was passed down through subsequent generations, grounding them in the context of their past and combining spirituality with industry. Folklore of the land served to balance and enrich community culture.

[00:06:01]It's a humbling experience to live rationally day by day, working to live, but leaving the door open to legends and mythology. accepting that there may be things beyond your current understanding of reality. Contemporary online culture seems incapable of holding two beliefs in tandem or indeed of any nuance at all. Like Vance's UFO demons, the folklore of today must either be fully implemented into our narrative identity, the supernatural considered a tangible presence and an anti-Christian threat as real as foreign adversaries, or else discarded as complete delusional nonsense, the enemy of rationality and science. Of course, it's very easy to argue that interest in folklore is actually experiencing a resurgence, the likes of which it has never seen before.

[00:06:43]There are now countless podcasts, YouTube channels, and audio books covering these subjects. And some of this discussion has even breached the surface and entered the mainstream with shows like Uncanny or Charlie Cooper's Myth Country. Many have theorized that interest in such esoteric subjects spikes after periods of great tragedy like the world wars or in this case the Corona virus pandemic. So much intimate exposure to death naturally sparks fear and curiosity about what lies beyond it.

[00:07:11]But there's a key element to this renewed fascination with folklore, history, and the paranormal. It's almost exclusively occurring in online space.

[00:07:20]Of course, the internet is now the dominant space for the sharing of stories and ideas of all subjects. But I want to ask you a question. Even if you have an interest in this subject, how much do you actually know about the history of the physical space surrounding you and the folklore that those who once lived there have shared about it? The strange truth is that many of us no longer inhabit physical space, at least not completely. There is increasing evidence to suggest that smartphones are an extension of the body's schema. We offload information onto them like names, phone numbers, and dates. The brain also seems to supplement analytical thinking for internet searches and more recently responses from LLMs. In a sense, we are cyborgs carrying around external hard drives in our pockets. It's an airy thought that half of our minds exist elsewhere and so too do our stories.

[00:08:09]Folklore and legends birthed through oral storytelling that were once localized and tied to the landscape of their origin are now catapulted across the world at light speed. And they're still changing, not by way of oral retellings down through the generations, but by artificial intelligence, which consumes all human creation before regurgitating it into unoriginal culturalist slop. Okay, perhaps I'm exaggerating a little. I'm aware that much of what I've just said sounds like the ravings of a paranoid lunatic. There is no doubt that without the internet, we would already have lost so much folklore that has been preserved through video, audio, and text. I probably wouldn't have such an interest in esoteric subjects if it were not for online communities. My point is not that we send a giant middle finger to the internet and all of its shortcomings, but that we should promote a type of information sharing that seeks to preserve and archive these cultural narratives, not one that alters them for more engagement and thus more profit.

[00:09:04]But I suppose the broader idea I'm trying to promote here is that we shouldn't just abandon the history of our physical spaces just because the stories there are more difficult to find than a simple Google search. It's our collective responsibility to seek out the folklore and legend which colors the history of our surroundings. To let these stories die out is to discard the lives of the everyday people who once inhabited the same spaces as we do. And this is a very real concern. A BBC report from 2025 quoted the Welsh author Anharadwen as saying that Welsh folk music could die out within a generation.

[00:09:38]Historic Environment Scotland said in 2023 that Scotland needs a dedicated framework to ensure that folklore, art, and traditional skills are not lost through neglect. If history is written by the victors, then folklore is the history of everyone else. We need to immerse ourselves in our local environments. And to use a terribly modern phrase, go touch grass.

[00:10:01]Thank you very much for watching. You might also enjoy this video and please check out my channel for more videos on dark history, folklore, and the paranormal.