I want to say it again: We do not live in a simulation! But I get where the feeling comes from. It's increasingly difficult to square what we see happening with what is described to us. The sensation of unreality, or of dissociating or disconnecting personally from what we see happening around us during times of immense, distributed suffering... it makes sense. Especially as we are bombarded by narratives that don't match what we see. Even though we know it's bullshit, we have to hear phrases like, "America is the greatest country in the world," "God has a plan," "We support small business," and countless other obviously-untrue statements with bewildering regularity.
The "simulation" that's being described is the false reality of constructed narrative. It's the maddening feeling of drowning in propaganda while experiencing the material world propaganda opposes. So, in that sense, maybe we are presented with a described simulation of some other place.
But we don't live in a simulation. This isn't simulated. It's real. You are real, and so am I. Your consciousness, confusing as it is, is real. This is a real place; you have a real body, real feelings, real thoughts, and real pain. It's comforting sometimes to disconnect from that, but it's a corrosive comfort. This is really happening. The suffering we swim in is real — as is the pleasure, tedium, and so on — and it's happening to lots of other real people, just as much as it's happening to us.
As weird ol' Korzybski said in that recording, it's not that we live in an illusion, or simulation. It's that the process of describing, verbalizing, and generalizing creates an abstraction. And that's the part that's hardest to navigate, especially when that process is hijacked by verbal terrorists who spend ill-gotten fortunes to convince us that what we see is not what is really happening. Millions of Americans think "socialists" and "democrats" want to kill them in the night, when what the people who self-describe as "socialists" want is to make sure those people can go to the doctor if they need to. These are perfect circles of incongruous belief, with no Venn overlap whatsoever. And it is this fabricated disconnect — along with thousands of others, big and small — that can cause our sense of reality as real to short circuit.
It's one of the beautiful curses of human existence that we can identify more with abstractions than what is really happening around us. Right now we're in a phase of human culture where it feels like our stories and abstractions are eating us alive; that it's more important to some people to protect their collection of icons and definitions than to cede even an inch of ground in the direction of our collective well-being and survival. I'm not sure what to do about that in the big picture! But I have a strong inkling that learning to interact directly with the process of abstraction can protect us from manipulation. And that it's really important for us to embrace reality as closely as we can, not to throw up our hands and say it's all fake, so hurry up and hit the reset button.
Please remember we are interested in humanity.