I call this "The Truman Effect". I've felt it several times throughout my life but haven't ever seen it put into words, or heard it discussed it anywhere. Much like deja vu it's something that you can feel an echo of but is completely different when you feel it powerfully.
In the movie "The Truman Show" the main character is living a perfectly manufactured life since birth. His complete life is broadcast as a TV show and everything that he does, everything he owns, everyone he talks to are all a part of the set.
The two core elements to this feeling are that of a disconnection from reality and a disconnection from other people.
I'll do my best to describe an example but I think that it's something that you really need to experience to understand.
When I was younger I went on a field trip to a place where we pretended to have jobs. It was the culmination of a few different things we'd been learning like writing checks and making a budget, etc. The activity was hosted in a large arena of some sort laid out with astroturf. The businesses ringed the sides of the arena and for an entire day we went about our 'lives' doing our 'jobs' and spending our 'money'. It was a fun time and since we as children really had no frame of reference for what life was actually like it was a novel experience.
Fast forward a decade and I'm driving into some city to go to some event. The city is a major metropolis, but the event is held at a local college so I stay in the 'college town' section. When I arrive the first thing that I notice is the main boulevard. Although the rest of the city is very loud, very noisy, very busy, this particular street is not. Shops and lights line the boulevard, giving it a very "small town at Christmas" feel. This is the first thing that strikes me, and I as I drive around and notice more things I begin to develop a deep sense of unease. The lawns of the houses are perfect. They're square and filled with AstroTurf. The gas station is new and clean and has a "dark alley" that is as wide as a two-lane street. The people mill about, doing things that you would expect college students to do. At the local McDonald's you have a perfect distribution of every stereotype that you see in your Hollywood Movies. The pretty girls flirt with the jocks, the couple nerds in the corner are talking about card games, the student at the counter has the deadpan expression that finds a perfect middle ground between the boredom of the routine and mortification that they would have to work at a McDonald's. At night the streets, the alleys, the parking lots are lit up and the students walk to their apartments, their dorms, their homes, chattering away with the zeal that college students have. Groups of girls and groups of boys meander down the main boulevard, very obviously subdivided based on appearance, hobby, or taste. When the shadows grow deep the night owls and the stoners come out. A fight breaks out in the parking lot of the gas station. But even these events are perfect. The people who are obviously dealing or doing drugs are still people, not the soulless husks of humans that drug addicts inevitably become. The fight calms down within minutes, neither antagonist landing any serious hits. The day after I arrive I need to go to a different part of town for a bit and as soon as I get just a few streets down from the campus the city comes back. The gas station is dingy and grimy. The sidewalk in front of it is stained with cigarette butts, gum, and million spots of unidentifiable grime. The door squeaks on the way in and the clerk is preoccupied and frustrated. People cut each other off in the streets, the intersections are difficult to navigate, the traffic is bad and the smell of exhaust is everywhere. When I get done with my errand and go back to that college part of town I'm once again plunged into that unshakeable sense of unreality. Everything is too perfect, too neat, too put together. It's like aliens created a suburb based only on their perceptions from Hollywood movies. Later I realized that it reminded me of that field trip I took when I was younger. The yards, the businesses, the people, everything was like the set of a movie, like everyone's actions were based on a role they were assigned rather than real human motivation. It was like they were all children, play-acting at their lives while in an environment that was specifically tailored to guide their actions.
That was the first time I felt it and I had no idea how to put what I felt into words. I think I can now.
The unease that I felt wasn't at the people or the town, it was at the very deliberate atmosphere it had. Everything that I saw was designed in order to create a certain feeling and everyone there seemed to feel what the way they "should" in response. It was like some old horror movie where the person wakes up in a world where people live perfect routine lives and never question some very obvious threat or imperfection in the system. It's like the Truman Show where every part of the life is a set. The worst part was that nobody realized it. The people fit so perfectly into their roles that they appeared, at times, faker than even the atmosphere. It's like they weren't people at all but automatons designed specifically to play the parts that they did. It gave me the feeling that if I were to try and sit down with some of them and have any type of honest conversation about how perfectly put together the place was they would all slowly turn towards me, identifying me as someone who could see through the illusion, someone who was a threat to the system, someone who had to be silenced. It made me feel like the only sane person in the land of the insane, or the only insane person in the land of the sane. Like I was a human in an alien environment or an alien in a human one. The sense of disconnection I felt was so strong that it made me consider if what I was seeing was real or if I might be having some sort of break from reality.
