The Reality Stack (or: Why Evolution Secretly Hired a Systems Engineer)
Reprograming our individual and collective Reality.
AI rendering. A programmer is at his desk, out his window is a UFO and he sees code falling down from a dark sky like in the Matrix.
Every once in a while I stumble into an idea so obvious in retrospect that it makes me laugh like an idiot alone in my office. This week’s realization? Humans basically run on a programming stack. Yes, a literal stack — as in computer science 101: push a frame, pop a frame, try not to overwrite the heap, pray you don’t cause a segmentation fault. For my sins I used to be a systems engineer many lives ago. I know. It sounds ridiculous. But stay with me.
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And it explains far more about human psychology — and society — than it has any right to.
The “Normal” Loop: How Humans Think When Nothing Weird Happens
NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, mapped out something that always felt intuitively right to me, even if the practitioners wrapped it in more hand gestures and confidence games than scientific rigor. The idea is that human meaning-making runs through a set of levels or layers:
Environment
Behavior
Capabilities
Beliefs
Identity
Purpose
Most people treat this like a hierarchy. But what it actually is — what it behaves like — is a processing loop. The human Default Loop.
Something like:
Process {
Environment
Behavior
Capabilities
Beliefs
Identity
Purpose
}
When life is normal, this loop runs quietly in the background. You take in sensory data. You act. You update your self-model. You check your beliefs against the world. You maintain a sense of purpose. The stack is stable. It keeps its shape. You can add frames and pop frames without destabilizing anything important.
In other words:
Your reality feels like reality.
Just don’t look too closely.
The Anomaly: Undeclared Variables Enter the Matrix
But then something… anomalous happens.
Doesn’t have to be a UFO. Though that is the cleanest example and the one I am working with now. A UFO is basically an ontological injection directly into your main thread. The anomaly could alternatively be:
a betrayal
a diagnosis
a mystical experience
a sudden loss
a disorienting insight
anything that your current model of the world can’t parse
The point is: you get an input the system can’t interpret.
In programming terms, this is when a function receives a variable it wasn’t written to handle. In life, this is when your worldview gets handed something like:
NHI = true
agency = nonhuman
causality = violated
identity = unstable
meaning = undefined
Your processing loop looks at this and says:
“This variable does not exist in my ontology.”
Which triggers the thing evolution built for exactly this scenario:
the error-return system.
The Four Error Returns: Our Built-In Diagnostic Suite
Humans don’t actually crash. There is no “blue screen of death.” And catatonia, while real, is rare and usually temporary. Instead, we have four fallback routes — emergency return states that bypass the normal processing loop entirely:
Fight
Flight
Freeze
Appease
These are not moral failings.
They are not personality quirks.
They are not signs of weakness or immaturity.
They are error returns — fast-and-dirty evolution guided survival-level routines that take over when the system receives an input too strange, too threatening, or too complex to process normally.
And here’s the twist I find hilarious:
each of these error returns is also a reality test.
Fight = test by pushing
“What I’m seeing — does it push back? Can I restore coherence through force or assertion? Can I make it fit?”
Flight = test by withdrawing
“Is this real when I step back? Is it persistent? Is it coming with me?”
Freeze = test by stillness
“What information appears when I stop acting? What emerges when I remove myself from the causal loop?”
Appease = test by interaction
“Does it respond? Does it have intention? Can rapport stabilize the situation?”
These routines aren’t flaws. They’re diagnostics for Reality.
Evolution didn’t give us a crash; it gave us four different reality-check mechanisms.
Which is honestly more clever than most software systems I’ve worked with.
When People Get Stuck Running Only One Return Loop
You probably know someone who has a single dominant error response. We all do. The friend who goes straight to anger. The colleague who disappears at the first sign of discomfort. The family member who freezes like a crashed browser. The people-pleaser who appeases everything that moves.
In the stack model, they’re not “dramatic” or “avoidant” or “too sensitive.”
They’re running a single return loop because their stack underneath is too thin to support anything else. There isn’t much identity, or capability, or belief-flexibility to catch the anomaly — so any input they can’t immediately parse throws them into the only error routine they trust.
And, crucially:
they never get the final step — reorientation.
They stay in the loop. Defensive. Reacting to internal alarms instead of the actual environment. Living inside a nervous system that keeps shouting PANIC even when nothing is happening.
Not their fault.
But absolutely exhausting.
Why This Matters (Far Beyond Personal Psychology)
This is where the metaphor escalates from “cute insight” to “framework I will probably use for the rest of my life.”
Because this is not just how people respond to anomalies.
This is how societies respond.
This is how institutions respond.
This is how governments respond.
This is how the entire UFO secrecy apparatus has responded for 80 years.
The fight-loop? Debunking, ridicule, suppression.
The flight-loop? Bureaucratic avoidance. “We don’t study that.”
The freeze-loop? Committees, stalled reports, internal paralysis.
The appease-loop? Limited hangouts, partial disclosures, symbolic transparency.
The very thing that keeps an individual from crashing is the thing that keeps a nation-state from collapsing under ontological stress.
Evolution wasn’t designing for congressional hearings, but the logic holds.
Why I Keep Laughing at This
Because the metaphor is absurd and absurdly neat.
Humans — messy, emotional, full of contradictions — turn out to operate like a defensive runtime system trying very hard not to segfault. And when something impossible enters the environment — an NHI encounter, a personal crisis, a revelation that breaks a belief layer — we don’t fall apart.
We return an error.
We test the world.
We rebuild the stack.
We survive.
And because we do this at every level — neural, psychological, cultural — it gives me a strange kind of hope. We may not be rational, but we are robust. Our meaning-making system is archaic and brittle and occasionally ridiculous, but it is also elegant in its own feral way.
Evolution, in its darkly comic improvisational style, accidentally implemented a recursive, self-healing architecture of reality construction.
I find that both hilarious and comforting.
So What’s the Point of Seeing the Stack?
Awareness changes everything.
When you can see the moments your stack fails —
when you catch yourself about to spit out one of the Four Error Returns —
you suddenly have options.
You can interrupt the loop.
You can step into liminality instead of panic.
You can rebuild meaning consciously.
You can bypass the inherited routines that kept your ancestors alive but make you miserable.
And at scale?
A society that understands its own error-handling is one step closer to not losing its collective mind when reality throws something unexpected at us.
Which, given the times we’re living in, might be wise to cultivate.