What is even reality?

Another ridiculous question, but its true. If we think more about it, what is even real? There's this book inside The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim called Reality and Other Falsehoods. The passage says: "...first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception..."

Well, I think we rarely experience reality directly. We experience our interpretation of reality. We see what happened, process it through our knowledge, assumptions, fears, and desires, and then call the result “reality”. Two people can observe the same event and walk away with two completely different realities.

What businesses and private equities has taught me about this?

Financial markets have taught me that perception can become reality.

A company may have strong revenue, healthy cash flow, and good products. But if investors believe the company has no future, its valuation can collapse.

Another company may have little revenue, continuous losses, and an uncertain product. But if investors believe it will dominate the future, its valuation can rise.

Which one is real?

Is the real value of a company its assets? Its profits? Its future cash flow? Its stock price? Or what people are willing to pay for it today?

Perhaps all of them are real in different ways.

What about software engineering?

I'd love to believe software engineering is grounded to a reality. I think the implementation of any software is indeed grounded to a reality. Whichever reality that might be... But let's assume it is "this" reality.

However not everything in software engineering is that grounded. Think more about it. Remember back in 2020-2022 era? yes... the microservices. That time microservices was sold as a scalable solution to software. Well, I was one of the victims that believe it without thinking in first-principles.

If we think in first-principles, microservices caused more latency as now there are hops between microservice. So, it does not make a software itself scalable! It is only useful to decouple teams as far as I know. So, it solves organizational problem as opposed to a performance problem.

So, what is reality?

I don't know, well, let's have a coffee and talk about that instead.