Daniel sent us this one — and it's a big one. He's living in Jerusalem, running a twice-daily situational report called Citrep Israel, and he's noticing something strange. The gap between the Red Alert app telling you to get to a shelter and the twenty-four-seven speculation machine on television has become unbridgeable. Nobody knows what's actually happening with Iran, the government isn't communicating with its own citizens, and yet Google News reads like the apocalypse is arriving by lunchtime. His question is about a genre — the films and books that capture this feeling of living in a reality that might not be what it seems. Eternal Sunshine, The Matrix, Inception, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Vanilla Sky, Severance. He wants to know what this genre is called, and what else he should be reading and watching.
This is such a rich one. And the setup matters because it's not abstract for him — he's feeling this epistemologically unmoored in real time. The information environment has become what I can only describe as hostile to understanding.
Hostile to understanding. That's good.
Think about what he described. You have a government that communicates through Fox News interviews rather than addressing its own public. You have a ceasefire that was apparently designed to fail. You have international media constructing narratives that feel completely disconnected from the experience of walking outside and seeing cafes open. That's not just a gap — that's three different realities running in parallel, none of which fully acknowledge the others.
The strangest part is what he said about mistrust. It's not that people don't trust institutions anymore. It's that they don't even know what facts to hitch their mistrust to. Which is a whole different tier of disorientation.
Mistrust implies you have a version of events you're skeptical of. This is more like... the events themselves haven't been issued yet. You're waiting for a stable narrative to even form so you can properly doubt it.
Which is where the genre question gets interesting. He named some films — The Matrix, Inception, Eternal Sunshine, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Vanilla Sky, Severance. And he asked what this is called. So let's start there. What's the name for this thing?
There isn't one single agreed-upon label, which is part of why it's so interesting. But there are several terms that critics and scholars use. The broadest is "ontological fiction" — stories that question the nature of being and reality itself. Then there's "metaphysical thriller" for the darker, more suspenseful ones. Some people use "mind-bending cinema" or "puzzle films." But I think the most useful term, especially for what Daniel's describing, is "ontological uncertainty.
That's the academic version of "wait, is any of this real?
The term gets used in film studies and philosophy. It describes narratives where the protagonist — and by extension the audience — can't be sure about the fundamental nature of their reality. Not just "I'm being lied to," but "the fabric of what I'm experiencing may be constructed, simulated, or otherwise not what it appears.
It's not just a conspiracy thriller. In a conspiracy thriller, there's a real truth underneath the lies. You pull back the curtain and find the smoking gun. Ontological uncertainty is different — you pull back the curtain and find another curtain.
That's it exactly. And that maps eerily well onto what he's describing in Jerusalem. It's not that there's a hidden truth being kept from the public by a coherent conspiracy. It's that the very machinery of truth production has broken down. Nobody knows what's happening. Not the journalists, not the officials, possibly not even the decision-makers themselves.
The curtain behind the curtain behind the curtain. And behind that one, a guy doing a Fox News interview in English while his own citizens are refreshing Telegram channels trying to figure out if they should cancel dinner.
Let's talk about the canon. He mentioned his favorites, and we can build out from there. The Matrix is the obvious entry point — nineteen ninety-nine, simulation hypothesis made visceral. But what's interesting is that The Matrix actually has a fairly stable ontology once you understand it. There's the real world and the simulation. The uncertainty is about which one you're in, but the categories themselves are clear.
Which is why it's the gateway drug for this genre. It introduces the question in a way that's thrilling rather than disorienting. You get the red pill moment, you get the cool fight scenes, and you walk out feeling like you've learned something. As opposed to, say, Mulholland Drive, where you walk out feeling like someone scrambled your brain and served it back to you on a plate.
Mulholland Drive is a perfect example of the deep end. David Lynch is basically the patron saint of ontological uncertainty. His work doesn't just question whether reality is real — it questions whether the question itself makes sense. In Mulholland Drive, the first two-thirds of the film may be a dream, a fantasy, a dying wish, or something else entirely. Lynch refuses to clarify, and that refusal is the point.
