If an Illusion Makes You Happy, Does It Matter That It Isn’t Real?

Photo by Sara Kurig on Unsplash

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately: if someone spends the rest of their life in an illusion, but dies genuinely happy, did they really live a worse life?

I know that’s an uncomfortable question, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it after watching a short animation. The story followed a rat trapped in the monotony of everyday life. Everything about its world was grey. The streets were grey. The buildings were grey. Even the other rats looked exhausted, moving through life as though they were simply existing instead of living. Then the rat takes a drug, and suddenly everything changes. The same streets become colourful. The same world feels alive. Nothing around the rat has actually changed, but to the rat, everything is different.

It made me wonder if that’s really what drugs are. Not an escape to another world, but an escape to another version of this one.

Then another question came to mind.

Why do we automatically assume that reality is better than illusion?

Imagine someone whose life has completely fallen apart. They’re homeless, they have no family left, they go to bed hungry most nights, and every waking moment is filled with pain. Now imagine that a drug allows them to experience something completely different. In their mind, they’re surrounded by people who love them. They feel successful. They feel free. They laugh. They experience a life they could never have imagined in reality. The drug wears off, so they take it again. Then again. Eventually, they spend more time in that reality than in this one.

If they eventually die believing they lived a happy life, what exactly makes that life less valuable?

Most of us instinctively reject the idea. We say the happiness wasn’t real. We say they wasted their life. We say they should have faced reality instead.

But why?

Is it because reality is inherently better?

Or because we’ve decided that truth is more valuable than happiness?

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that maybe drugs aren’t as unique as we think.

Haven’t we been creating alternate realities for years?

Think about social media.

How many people have lives that look completely different online from the lives they actually live? A carefully selected collection of photos, achievements, holidays, smiles, luxury, confidence, and success slowly becomes another version of themselves. People who are lonely appear surrounded by friends. People struggling financially appear wealthy. People whose relationships are falling apart post anniversary pictures with captions about forever.

The life on the screen isn’t always fake, but it often isn’t the whole truth either.

And strangely enough, many people eventually begin living for that version of themselves. The online version becomes more important than the real one. Validation from strangers starts feeling more rewarding than conversations with the people sitting beside them.

Maybe social media isn’t an escape from reality.

Maybe it’s the first version of a reality we’ve learned to edit.

And if that’s true, I can’t help but wonder where we’re headed next.

Virtual reality has always been marketed as entertainment, but what if its biggest market isn’t gaming at all?

What if one day people don’t buy virtual worlds because they’re fun, but because they’re preferable?

Imagine putting on a headset after a long day and stepping into a world where you’re healthier, wealthier, more attractive, more respected, and more successful than you are in real life. A world where rejection doesn’t exist, where your dream house already belongs to you, where your loved ones never die, and where every version of yourself is the version you’ve always wanted to become.

Would people really want to take the headset off?

Or would reality slowly become the place they visit between virtual sessions?

When you think about it, maybe the rat wasn’t escaping through drugs.

Maybe it was doing what humans have always done.

Searching for a reality that hurts a little less.

Maybe that’s why we read novels, watch films, scroll endlessly through social media, play games, and dream about lives we don’t have. Every one of them offers, in different ways, a temporary departure from the ordinary.

Perhaps the only difference is how immersive the escape becomes.

I don’t think this article is really about drugs.

I think it’s about something much deeper.

What makes a life meaningful?

Is it the fact that something actually happened?

Or is it enough that, to the person experiencing it, it felt completely real?

Part of me believes reality matters. That loving real people matters. That building something real matters. That our struggles and victories have meaning precisely because they happened.

But another part of me keeps thinking about that rat.

The rat wasn’t searching for drugs.

The rat was searching for colour.

Maybe that’s the real tragedy.

Not that it chose an illusion.

But that reality had become so grey that illusion felt like the better place to live.

And maybe that’s the question we should be asking.

Not why people try to escape reality.

But what kind of reality we’re creating that makes so many people want to leave it.