Welcome to the Age of Realism Fatigue
Once upon a time — which is how all good fairy tales begin — suspension of disbelief was a tidy little tool we used to indulge in dragons, space travel, talking animals, and the idea that people in rom-coms have apartments that match their personalities and incomes. It was a temporary transaction, a gentleman’s agreement, a pact signed between audience and creator with metaphorical ink: I know this is nonsense, but I’ll play along if you don’t insult my intelligence.
This idea, famously coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as the “willing suspension of disbelief,” was meant to give art its necessary air to breathe. Coleridge’s hope was that audiences would momentarily silence their rational faculties in favour of emotional truth. The dragons weren’t real, but the heartbreak was. The ghosts were fabrications, but the guilt was palpable.
But that was then. Before the world itself began auditioning for the role of absurdist theatre. Before reality TV became neither reality nor television. Before politicians quoted memes, tech CEOs roleplayed as gods, and conspiracy theorists became bestsellers on Amazon. These days, suspension of disbelief is no longer a leisure activity — it’s a survival strategy.
The Fictional Contract: Broken but Not Forgotten
Traditionally, suspension of disbelief was deployed like a visitor’s badge. You wore it when entering the imagined world and returned it at the door on your way out. Fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction — they all relied on that badge. You accepted the implausible if it served the probable. Gandalf could fall into shadow and return whiter than before because he was, after all, a wizard. We were fine with warp speed as long as the emotional logic of Spock’s sacrifice made sense. There were rules — even in rule-breaking.
The genres varied. Hard sci-fi asked you to believe in quantum wormholes but not in lazy plotting. Magical realism got away with absurdities wrapped in metaphor. Superhero films? Well, their disbelief threshold collapsed somewhere between the multiverse and the Bat-credit card.
Still, we always knew we were pretending. We had a tether to the real, even when we floated in the surreal.
But Then Real Life Said, “Hold My Beer.”
At some point — let’s call it the twenty-first century — the need to suspend disbelief seeped off the screen and into the bloodstream of everyday life. News cycles became indistinguishable from satire (except that satire still had editors). Headlines read like rejected Black Mirror scripts. A reality TV star became president, and nobody even blinked. Billionaires declared plans to colonise Mars whilst democracy quietly lost its pulse.
We began to live inside a fiction that demanded that our disbelief be suspended daily. Except now, it wasn’t voluntary. It was mandatory. If you wanted to participate in public life — or just maintain your sanity — you had to turn off some corner of your rational mind.
You had to believe, or pretend to, that the same people calling for “freedom” were banning books. That artificial intelligence would definitely save us, just as soon as it was done replacing us. That social media was both the great democratiser and the sewer mainline of civilisation.
The boundary between fiction and reality? Eroded. Fact-checking? Optional. Satire? Redundant. We’re all characters now, improvising in a genreless world that refuses to pick a lane.
Cognitive Gymnastics: Welcome to the Cirque du Surréalisme
What happens to a psyche caught in this funhouse? Nothing good.
Our brains, bless them, were designed for some contradiction — religion’s been pulling that trick for millennia — but the constant toggling between belief and disbelief, trust and cynicism, is another matter. We’re gaslit by the world itself. Each day, a parade of facts and fabrications marches past, and we’re told to clap for both.
Cognitive dissonance becomes the default. We scroll through doom and memes in the same breath. We read a fact, then three rebuttals, then a conspiracy theory, then a joke about the conspiracy, then a counter-conspiracy about why the joke is state-sponsored. Rinse. Repeat. Sleep if you can.
The result? Mental fatigue. Not just garden-variety exhaustion, but a creeping sense that nothing means anything unless it’s viral. Critical thinking atrophies not because we lack the will but because the floodwaters never recede. You cannot analyse the firehose. You can only drink — or drown.
Culture in Crisis: A Symptom or the Disease?
This isn’t just a media problem. It’s cultural, epistemological, and possibly even metaphysical.
We’ve become simultaneously more skeptical — distrusting institutions, doubting authorities — and more gullible, accepting the wildly implausible so long as it’s entertaining. It’s the postmodern paradox in fast-forward: we know everything is a construct, but we still can’t look away. The magician shows us the trick, and we cheer harder.
In a world where everything is performance, authenticity becomes the ultimate fiction. And with that, the line between narrative and news, between aesthetic and actuality, collapses.
So what kind of society does this create?
One where engagement replaces understanding. Where identity is a curated feed. Where politics is cosplay, religion is algorithm, and truth is whatever gets the most shares. We aren’t suspending disbelief anymore. We’re embalming it.
The Future: A Choose-Your-Own-Delusion Adventure
So where does this all end?
There’s a dark path, of course: total epistemic breakdown. Truth becomes just another fandom and reality a subscription model. But there’s another route — one with a sliver of hope — where we become literate in illusion.
We can learn to hold disbelief like a scalpel, not a blindfold. To engage the implausible with curiosity, not capitulation. To distinguish between narratives that serve power and those that serve understanding.
It will require a new kind of literacy. One part media scepticism, one part philosophical rigour, and one part good old-fashioned bullshit detection. We’ll have to train ourselves not just to ask “Is this true?” but “Who benefits if I believe it?”
That doesn’t mean closing our minds. It means opening them with caution. Curiosity without credulity. Wonder without worship. A willingness to imagine the impossible whilst keeping a firm grip on the probable.
In Conclusion, Reality Is Optional, But Reason Is Not
In the age of AI, deepfakes, alt-facts, and hyperreality, we don’t need less imagination. We need more discernment. The world may demand our suspension of disbelief, but we must demand our belief back. In truth, in sense, in each other.
Because if everything becomes fiction, then fiction itself loses its magic. And we, the audience, are left applauding an empty stage.
Lights down. Curtain call.
Time to read the footnotes.
Philosophics 