That's closer to what Daniel's describing, isn't it? The refusal to clarify. The experience of living in a information environment where clarification is simply not forthcoming. Not because someone's hiding it, but because it doesn't exist yet. Or it exists in too many contradictory versions simultaneously.
And that brings us to what I think is the central text for this specific flavor of ontological uncertainty — and it's not a film.
What is it?
It's a short story by Philip K. But we should talk about Dick more broadly first, because he's arguably the foundational figure for this entire genre. Most people know him through the film adaptations — Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly. But his short fiction is where the really destabilizing stuff lives.
Dick is the guy who basically spent his entire career asking "what if everything you think you know is wrong?" And not in a fun parlor-game way. In a genuinely unsettling, I-need-to-lie-down-now way.
He had experiences that fed into this. In nineteen seventy-four, he had what he called a "pink light" experience — a kind of visionary episode where he became convinced that we were living in some kind of simulated reality layered over a first-century Roman world. He spent years trying to process it, wrote thousands of pages of exegesis, and incorporated it into his later novels. Whether you think he had a genuine mystical experience or a neurological event, the result was fiction that takes ontological uncertainty more seriously than almost anything else.
What's the short story?
It's called "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon." Published in nineteen eighty, one of his last. The premise is that a man is placed in cryogenic suspension for a ten-year interstellar journey, but something goes wrong — his mind remains conscious. The ship's computer tries to keep him sane by feeding him simulated realities, but each one breaks down because he brings his own unresolved psychological baggage into it. The simulations become increasingly unstable, looping through his memories and regrets, until neither he nor the reader can distinguish between the simulation, his memories, and whatever the "real" reality might be.
It's Inception before Inception, but bleaker.
And more philosophically rigorous. Dick understood something that a lot of these films miss — which is that the question "is this real?" is inseparable from the question "who am I?" You can't have ontological uncertainty without identity uncertainty. The self and the world unravel together.
That's the thread that runs through Eternal Sunshine too, isn't it? The memory erasure procedure doesn't just change what Joel knows — it changes who he is. And the tragedy is that he's erasing the very experiences that made him capable of love in the first place.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is interesting because it's ontological uncertainty applied to the emotional realm. The question isn't "is this world real?" but "are my feelings real if I can't remember what caused them?" And the answer the film gives is surprisingly hopeful — yes, they are. The emotional truth survives the erasure of factual memory.
Which is the opposite of the information environment Daniel's describing. In his case, the factual memory is there — the rockets, the sirens, the ceasefire that felt fake from day one — but the emotional truth is what's become inaccessible. You can't process something that hasn't resolved.
That's a really good distinction. And it connects to Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he mentioned. That film takes ontological uncertainty and makes it almost exuberant. The multiverse isn't a source of dread — it's a source of possibility. The crisis isn't "nothing is real" but "everything is real simultaneously," and the question becomes how to live meaningfully across infinite possibilities.
Which is, I have to say, a very American solution to the problem. The immigrant-family drama at the center of that film is about choosing connection even when you can see every path not taken. It's ontological uncertainty resolved through love and googly eyes. Very different from the European tradition, which tends to resolve it through... well, not resolving it.
The European tradition of ontological uncertainty goes back much further than film, actually. If you want to trace the intellectual lineage, you have to start with the philosophical tradition of skepticism. Descartes in the seventeenth century, wondering if an evil demon could be deceiving him about everything he perceives. Then Kant in the eighteenth century, arguing that we can never know things as they are in themselves — we only know phenomena as they appear to us. The "noumenal" world is permanently inaccessible.
The genre has a name and a pedigree. Ontological uncertainty, born in German philosophy, raised in Philip K. Dick short stories, came of age in nineties science fiction cinema.
There's a crucial twentieth-century figure we haven't mentioned yet — Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine writer who spent his career constructing labyrinths made of words. His stories aren't about simulated realities in the technological sense. They're about the ways that language, memory, and narrative themselves construct realities that may or may not correspond to anything outside themselves.