That is why I call it the Truman Effect. Because the experience was so powerful, so engrossing, so surreal that I felt like that environment had been specifically designed to lie to people. And since I was seemingly the only one who could 'see through' it, it made it feel like it was designed to lie to me. It was as if I had stepped onto a movie set for a reality show without knowing it, and the only way I could tell that it was a set was because it was too perfect to not be one. Everything was routine, predictable, perfectly typical. I felt like I could live a lifetime in that small part of the city and watch the same events happen day after day for my entire life. The part that made it truly terrifying was the thought that someone had put it together like that. That the roads, the buildings, even the streetlamps were all deliberated planned out by someone in order to give it that feeling, it was like someone was playing with dolls except instead of dolls they were using real people. The environment didn't scare me, it was that ephemeral figure that had created it that scared me. Everything was so perfectly controlled that I felt my skin crawling, my nerves on edge, ready jump just in case that shadowy creator would realize that I hadn't bought into the illusion. I felt like at any moment he could show up and try to bend me to fit in to that place, like I could get trapped there forever, completely losing my sense of who and what I was as I sunk into a role specifically designed for me.
It was the feeling of being alone in a crowd, of not fitting in, of not being able to get through to people.
I think that's what you're getting when you feel like something 'doesn't count' because it's so surreal. Like the wedding with the tacky children's party decorations or the plastic pot that's been painted to look like it's ceramic. You expect at any moment someone to tell you it's all a big joke but they never do. The couple with the tacky children's wedding didn't do it because they have a deep connection to the source medium and they realize that while it's tacky they care about it and that's what counts. They legitimately think that it's fun and unique and quirky. The manufacturer of the pot doesn't see the irony in disguising the plastic as ceramic, they think that it will sell better because that's how pots are supposed to look.
The two components that cause this are: the feeling that you're being deliberately deceived and the feeling that nobody else can see through the deception. It's even worse when you're with someone that you trust because if even they can't see through it you can't be sure that you're not just losing touch with reality. I think it's as close as a regular person can come to feeling the way that a schizophrenic does. First you want to talk to people, to let them know that you see right through it. That they can drop the act because you get the joke. But they're not joking. Then maybe if you can just tell them to cut the shit, that you know that they're concealing something, that they can't be that 'perfect'. But they don't know what you mean. And so finally you're left alone in a world to which you cannot relate at all, populated by people you cannot understand.
When you suspend your belief, you do so willfully. You know that things aren't the way that you're going to pretend they are, but you let go of the need to judge them in a regular context and just take them as they are. You know that people can't fly but you can still watch the superhero movie. You choose to suspend your disbelief. You are as much a participant in that scenario as any of the actors and you all understand that you're taking part in a fantasy.
But when it comes to something like what I've described, the choice of participation no longer applies. The people in these situations don't understand the deliberate nature of the fantasy. They have so bought into it that there is no 'willful suspension of disbelief' for them because they actually believe. It's not a scenario where someone literally thinks that Superman exists, but one where someone spends so much time consuming media and talking about Superman that they struggle to exist in a space without him. When they talk about Superman racing the Flash they don't point to some comic book example to say why one character or the other would win, they point to an example to say they know he would win. To them the character is so real that they know him as well as they do anyone in their lives. Where the fantasy transcends reality and literally becomes a part of their life. Were they to meet Superman in real life they would be unphased because they know him so well as a concept that to them the only thing he lacks is a physical form.
It's a duplicitous dishonesty, a lie that people tell you because they're lying to themselves. They have a different view of reality than you do and, as such, the two of you can't find enough common ground to actually relate enough to have a discussion of where your views differ. When you realize it, you feel reality shift underneath you, like you've taken a step on loose rock and have feel the entire mountainside slide an inch. Whether you are sane and the other people are crazy or you're crazy and the others are sane it makes no difference, you're taking a step into a world where you can't understand anyone and they cannot understand you. You are perfectly alone in a land of dolls that play at appearing human.
