There are a lot of things we put a lot of stock in that don’t exist anywhere outside of human social construction.

Things like fairness, beauty, niceness, charisma, manners, equality, justice, postmodernism, celebrity.

These are not real in any sense apart from human understanding of them. I am not saying they are not good things, or that they are good things, only that they are the result of human construction and nothing more.

I like to ask myself if something would keep a bear from eating me to decide if it is real or not.

None of these things fit the bill. Violence or speed or being better at hiding than the bear is at finding would save me, but these other concepts would not.

We are humans, living in a complex human world and human society, so these things are necessary, but we often get them confused with things that are inherently existent in the world, when they are not.

This makes us think they are going to be more present than they are, or that they are inherently good things. Maybe some of them are, others maybe are not, but they are created by us, for us.

That’s it.