Borges is the guy who wrote about the library that contains every possible book, right?
"The Library of Babel.The library contains every possible combination of letters, which means it contains every book ever written, every book that could ever be written, and also an infinite number of books that are complete gibberish. The librarians spend their lives searching for a book that explains the library itself — a catalog of catalogs, a key to the system. Some believe it exists. Some believe it doesn't. Some have gone mad searching.
Nobody actually knows.
Nobody can know. That's the Borgesian move. The structure that would explain the structure is itself part of the structure. You can't step outside. You can only wander.
Which is a pretty good description of trying to understand the Iran situation through news media right now. You're inside the information system, looking for information about the information system, using tools provided by the information system. There is no outside vantage point.
Borges also wrote a story called "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" which might be the single most relevant text for what we're discussing. The premise is that a secret society has been gradually inventing an entire imaginary world — Tlön — complete with its own languages, philosophies, and physical laws. They've been doing this for centuries, in secret, through an encyclopedia. And by the end of the story, the imaginary world is beginning to replace the real one. Objects from Tlön are appearing. People are adopting Tlönian ideas. Reality is being colonized by fiction.
It's a conspiracy theory that succeeds so thoroughly it stops being a theory and becomes the world.
The story was written in nineteen forty. It's not about technology. It's about the power of collective belief to reshape what counts as real.
So if I'm Daniel, and I'm sitting in Jerusalem feeling like the information environment has become a kind of Tlön — a fabricated world slowly overwriting the actual one — what do I read and watch to explore this feeling rather than just be consumed by it?
Let me build a proper syllabus. We've mentioned the philosophical roots — Descartes, Kant, and if you want to go deeper, the twentieth-century phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who were all about how consciousness constructs experience. But for someone who wants art rather than philosophy textbooks, let me start with literature.
Give us the list.
Borges is the foundation. Start with "Ficciones," his nineteen forty-four collection. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Library of Babel," "The Garden of Forking Paths," and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" — which is about a man who tries to rewrite Don Quixote word for word, not by copying it, but by becoming Cervantes. The result is identical text that means something completely different because of the context in which it was produced.
That's a mind-bender about information and meaning that's directly relevant to the news consumption problem. Same words, different context, entirely different meaning.
After Borges, go to Philip K. "Ubik" is his masterpiece — a novel where reality keeps regressing, objects transform into earlier versions of themselves, and the characters can't tell if they're alive, dead, or something in between. "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" is about a drug that transports users into a shared hallucination that may or may not be controlled by a malevolent entity. And "A Scanner Darkly" is about an undercover narcotics agent whose identity splits so thoroughly he ends up investigating himself.
The short story you mentioned — "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.
It's in the collection of the same name. It's maybe twenty pages and it'll stay with you for years.
What about more contemporary literature?
For the specifically post-truth, information-overload flavor of ontological uncertainty, I'd recommend three books. One: "The Raw Shark Texts" by Steven Hall — a novel where a man is pursued by a conceptual shark that eats memories and identities. The shark is made of language. Two: "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski — a book about a documentary about a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside, wrapped in layers of unreliable commentary and footnotes that may themselves be fictions within fictions. Three: "There Is No Antimemetics Division" by qntm — which is about a secret organization fighting ideas that prevent themselves from being remembered.
Wait — ideas that prevent themselves from being remembered. What does that even mean?
Imagine you're fighting a creature that, the moment you look away from it, you forget exists. You can't take notes because the notes would describe something you can't remember. You can't brief your colleagues because by the time you finish the sentence, you've forgotten what you were briefing them about. That's an antimeme — an idea with built-in self-censorship.
That's the most terrifying thing I've ever heard. And also, unfortunately, a perfect metaphor for what it feels like to follow a fast-moving conflict where the narrative shifts faster than anyone can anchor it.
The book is set in the SCP Foundation universe, which is itself a fascinating example of collective ontological uncertainty — a vast collaborative fiction project where thousands of writers contribute documents about anomalies that may or may not exist, written in the style of bureaucratic reports. The frame is that you're reading classified files. The question of whether any of it is "real" within the fiction is deliberately, permanently unresolved.
