Fact is often weirder than fiction. This isn’t just a fancy phrase, though! If you look at science, history, and even at our personal experiences, you’ll realize that the world can be a truly bizarre place at times. So much so that anyone who’s a fan of ‘The Matrix’ might wonder whether what we see is, in fact, reality.
Inspired by user u/DawsonD43, the members of the r/AskReddit group started a lively discussion where they shared some of the top spooky indicators that we might be living inside a computer simulation. We’ve collected some of their most interesting ‘proof’ to share with you. Scroll down to check it out! And if you get an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, don’t panic—an Agent will soon be with you.
We reached out to the author, u/DawsonD43, who was kind enough to share their thoughts on simulations and how our lives would change if we were actually in one. Be sure not to miss Bored Panda’s interview with them!
#1
Long, but super weird and inexplicable. I know how this sounds, but I swear this really happened:
I was a childhood bookworm. While the other girls at a 5th grade sleepover were playing air hockey and dancing around to “Let’s Hear it for the Boy’, I’d pulled a creepy looking book off my hostess’ shelf and huddled into a beanbag chair in a quiet corner of her family room.
I finished the book that night and the next morning I placed it back on her shelf, left, and promptly forgot the title.
We moved a few months later and I spent the next 7 years trying to find that damn book. There was no internet, just old card catalogues, but I searched every library I visited.
Unfortunately, both book and title remained elusive. It turns out that there is no shortage of books about young ghost girls on farms in spooky houses with ponds. The author wasn’t Mary Downing Hahn, Richard Peck, or any of the usual paranormal YA authors. It wasn’t “Wait til Helen Comes.” The only thing I could remember about the cover was that she was holding an owl. That didn’t turn out to be helpful, either.
In my sophomore year I worked as a librarian’s aid & spent roughly 2 hours in my school’s library every day. To no avail, I’d literally searched through every book that contained the following keywords: ghost, haunted, spooky, scary, & mystery.
But one afternoon as I was shelving books in the Biography section, something quite literally hit me on the head. It was a hardback book that had fallen off the top shelf in a section it didn’t belong in. As soon as I picked it up and saw the hollow owl on the cover I KNEW.
It was not a book logged into our system. Nobody knew how it got there. I was alone in the library.
FWIW, I just Googled “ya novel ghost story girl pond owl” and it was the top result: *The Ghost Next Door* by Wylly Folk St John. If I’d just waited 32 years…
Image source: RphWrites, Tima Miroshnichenko / pexels
#2
The Mandela Effect.
Like, there are things that have clearly been changed. Fruit of the Loom had a cornucopia when I was a kid. It’s the entire reason I know what a cornucopia is. Yet according to every source it never did.
Image source: Ohiostatehack, river_is_nice
#3
Clearly that some people have their settings on Easy Mode and others are on Survival Mode. You ever met someone who literally never has or had any issues? Easy childhood, solid upbringing with good parents, smart, good looking, gets the job they want, healthy relationship, financially stable… that’s an NPC on the Easy Mode for sure.
Image source: asq1616, Andrea Piacquadio / pexels
#4
That it never fails that once you start to get a little bit ahead in life, your car’s check engine light comes on
Image source: Particular-Topic-445, Chris Isherwood / flickr
#5
Going into a room and forgetting what i was gonna do. We’re sims and they cancelled the action.
Image source: Red-okWolf, KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA / pexels
#6
The usb plug still the wrong way after you turn it over.
Image source: zanybrainy, Karolina Kaboompics / pexels
#7
Look at the video game industry, and all the progress made in only fifty years. We went from dots and bars on a screen to photorealistic characters and full scale worlds.
Now extrapolate this progress out say….1,000 years? I don’t think it’s inconceivable to think that we might be able to simulate an entire galaxy by then.
And if we can, someone else might already have.
Image source: VeryTightButtholes, Bradley Hook / pexels
#8
History repeating with nothing learned.
Image source: spagyrum, T6 Adventures / pexels
#9
The big bang, there was nothing and then there was everything. Sounds like a program starting up to me. Also particles acting differently when being viewed.
Image source: mrjangles0110, Castorly Stock / pexels
#10
Never forget the dancing plague of 1518.. Probably devs were installing a new Mod or something.
Image source: SleepingUnderARock, Pieter Brueghel the Elder / Wikipedia
#11
Things would re-appear only when I stop looking for it. If that’s not a dead give away that we’re living in a simulation, I don’t know what is.
And don’t forget about hair pins and hair ties. Where do they even go???
Image source: Long-Marketing-8843, Karolina Grabowska / pexels
#12
The baader-meinhof phenomenon- lazy coding like GTA, you see a car for the first time and the next day you see it everywhere
Image source: ThtPhatCat, Arthur Brognoli / pexels
#13
All the “deja vu” moments. Like mf I’ve played this level already
Image source: anon, Karolina Kaboompics / pexels
#14
Thinking about something then getting an advertisement for it online.
