Back in 2010 I wrote a post about the power and price of illusions. It was built on a small, informal experiment: I asked people if they were living in an illusion. Everyone said no. A few months later, after their circumstances had changed, I asked again. Different answers.

The point was simple: the most dangerous illusions are the ones you’re most sure aren’t there. Sixteen years later, that part holds.

What changed is everything around the illusions themselves. I wrote that post before filter bubbles, before deepfakes, before AI content by the truckload, before the whole epistemological circus of the 2020s — a decade that turned out to be a masterclass in manufacturing illusions and shipping them at scale. The personal illusions from 2010 didn’t go anywhere. They just got stronger and industrialized.

One I Dismantled

Back then I was living inside a very clean illusion myself: that the quality of your work decides your outcomes. Do the work well enough and the results show up on their own. I believed it. I defended it when people pushed back. It felt like integrity — proof I wasn’t playing games or chasing attention.

What it actually was: an excuse. A tidy story that let me skip the uncomfortable parts — being visible, selling, asking for what I wanted out loud.

Taking it apart cost me some ego and a few comfortable stories I told about myself. Being involved is just as important, and being open about what you want is just as important, but because I was too inertial in my “work hard” mantras, it took longer than it should have. Oh, and also because the illusion was half true. Quality does matter. It just doesn’t work in isolation, the way I wanted it to. And that was a very pleasant trap. The half-true illusions are the hardest to kill.

The New Infrastructure of Illusions

The 2020s did something the 2010 version couldn’t. Back then the illusions were personal. Yours, mine, one at a time. Now they’re shared, delivered by algorithm, and reinforced by oceans of social media. The old experiment — ask someone if they’re living in an illusion, watch them say no — now runs on whole populations at once.

AI content piled on another layer. You can now generate convincing proof for basically any position you want — text, images, charts, expert-sounding arguments, all of it, in seconds. The old filter was raw but it worked: does this look like a human made it? That filter is dead.

So the machinery that keeps illusions alive just got a serious upgrade, exactly when verifying anything got harder for the rest of us.

The One I’m Probably Still Living In

So what am I still fooling myself about? Probably this: I think I’m more consistent than I actually am. I’ve got a story about myself — the guy who follows through, does the work, doesn’t need anyone holding him accountable. Parts of it are true. The parts that aren’t — the projects I started and quietly let die, the commitments I softened and rebranded as “pivots” — I’ve gotten good at folding those back into the story without it cracking.

The 2010 post ended by handing the discomfort back to the reader. I’ll do that again. You’re living in at least one illusion right now — something that feels like clarity and is actually just a bandaid. Whether it’s there isn’t the question. It’s there.

The question is whether you’re willing to honestly look at it. And whether, this time, you can afford what the looking will cost.