The genre has evolved from individual stories about reality being questionable to entire collaborative frameworks where the questioning is built into the form itself.
Which brings us to film. He already mentioned the core canon — The Matrix, Inception, Eternal Sunshine, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Vanilla Sky. Let me add some that go deeper into the specific feeling he's describing.
Go for it.
First, "Synecdoche, New York" — Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a theater director who builds a replica of New York City inside a warehouse, then builds a replica of the replica, then populates it with actors playing actors playing people from his life. The layers of representation multiply until you can't find the original anymore. It's about the impossibility of capturing reality through representation, and it's devastating.
Kaufman also wrote Eternal Sunshine and Being John Malkovich. He's basically the poet laureate of ontological uncertainty at this point.
His most recent film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things," is maybe his most unsettling. A woman drives with her boyfriend to meet his parents at a farmhouse, and nothing about the experience is stable. By the end, you're not sure whose consciousness you've been inside, or whether any of the events happened at all.
That one left me staring at a wall for about forty minutes afterward.
Second recommendation: "The Double Life of Véronique" by Krzysztof Kieślowski. It's about two identical women — one in Poland, one in France — who don't know each other but share an inexplicable connection. It's not science fiction. There's no explanation. It's just... the mystery of doubled existence, presented as a sensory experience rather than a puzzle to solve.
European cinema's answer to the question — don't explain it, just let it wash over you.
Third: "Paprika" by Satoshi Kon. It's an animated film about a device that lets therapists enter their patients' dreams. When the device is stolen, the boundary between dreams and reality collapses. Kon was doing Inception-level dream layering years before Inception, and with more visual imagination. The parade sequence alone is worth the price of admission.
Satoshi Kon also did "Perfect Blue," which is about a pop star whose identity fractures under the pressure of fame — she literally can't tell if she's herself or an impostor. That one's darker, more psychological.
His series "Paranoia Agent" is about a community collectively creating a monster to explain their anxieties, and the monster becoming real because enough people believe in it. Which is basically Tlön as a TV show.
What about television more broadly? He mentioned Severance.
Severance is excellent and he should push through. The premise — a company that surgically separates employees' work memories from their personal memories — creates a situation where the "innie" at work has never experienced the outside world and the "outie" has no idea what they do all day. It's ontological uncertainty as labor critique. Your self is literally divided by your employment.
The aesthetic is perfect — the endless white corridors, the retro-futuristic computers, the sense that the workplace is a kind of liminal space that exists outside of normal time.
For other TV, I'd recommend "The Leftovers" — which is not science fiction but operates on ontological uncertainty principles. Two percent of the world's population vanishes instantly. No explanation is ever given. The show is about how people construct meaning in the absence of any stable narrative about what happened. It's the closest thing I've seen to what Daniel's describing — the experience of living after a rupture that nobody can explain or resolve.
"Twin Peaks: The Return" — David Lynch's eighteen-hour film that aired in twenty seventeen. It's the apotheosis of everything Lynch has been doing with ontological uncertainty for forty years. Characters exist in multiple timelines simultaneously. The show ends with a question that will never be answered.
What year is this?
"What year is this?" — delivered by a character who may not know who she is anymore. It's the question that sums up the entire feeling Daniel's describing. When the information environment breaks down, you lose your temporal bearings along with everything else. You don't know what year it is, metaphorically speaking. You don't know which version of events you're in.
There's a term for this specific aspect of it — "chronological disorientation." It's a feature of a lot of ontological uncertainty fiction. When reality becomes unreliable, time becomes unreliable too. Inception uses it literally — time moves at different speeds in different dream levels. Synecdoche, New York does it through the protagonist's life accelerating and fragmenting. The Matrix has déjà vu as a glitch in the simulation.
In Jerusalem right now, it's the experience of a war that was supposed to resolve in weeks stretching into months of ambiguous pause, with no clear markers of whether you're in wartime, peacetime, or some new category that doesn't have a name yet.
