In This Dream of Reality...
Let's run the game theory. You desire Outcome X.
Scenario A: You stress, fixate, and dwell in lack of Outcome X.
— If you get X: you suffered the entire wait.
— If you don't get X: you suffered the entire wait and got nothing.
Scenario B: You drop the resistance and allow yourself to feel whole now.
— If you get X: you enjoyed the wait and the result.
— If you don't get X: you still enjoyed the wait.
In any universe where "time spent suffering" is a net loss, Scenario B is strictly dominant.
It wins regardless of outcome.
That alone is enough to act on. Waiting for the world to change before you allow yourself to feel whole is not humility - it's a logical error.
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Two World Models, Same Instruction
In our default Materialist worldview, cultivating internal wholeness lowers stress hormones, increases parasympathetic response and flow, prevents burnout, and makes you a more effective agent. This is the mechanical basis of Stoicism and CBT.
So this is the dominant strategy if Materialism is true.
But that was the floor.
If Idealism is true - if consciousness is the ground of reality rather than a byproduct of it - then the implications aren't just psychological. They're structural.
Your internal state isn't upstream of your experience in some soft motivational sense. It's upstream in the way a cause is upstream of its effect.
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Stripping Everything Back To First Principles
But is there a case for Idealism?
We often make the mistake of conflating the scientific method - a brilliant, agnostic tool for testing hypotheses - with scientism, a philosophical belief system that smuggles in unprovable metaphysical assumptions while pretending to have none.
Strip away the cultural baggage. Apply only logic, parsimony, and explanatory power.
A quiet truth emerges: Idealism makes significantly more logical sense than Materialism.
Idealism starts with the only thing any human being has ever actually known for certain: experience exists. That's it. One axiom.
Materialism asks us to take several leaps of faith. First, assume that an objective physical universe exists entirely outside of experience - an abstraction that can never be directly proven. Then assume that dead, non-conscious matter arranged itself into a brain. Then assume that brain somehow began generating subjective experience. There is currently no scientific theory for how this happens. Materialism calls it "strong emergence." It looks suspiciously like magic.
Materialism assumes two substances - Matter and the Consciousness it somehow generates. Idealism assumes one: Consciousness. Matter isn't a separate substance - it's simply what shared mental interaction looks like from the outside. There's no magic bridge to build between brain and experience, because Mind is the starting substrate, not the destination.
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Let's Solve Some Frontier Science While We're At It
You don’t need to buy any of this to use the strategy. But if you’re curious whether the deeper model holds, here’s the case.
I want to emphasize that this isn't me saying: "Idealism proved by facts and logic! More at 11!" It's more of a: "Hey, here's this parsimonious and elegant model of reality that is consistent with the scientific corpus just as much as any metaphysical framework, if not more, but doesn't get nearly as much credit as it deserves. And if true, the implications are incredibly consequential."
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Starting from Mind doesn't just win on parsimony. It dissolves the two biggest unsolved problems in modern science.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Under materialism, you can describe every neuron firing and every electrochemical cascade in perfect detail, and you still cannot explain why any of it feels like something. The explanatory gap doesn't close - it stares back at you.
Under Idealism, the problem literally vanishes. Mind is the substrate. You don't need to explain how matter generates consciousness - you explain matter as a feature of consciousness. The question answers itself by disappearing.
The Quantum Measurement Problem. In a materialist framework, it is genuinely baffling why a probability wave collapses into a definite outcome only when observed. If the observer is just another clump of atoms, why does observation change anything?
Von Neumann followed the math. A quantum system hits a sensor, which hits an eye, which hits a brain. At every physical step, the system remains in a quantum superposition of possibilities. The math never forces a definite outcome. In Von Neumann’s formalism, the only thing that terminates the infinite regress of physical chain reactions is the non-physical consciousness of the observer.
The recent Wigner's Friend experiments have made this weirder, not cleaner. Two observers applying quantum mechanics consistently can arrive at logically contradictory facts about the same event - both correct within their own reference frame. This is not a result that a consciousness-agnostic physics handles gracefully. It is exactly what you'd expect if observation is constitutive of facts, not merely a recording of them.
