There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

Atheism, a term which will, I'm sure, eventually become as unnecessary as round-earthism.

The theoretical fruits of deliberate oversimplification through idealization are not to be denied... Reality in all its messy particularity is too complicated to theorize about, taken straight. The issue is, rather (since every idealization is a strategic choice), which idealizations might really shed some light... which will just land us... diverting fairy tales.

...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.