Sometimes I feel like we’ve been living in the future for the last 100 to 130 years. What I mean is, sometimes it seems like the real world ended sometime in the late nineteenth century, and everything since then has been an epilogue, or not quite real. At various times I feel like the real world ended with the invention of the light bulb, or with the beginning of World War I, or with expressionism or atonal music — that the world stopped making sense somewhere around the turn of the twentieth century, and that nothing since then has been real: automobiles, movies, TV, radio, rock music, space travel, iPads.

Of course, every new technology has made the world seem different. One could just as easily say that the real world ended with the invention of the railroad, or with the Industrial Revolution, or the creation of cities, or the development of agriculture or the invention of writing. The last 5,000 to 10,000 years themselves could just be an epilogue to the vast human history that came before it. Perhaps ancient nomadic tribal society was the last “real” type of human existence.

That may be true, but there’s something about the light bulb to me that just seems different. It changed human existence not gradually but immediately and drastically. It robbed us of our regular circadian rhythms, and there must have been something magical about it. Or maybe I’m really thinking of electricity, not just the lightbulb? Maybe it was the telegraph that began to make the world seem unreal?

By “unreal,” I mean that electricity is something we can’t see. It’s something we can’t intuitively understand. Human beings can understand steam power, or mechanical power, or farming. But electricity? It seems like magic. I can’t even imagine how you’d explain the internet to Thomas Jefferson. And remember the first time you saw an iPhone? Remember how fucking awesome it was that you could zoom in on a website just by pinching it with your fingers? I’ve got an iPhone in my pocket and it still feels like magic.

Maybe that’s what I mean. We live in a world we don’t understand.

And yet… even the iPad is created out of materials that have existed for a few billion years. Yes, the materials have been mined and refined and chemically treated, and the architecture might be based on principles nobody understood until a few decades ago, but the raw materials themselves — the elements — have existed since the Earth finished forming. If we could somehow teleport an enormous group of human beings back in time a few thousand years — a group containing the right mix of people, including experts in every subject imaginable — they could probably recreate our modern conveniences, eventually. Some of them would know how to mine metal, some would know how to create electricity, and then electrical generators, and some would know how to create lathes, and so on. They could create the meta-tools needed to create the tools needed to create anything we have today. It couldn’t be done instantly, but it could be done.

Ultimately there is no “real” versus “un-real.” There was no golden age of the world. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been changing, and it always will change.

Sometimes the world I’m living in doesn’t feel real, but it is as real as I am. This world is weird, but I can laugh, and cry, and feel fear and happiness, and the littlest things can seem like the realest, most important things in the world to me.

As long as I am real, my world is real.