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Reality Fails the Local Check
Then came the 2022 Nobel in Physics. Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger confirmed that the universe is not "locally real" - objects do not possess definite properties prior to and independent of observation. This rules out the entire class of theories where reality is a fixed, pre-existing thing that observers merely discover. It doesn't prove Idealism by itself. But it is a significant blow to naive Materialism, and it fits seamlessly into an idealist framework.
Kant argued in the 18th century that space and time are not fundamental physical scaffolding - they are cognitive interfaces, the way minds organise experience. If that's right, "spooky action at a distance" stops being spooky. Two entangled particles aren't separated by physical distance because physical distance is the interface, not the ground truth. At the foundational level, they were never apart.
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How About...?
Idealism is a deliberate landing spot, not the only defensible one. There are other models that attempt to reconcile these gaps, but they all seem to ask for ontological loans they can't ultimately pay back.
To get around the observer effect, physics often points to Decoherence or the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI). But Decoherence only sidesteps the problem - it explains why a collapse *appears* to happen from the outside, but not why any particular observer experiences a definite outcome.
MWI tries a different dodge: every possible outcome happens and the universe infinitely branches. If parsimony is the standard, multiplying physical reality infinitely just to avoid admitting that consciousness does something is a steep price to pay.
In philosophy, there are retreats to Panpsychism (consciousness is a fundamental property of all matter) and Neutral Monism (mind and matter are both just expressions of a deeper, unknown third substance). But Panpsychism just restores the Hard Problem in a different costume: if every atom has proto-experience, by what mechanism of "strong emergence" do billions of them combine to form the unified experience of you reading this sentence? Meanwhile, Neutral Monism is largely agnostic - it doesn't explain the mystery, it just gives it a new name.
Idealism has one decisive advantage over all of them: it starts from the only thing we actually have direct access to - experience - and works outward. It doesn't need to invent infinite universes, magical emergence, or undiscovered substances.
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I'm Something of a Fringe Scientist Myself
There is one argument that's easy to misuse.
Across radically different eras, geographies, and methods, independent inquiry has repeatedly converged on something structurally similar to Idealism: consciousness as fundamental, separateness as partial illusion, reality as appearance rather than base substrate.
The standard dismissal is shared neurological hardware, not discovery. But that concession still leaves a datapoint.
One that deserves more weight than it typically receives - and whose dismissal often says more about the prior commitments of the dismisser than the quality of the evidence.
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"Hello, Earth calling!"
I won't reject the value of Materialism entirely. It's fair to say Materialism built the modern world. It is a phenomenal tool for curing diseases and launching rockets.
Idealism - however - is better for explaining why there is a universe to build a bridge in. Think of Newtonian physics - incredibly useful, a precise local approximation, and ultimately superseded by the more fundamental truth of General Relativity. Materialism and Idealism have the same relationship.
"But how can a subjective substratum create a seemingly objective world?"
Every night the mind effortlessly generates a world that appears external, lawful, spatially coherent, and populated by beings who seem separate from us. Within the dream, physics holds. Gravity works. Objects resist us. Other characters surprise us.
Yet, every brick, every person, and the gravity itself are being rendered by one undivided substrate: our mind. The dream does not feel like “imagination.” It feels like reality.
And crucially: the realization that we were the dreamer only arrives at waking.
Idealism proposes something structurally similar at a cosmic scale. We are all localized perspectives dreaming within a larger, undivided field.
If mind is the substrate, then cultivating wholeness isn't a coping strategy - it's operating at the level of cause rather than effect. You're not rearranging furniture. You're working at the foundation.
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Playing the Strategy
“You huffing too much copium dawg.”
All perception is a filter. None of us has direct access to base-level reality - we're all working from models. The question isn't whether we’re using one, it's whether the one we’re using serves our life or corrodes it.
Unlike Stoicism or Absurdism, this framework doesn't ask us to brace against an indifferent or adversarial universe. It assumes the field is cooperative. That's a meaningful difference in how we move through the world.
And none of this means conjuring fake emotions on command. We’re removing the artificial resistance we’ve placed against the present moment. Wholeness isn't something we manufacture - it's what's already there when we stop waiting to arrive.
When things actually go wrong, we don't ignore them. We choose our staging ground. Panicking over a problem has never solved one, and approaching it from internal stability means we’re more effective, not less.
Wait and worry are not forms of work. They alter no physical constants. Once you see the game board clearly, the only rational move is to put them down.