Makeshift Make Believe

Playing with words is gradually becoming a hobby of mine.

I'm not sure if my brain is a bit too bored nowadays but I think being less analytical and more playful with words is teaching me that creativity doesn't need perfect structure.

Makeshift make believe refers to the act of spontaneously creating or improvising an imaginary scenario or game using whatever materials or objects are readily available at the moment. It combines the idea of "makeshift," which means something that is temporary or improvised, with "make believe," which is the act of pretending or engaging in imaginative play.

Copied from a response from Grok AI after I asked with a prompt; What is makeshift make believe?

After reading this response, two streams of thoughts emerged in my mind. A macro and a micro one.

The macro one is centred around narrative. It is said we live in a narrative driven world.

Given enough adoption, any meme can become a reality even though it may lack factual foundation or started as pure fiction.

Money is perhaps the most successful "shared fiction" in human history. It began as an abstract concept - the idea that we could represent value with symbols - and evolved into a fundamental reality that shapes our world.

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A Collective Play

I think money as a shared fiction very well demonstrates how an improvised solution(i.e using tokens to represent value) became a rather permanent, structured system through shared narrative and belief.

Of course, money isn't exactly 'makeshift' in the traditional sense. It's more like a game we all agreed to play, turning tokens into treasures through collective make-believe.

Unless we decide to switch games entirely, this particular narrative seems set to continue. Will that happen anytime soon?

Even within this grand narrative of money, we still somehow keep creating makeshift solutions. For example, cyptocurrencies emerged as a makeshift alternative to traditional currency, and despite their volatile nature, they've carved out their own reality through collective belief.

Speaking of turning nothing into something, let's scale down to the personal level.

If you think about it in a certain way, our individual minds are remarkable factories of makeshift make-believe.

Take the simple act of seeing shapes in clouds or faces in random patterns – pareidolia, as it's called.

Relatively Real

I find it interesting that during the act of play, a child can turn a cardboard box into a spaceship and flies it across the air living in their own imaginary world. Or as writers, when we turn a blank page into a story, we're engaging in the same fundamental process that created money, just at a different scale.

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We're taking the raw materials of reality(abstract thoughts) and imbuing them with new meaning through our imagination.

Arguably, the most fascinating aspect of this "micro-creation" is how it requires no validation beyond our own willingness to believe.

Unlike global narratives that need mass adoption, personal acts of makeshift make-believe can exist solely within our own minds, yet feel just as real!

In a way, professional titles, social roles, and even national identities can essentially be viewed as elaborate forms of collective makeshift make-believe.

A CEO is only a CEO because we collectively agree to the significance of that role, just as a flag is only meaningful because we collectively believe in the nation and its ideals that it represents.


Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.