Let me tie this together into something like a recommendation framework. If you're feeling ontologically unmoored and want to explore that feeling through art, I'd organize it into tiers.
I like tiers.
Tier one is the accessible entry points — the films he already knows. The Matrix, Inception, Eternal Sunshine, Everything Everywhere All at Once. These all have coherent emotional arcs and satisfying resolutions, even if the reality questions linger. You can watch them and feel unsettled but not destroyed.
The gateway drugs.
Tier two is the deeper cuts — films and books that push further into the uncertainty without giving you a clear exit. Synecdoche, New York. I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Borges's Ficciones. Dick's Ubik and A Scanner Darkly. "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon." House of Leaves. These are works that will leave you less certain about things than when you started, and that's the point.
The hard stuff.
Tier three is what I'd call the residency — works that don't just visit ontological uncertainty but live there. Twin Peaks: The Return. The Double Life of Véronique. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." There Is No Antimemetics Division. These are works that make uncertainty into a sustained aesthetic experience rather than a plot device. They don't resolve.
They're the ones that feel most like what he's actually living through. The sustained state. The non-resolution.
And I think that's the key insight here. The reason this genre resonates so deeply right now isn't just that it's intellectually interesting. It's that it provides a kind of companionship. When you're living through a period where the official narratives have collapsed and nobody knows what's happening, watching a film or reading a book that says "yes, this is what it feels like, and here's what that feeling looks like when it's given form" — that's therapeutic.
Not therapeutic in the sense of fixing anything. But therapeutic in the sense of making the feeling legible.
You can't resolve ontological uncertainty by reading Borges. But you can feel less alone in it. You can see that other people have been here before, have mapped this terrain, have found ways to make art out of the disorientation. That doesn't tell you whether the war is going to resume. It doesn't make the government communicate better. But it does something important — it converts the feeling from a pathology into an experience.
From "something is wrong with me" to "something is wrong with the situation, and here's a tradition of art that grapples with exactly that.
There's one more work I want to mention, because it's the closest thing I know to the specific situation of living in a conflict zone where the information environment has broken down. It's a novel called "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. It's set during the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The characters are trying to live ordinary lives — love affairs, career decisions, artistic projects — while history is happening to them in ways they can neither control nor fully understand. The information they receive is contradictory, propagandistic, or simply absent. And the novel's central philosophical question is about whether our lives have weight or are unbearably light — whether anything we do matters in a universe that offers no guarantees.
That's a big swing from Philip K. Dick to Kundera.
It is, but they're asking the same question from different directions. Dick asks it through science fiction — what if reality is a simulation? Kundera asks it through historical fiction — what if reality is real but meaningless? Both lead to the same place: the experience of not being able to trust the ground beneath your feet.
The experience of making choices anyway. That's the thing that unites all of these works. The characters don't just sit around being confused. They make terrible decisions. They keep going. Even when they don't know what's real, they know they're still alive and still responsible for something.
That's what makes Eternal Sunshine so powerful, actually. Joel knows his memories are being erased. He's watching them disappear. And he still fights to hold onto them. He still chooses Clementine, even knowing how it ends. The ontological uncertainty doesn't free him from the obligation to care.
Which might be the most useful thing Daniel could take from this whole genre exploration. The feeling of not knowing what's real doesn't absolve you of the need to live. It just makes living a more complicated proposition.
That's where the sitrep format he created becomes so interesting. He built a twice-daily update that sits between the Red Alert app and the talking heads. It's an attempt to create a stable information artifact in an unstable environment. That's not just a practical tool — it's a philosophical response. It's saying "I can't fix the information environment, but I can create a small zone of clarity within it.
The sitrep as ontological anchor. A little island of "here's what we actually know right now" in a sea of speculation.
The fact that he's doing it while also feeling the same disorientation everyone else feels — that's the Kundera move. You act even though you don't know. You build something even though the ground is shifting.
