It had been three years since I had broken up with Lara. Three years of loneliness and just focused on work. I had been promoted to partner in the company and last September the company had gone through an acquisition that gave me just enough money to not worry about financial constraints for a time. Now, without work. There wasn’t much to do to escape the loneliness I had been drowning with work.

Can we say that the judge of what we consider real is now the degree of predictability?

Centuries ago, we could explain lighting as Gods being angry. We would do things to attempt to ease them (e.g. sacrifice a goat) and it would work or not. But the Gods were real to us.

In modern times, we know how lighting is produced, and we can predict it certainly well.

I’d argue both explanations have the same degree of realness narratively speaking (atoms producing lighting vs Gods throwing them from the sky) but what has changed is that one explanation predicts way better than the other.