Unveiling the Simulacrum

What is real?

Recently, I have been struggling with some health issues. It seems obvious, but the best way to get healthier is simply eating whole foods and exercising. But as I was thinking about healthy living, I began to realize that everything I was doing was an imitation of the average person’s life 100 years ago. I may have been lifting weights, eating organic vegetables, and going on jogs around my house, but all this felt horribly fake.

Today I want to teach you a new word: simulacrum. According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, simulacrum is a noun that means “an image or representation of someone or something [...] an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute.” All my efforts were only a simulacrum, an unsatisfactory imitation, of what true health looks like. My exercise was imitating a day of hard work, and my eating habits were imitating the diet of a peasant from long ago. I was stupefied. It felt like everything I did was fake!

So I began to think, “Perhaps I could grow my own vegetables, or at least some of them, and my hens give me eggs so maybe not everything I eat is simulacrum…” But I realized that even the seeds at the supply store come in little plastic packages, and they would be genetically different from the true varieties found in nature. Simulacrum!

I started going even deeper into this idea. My house, like most houses, has interior walls made of drywall and support beams with insulation stuffed between. But why? Houses used to be made of stone, wood, clay, or plaster. All materials that could be taken directly out of nature and used nearly unadulterated. Even the outside of my house, which is made of limestone, was only surface level. The back of my house has no stone at all, only cement that looks like wood. My stone house is only partially made of stone, and even the wood is fake.

We are surrounded by simulacrums. Why must we work to get money then buy food when we could just grow it ourselves? Why must we wear fake leather shoes when real leather exists? It seems like we have been jipped into thinking our lives are natural when in fact the majority of objects we interact with are completely fake.

I think this leads us to the greatest of all simulacrums in the digital layer of society. Money, communication, online images, ebooks– they are all pretending to be real when they have no substance. Nothing to give them bulk but the minuscule particles producing the light on a computer screen. Even this blog post has nothing to it. Shut off the world’s electricity and it simply ceases to exist.

It’s terrible really. Our skyscrapers are getting taller and cheaper, but all I want is to feel the earth beneath my feet. I want my clothes to be made out of real fibers, not plastic, and I want everything I touch and see to be made out of the materials God gave us to work with.

Right now, I can't do much about this ever-permeating simulacrum in society. Instead, I can only daydream about smashing my computer and living in a house I built myself. Then I could truly rid myself of all falsehood.

But would that really make all simulacrums stop in my life? Or do I myself become a simulacrum, an unsatisfactory substitute for a person living years ago?