To bring this back to his actual question — the genre is ontological uncertainty, the canon is Borges, Dick, Lynch, Kaufman, Kon, Kieślowski, and Kundera, with contemporary extensions into things like Severance, The Leftovers, and House of Leaves. The tier system gives him a path through it depending on how much disorientation he's in the mood for.
I'd add one more contemporary recommendation that I think he'd particularly appreciate, given his interest in the information environment itself. There's a novel called "Rabbits" by Terry Miles, based on a podcast of the same name. It's about an alternate reality game that may or may not exist, and the people who become obsessed with finding it. The central question is whether the patterns they're seeing are real or whether they're losing their minds. It's ontological uncertainty set in the world of internet mysteries and conspiracy culture.
Which is basically the online version of what he's experiencing offline. The same question — is there a pattern here or am I just seeing noise? — applied to different domains.
There's a film called "The Congress" from twenty thirteen, which is a loose adaptation of a Stanisław Lem novel. An actress sells the rights to her digital likeness, and the film then jumps forward twenty years to a world where the boundary between the real and the animated has become completely porous. It's about the commercialization of identity and the replacement of reality with licensed content. Very relevant to the AI and information environment questions.
The Congress is also one of those films that got almost no attention when it came out and has been slowly accumulating a cult following ever since. It's messy and uneven and completely worth watching.
Let me summarize the core syllabus. Borges, "Ficciones" — start there. Dick, "Ubik" and the short story collection "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon." Charlie Kaufman's filmography — "Eternal Sunshine," "Synecdoche, New York," "I'm Thinking of Ending Things." David Lynch, "Mulholland Drive" and "Twin Peaks: The Return." Satoshi Kon, "Paprika" and "Perfect Blue." "Everything Everywhere All at Once." "House of Leaves" if you want to really go deep. And "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" for the historical-philosophical dimension.
That's a syllabus that'll keep someone busy for months. And probably change how they think about what it means to not know things.
The unifying thread is this: all of these works take seriously the possibility that our grip on reality is more fragile than we want to believe. They don't treat that possibility as a cheap twist or a gimmick. They treat it as a genuine philosophical and emotional condition. And they find ways to make that condition not just bearable but meaningful.
Which is, I think, what he was really asking for. Not just a list of movies, but a way to feel like this strange, dislocated state he's living in is something that art has grappled with before and can help him navigate now.
The final thing I'd say — and this is more of a reflection than a recommendation — is that there's actually something valuable about the experience he's describing. Not valuable in the sense of "this is good and should happen more." But valuable in the sense that it strips away illusions. When the information environment breaks down, you're forced to confront how much of your normal life is built on trust in narratives you've never verified. You don't actually know most of what you think you know. You're taking it on faith — faith in institutions, faith in media, faith in the basic stability of the world. When that faith is shaken, it's terrifying. But it's also clarifying.
It's the Descartes move. Doubt everything until you find the one thing you can't doubt. For Descartes, it was "I think, therefore I am." For someone living through this, it might be something more like "I'm here, my family is here, the cafe on the corner is open, and I'm going to keep going.
That's not nothing. In fact, in the context of ontological uncertainty, it's everything.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In nineteen forty-seven, the succession crisis in the Shilluk Kingdom of South Sudan involved thirty-two recognized claimants to the throne, each representing a different royal lineage, with the dispute ultimately resolved when a British district commissioner arbitrarily selected a candidate who had already died of malaria three weeks earlier.
The resolution was... coronating a dead man?
Which is, I have to say, a pretty efficient way to handle a succession crisis. Hard to start a civil war when the king is already deceased.
That was deeply unsettling in ways I'm still processing.
The Shilluk Kingdom apparently had a more advanced understanding of ontological uncertainty than we gave them credit for. A dead king is, after all, a king whose reality cannot be questioned.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for the daily dose of historical absurdity. If you want more episodes, you can find us at myweirdprompts.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review if you're enjoying the show.
Until next time, may your reality be stable enough to trust and uncertain enough to keep things interesting.
If it isn't, there's always Borges.
