When I was (much) younger, I went through a stage where I was convinced that all the world was some sort of conspiratorial combination of holographic image or hallucination, and that if I were to leave one room and walk into the next, then the room I had just left would completely disappear and anything or anyone who happened to be inside would cease to exist.
I call it the the Truman Show effect.
I think we may all, at one point or another, go through a stage where we wonder if our entire existence might not just be the product of some elaborate hoax, as some ethereal figure manipulates the world around us to fool us into thinking that we are interacting with a world that in truth is really just an endless treadmill surrounded by holographic projectors.
Hey, don’t look at me like that! I was just a kid…
And thank g-d I out grew that stage pretty quickly. But every now and then, I see something that reminds me of those days, and while my adult mind laughs and chides me for even entertaining the thought, that same little kid, buried a little deeper inside every time, resurfaces, and for a split I can’t help but wonder “what if…”.
This beautifully hand-carved glitch-style storage chest titled “Good Vibrations” by architect and furniture designer Ferruccio Laviani is just the kind of thing that triggers these memories. It’s the kind of thing that may make you pause for a second and think, well, “what if…”.