Image source: anon, SHVETS production / pexels
#15
Me asking myself a question about a topic I have no prior knowledge of and the next day a YouTube video appears on my screen answering the exact same question in detail.
Image source: ahtapotvebaykus, Pixabay / pexels
#16
The stupidity of some people makes me believe we are 100 percent in a simulation
Image source: Comfortable_Crab_988, Yan Krukau / pexels
#17
The pens. I used to go to large corporate meetings a few times a year. They gave out pens and notepads to everyone (as if I was going to take notes). I would take pens from empty seats and from coworkers and take them home. A dozen at a time at least. This went on for years. So where are the pens? There should be *hundreds* of them in my home. I should be able to stand anywhere and look in any direction and see a pen, but no.
Image source: bishophicks, Karolina Kaboompics / pexels
#18
We went from the Wright brothers flying the first plane to space missions in roughly 50 years. That’s wild imo. I don’t think people realize how quickly tech evolves.
Image source: isluna1003, Pixabay / pexels
#19
Monarch Butterflies: A soft tube of goo with tissue-thin wings, and brain smaller than a grain of sand, flitters across an entire continent and back to the exact same tree in less than one year.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly_migration?wprov=sfti1)
Image source: anon, Cindy Gustafson / pexels
#20
Some people getting a head knock and suddenly becoming geniuses. Or people waking from accidents or surgery and speaking with a foreign accent from countries they ve never been to.
Image source: StorytellerGG, MART PRODUCTION / pexels
#21
One time some friends and I were playing a game on Steam called TableTop Simulator. Its a game where you can play board games and have to actually move the pieces and such. It had the ability for any player to spawn in any game pieces for any game at any time, theres also an extras category. One of the extras you can spawn in is an iPad.
So we get f****n around and its a functioning iPad. I opened up Andkon Arcade, and tried playing Hex Empire… it worked.
So Im sitting in my game room, on my PC, playing a game on steam, with a VR headset strapped to my face, where Im sitting at a table on an iPad, playing full functioning flash games on that iPad.
I was like “How much deeper does this go than me, is somebody playing me too?”
Image source: NoahCWNorrad, Julia M Cameron / pexels
#22
Anyone else ever experience this? It happens to me all the time, and with words that are not part of every day speech. I’ll have the TV on or YouTube while I’m reading an article and as I’m reading, the video will say a word that I’m reading at the exact time I get to that word. I always forget the word, but most recently it was “masticate.” I’ve used that word maybe once in my life and only ever read it in a book before. But, there are so many examples of this, and every time I’m left thinking, “are you serious?” Seems like something that might happen in a simulation.
Image source: Baggabones88, Andrea Piacquadio / pexels
#23
All the times I’ve “nearly” died.
I’ve lost count of the number of moments I’ve had where all I could do was think: “Well, this is it…” and somehow made it through.
One example:
I was turning onto an offramp and got clipped by a bus. I was driving a tiny car (Geo Metro, I think) and the bus spun my little car 360+ in the middle of traffic. When I stopped spinning I was facing perpendicular to traffic with the drivers side facing incoming traffic.
I could see the truck about to hit me. There was literally nothing I could do. My car ‘slid’ backwards off the road as the truck whipped past me. The driver hit their brakes and nearly ran off the road.
We had a good laugh about it after. But man… Once in a lifetime is weird enough. But the fifth, sixth, etc. time something so surreal happens it’s harder and harder it is to accept it as just dumb luck.
Like at this point I’ve used up all my luck, and at least six or seven other people’s dumb luck (sorry).
Image source: Ormyr, Gustavo Fring / pexels
#24
I can’t remember what it’s called but the scientific phenomenon of particles and photons behaving differently when observed. They aren’t being coded into the environment if no player is observing that area.
Image source: Gnostic_Gnocchi, RDNE Stock project / pexels
#25
The fact that the fibonacci sequence shows up everywhere in nature.
Image source: TheAmazingCrisco, Sam Felde / flickr
#26
Never seeing my neighbours carrying in groceries.
Image source: RedditAccountOhBoy, Ron Lach / pexels
#27
I used to work in a pharmacy, so I asked about a hundred people for their name and DOB every day. A couple weeks into the job, I mentioned to a coworker how I hadn’t had a single customer with the same birthday as me. Got 4 of them over the next two days.
EDIT: Another time I realized we were living in a simulation was when I said something online and 40 people replied to me saying the exact same wrong thing about the Birthday Paradox or the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Lazy devs copy-pasting code.
Image source: Marx0r, World Sikh Organization of Canada / pexels
#28
When observed from the surface of the earth, the moon has the exact same diameter as the sun.
It’s because the Sun has a diameter about 400 times greater than the Moon, yet is also 400 times further away.
What are the odds of that happening by pure chance?
Image source: SuvenPan, Lucas Pezeta / pexels
#29
I can sometimes think of a movie or a song. And that b***h either shows up in some form on my suggestions or my actual television.
Image source: Ok_Relationship_705, KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA / pexels
#30
Too many things taste like chicken
Image source: jdchevygirl, Pixabay / pexels
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