Everyone is delusional
We like to think we see the world as it is. Rational, grounded, mature. But we don’t. We see the world as we predict it to be.
The brain is not a camera; it’s a storyteller. Every moment, it constructs a best guess about reality - stitching together memories, expectations, and sensory signals into a coherent scene we call “experience.” Neuroscientists describe this as predictive processing: perception is less about seeing what is, and more about testing what we believe should be there.
Our memories are not recordings, but reconstructions. Our emotions don’t cloud judgment - they shape it. And our biases, inherited from evolution and culture alike, quietly tune what we notice and what we ignore. In a sense, each of us lives inside a personalized simulation - not a hallucination detached from reality, but a continuously updated model of it.
That isn’t a flaw. It’s how the mind stays efficient.
I remember realizing this the hard way. Once upon a time, when I was doing experiments in a lab, I once built a model that predicted the behavior of an interface with what seemed like perfect accuracy - until it failed spectacularly in real conditions. I had trusted the math, but the math had quietly trusted me: my assumptions, my framing, my optimism. Years later, building products and leading teams, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat. The delusion just wears a new uniform - belief in a roadmap, a dataset, a market. And yet, without that belief, nothing would ever begin.
When a founder is convinced their idea will change the world, or when an artist keeps painting through years of rejection, we might call that delusion. Yet psychologists find that mild positive illusions — a bit of overconfidence, a touch of idealism - often fuel resilience and creativity. Too much realism can paralyze; a little self-deception can propel.
Still, not every delusion leads to genius. For every successful visionary, thousands sink quietly under the same weight of belief. We tend to remember the ones who succeeded - a classic case of survivorship bias. But progress often requires exactly that irrational spark: the refusal to see the world as fixed.
Sociologists remind us that even our “shared reality” is partly imagined. Money, borders, success, even time as we measure it - all are collective fictions sustained by mutual belief. The philosopher Erich Fromm once suggested that society itself can be sick, that what we call “normal” may simply be a collective dream we’ve agreed not to question. Modern cognitive science agrees: our species thrives on stories that synchronize minds.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re delusional, but how consciously we choose our delusions.
The mature mind doesn’t seek pure realism - that’s impossible. It learns to dream with awareness: to believe, but gently. To carry a vision while staying open to correction. To know that imagination and evidence are not enemies, but partners in building a world that feels, and sometimes becomes, real.
After all, every city, every piece of art, every scientific discovery began the same way - as someone’s beautifully structured guess about what might be true.