The World and Its Eight Billion Stories

We like to think we live in one world. The truth is more unsettling: each of us carries our own world, stitched together from beliefs, fears, and desires. What appears as consensus is only a patchwork of overlapping stories, just enough to keep the machinery of society running. In reality there are eight billion separate worlds—eight billion private narratives—each insisting on its own truth.

From a distance this looks like sanity, like shared order. But if sanity means seeing reality as it is, then the world is not sane. It is a vast collection of hallucinations, each person running their own algorithm, defending their own story, and mistaking it for what is real.

Stories overlap just enough to appear as consensus, but at the root they remain private illusions. Your story and mine are never the same. Even in a stadium full of people chanting one slogan, there are as many versions of that belief as there are minds repeating it. Civilization itself is just codified delusion, the most popular stories written into laws, rituals, and institutions.

We can see this more clearly when we look back. Watch an old film, flip through a vintage advertisement, or listen to a politician’s speech from fifty years ago. You see people acting out gestures, postures, and trends that no longer hold our imagination. Their clothes, their slang, their rituals of romance or patriotism once seemed natural, unquestionable. Now they look quaint, even absurd. Yet at the time, millions lived and died inside those stories, certain they were real. Yesterday’s sanity becomes today’s costume. The lesson is unavoidable: what we call “reality” is only the collective hallucination of the moment.

Take money: symbols of faith disguised as wealth. Strips of paper, glowing digits, believed into being. We trade our years for them, guard them as if they could outlast time. Yet when belief falters, they vanish—mere patterns of ink and light.

Then fame: a shared hallucination of faces. Once it was the silver screen, now it is the glowing feed. For a moment, the crowd believes, and an image becomes divine. Then the algorithm shifts, and the god dissolves. Whole identities rise and fall on nothing more than attention.

Power fares no better. Nations still enthrone their saviors, but the stage has multiplied—politics performed across cameras and timelines, where outrage is currency and followers stand in for faith. The rulers are ruled by the same dream: control, destiny, belonging. They do not steer the tide; they drift upon it.

And beneath these familiar illusions, new ones bloom. We call endless connection “community,” constant updates “progress,” and algorithmic mirrors “self-knowledge.” The world hums with information but starves for understanding, mistaking motion for meaning, noise for life.

Yet beneath every illusion waits the simplest truth: all stories end. The body breaks, the name fades, the feed goes dark. We live as if death were theoretical, when it is the only fact. Knowing this, we cling all the harder to the simulation, afraid to wake before the dream is done.

So what do we have? A planet humming with eight billion story-machines—fearing, desiring, consuming, arguing—each convinced it has found reality. Seen from above, humanity looks less like a rational species and more like an immense carnival stage.

Eight billion actors, each improvising their roles, convinced the play is real. The scripts are stitched from memory and desire, fear and imitation. Entire audiences applaud one scene and hiss at another, until the mood shifts and the same actors are cheered for what was once condemned. The set itself changes constantly: one decade the world worships cigarettes and tuxedos, the next it worships fitness and self-expression. Nothing holds. Everything is theater.

Vedanta names the power behind this theater: maya. Maya projects what is not real and conceals what is. It shows us stories, objects, identities, and convinces us they are substantial; at the same time it hides the one truth that never changes. Under maya’s spell, the mind confuses flickering images for reality and overlooks the screen on which they appear.

This is why life feels insane: it is insane if sanity means seeing reality as it is. Eight billion hallucinations flicker at once, each held up as “truth,” each dissolving in time. The consensus we trust is only the temporary overlap of delusions, fragile enough to collapse with the next rumor or crisis. From the Vedantic view, samsara is not just suffering — it is a kind of mass psychosis, an endless trading of one dream for another while the substratum of awareness goes unnoticed.

Vedanta returns us to a deceptively simple question: Who is the “I” at the center of the story? If that question is examined honestly, the scaffolding of beliefs begins to loosen. Without it, we remain like dreamers in a collective dream—trading one storyline for another, fighting one belief against another, all while the underlying layer remains unseen.

It is an oddity, yes, but also the central human predicament. From one angle it is tragic: so much energy spent in delusion, so many lives consumed by stories that never deliver what they promise. From another angle it is profoundly mysterious: the Self, untouched and whole, play-acting as billions of storytellers at once.

The world is made of stories. The Self is not. To know the difference is the beginning of sanity.