You know that David Foster Wallace speech about fish? Two young fish swimming along, older fish passes and says “Morning boys, how’s the water?” The young fish swim on, then one turns to the other: “What the hell is water?”

That’s the point. We don’t notice what we’re swimming in.

The Furniture We Sit In

Think about chairs. If you grew up sitting in chairs, you probably can’t comfortably squat all the way down with your feet flat on the ground. Try it right now. Most Americans can’t do it—our hips and ankles don’t have that range anymore.

But people in many Asian countries can squat like that easily. They didn’t sit in chairs as much growing up, so their bodies kept that mobility.

The chair didn’t reveal “the natural way to sit.” It created a way to sit, and then our bodies adapted to it. We lost other ways of sitting without noticing.

Stories and language work the same way. They’re like furniture for our minds.

Mental Furniture

The stories you grow up hearing shape what thoughts seem natural and what thoughts seem strange or even impossible.

If you grow up hearing stories where the hero goes on a journey, faces challenges, and comes back changed—you’ll expect your own life to work that way. When something bad happens, you might think “this is my challenge, I’ll grow from this.” That’s not wrong, but it’s not the only way to think.

Other cultures tell different stories:

• Some stories teach “be clever and survive” instead of “face your fears and grow”
• Some teach “keep the group happy” instead of “discover who you really are”
• Some teach “things go in cycles” instead of “you’re on a journey forward”

None of these is more true than the others. They’re just different furniture. They each let you sit in some positions comfortably while making other positions hard or impossible.

Reality Tunnels

Writer Robert Anton Wilson called this your “reality tunnel”—the lens made of your beliefs, language, and experiences that shapes what you can see. He was right that we’re all looking through tunnels, not at raw reality.

Wilson believed you could learn to switch between different reality tunnels—adopt a completely different way of seeing for a while, then switch to another one. Try thinking like a conspiracy theorist for a week, then like a scientist, then like a mystic.

He wasn’t completely wrong. But switching tunnels isn’t as easy as Wilson sometimes made it sound. It’s more like switching languages—you need immersion, practice, and maintenance, or you just end up back in your native tunnel when things get difficult.

Why This Matters

When you only have one kind of mental furniture, you think that’s just how thinking works. Like those fish who don’t know they’re in water.

But when you realize stories and language are furniture—not reality—you get some important abilities:

First: You notice when your furniture isn’t working. Sometimes you face a problem where thinking “I need to grow from this challenge” actually makes things worse. Maybe you just need to be clever and get through it. Or maybe you need to stop focusing on yourself and think about the group. Your usual way of thinking might be the wrong tool for this specific situation.

Second: You can learn to use different tools. Not perfectly—that takes years of practice, like learning a new language. But you can borrow techniques.

Want to think more tactically? Read trickster stories—the wise fool who outsmarts powerful people through wit rather than strength.

Want to notice how groups work? Pay attention to stories that focus on harmony and relationships instead of individual heroes.

Want to see patterns instead of progress? Look at stories where things cycle and repeat instead of moving forward to an ending.

Third: No framework gets to be the boss. This is where it gets interesting. Once you see that all frameworks are furniture, none of them can claim to be “reality itself.” They’re all tools.

Think about how cleanliness norms work in Japan. There’s no cleanliness police enforcing the rules. People maintain incredibly high standards because they value the outcome. The structure is real and binding, but not coercive.

Your mental frameworks can work the same way. You choose which ones to use based on what you value and what works, not because any of them is “the truth.” That’s a kind of mental anarchism—no imposed authority telling you how you must think, but still having structure because you value what it enables.

The Hard Part

Here’s what most people don’t want to hear: different frameworks sometimes genuinely conflict. There’s no way to make them all fit together nicely.

An anthropologist once read Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a tribe. The tribesmen thought Hamlet’s uncle marrying his mother was perfectly reasonable, and Hamlet’s reaction seemed childish. They weren’t offering “an alternative interpretation.” From their framework, the Western reading was simply wrong.

This creates real tension. You can’t be “in” two incompatible frameworks at once. You have to actually pick, at least for that moment. And when you’re stressed or in crisis, you’ll probably default back to your native framework—the one you grew up with.

The question is whether you can recover perspective afterward: “That framework felt like reality in the moment, but it doesn’t own reality.”

The Practical Part

You probably can’t completely change your mental furniture. That would be like growing up again in a different culture. It would take years of immersion in situations where a different framework actually matters—where there are real consequences for not using it.

But you can do three things:

Stay aware that you’re sitting in furniture, not on the ground. Notice when your usual way of thinking is just one option, not the truth.

Borrow strategically from other frameworks for specific situations. Use a different mental model, tell yourself a different kind of story about what’s happening, ask different questions. Not because the new furniture is better, but because sometimes it gives you a view you couldn’t see from your regular chair.

Accept the tension when frameworks conflict. Don’t try to force them into a neat synthesis. Real anarchism isn’t chaos—it’s having structure without letting any structure claim ultimate authority. You maintain your primary way of thinking because you value what it enables, not because it’s “true.” And you accept that other frameworks might be genuinely incompatible with yours, with no neutral way to resolve it.

The Bottom Line

We all swim in water—language, stories, ways of thinking that feel natural but are actually learned. The point isn’t to get out of the water. You can’t.

The point is to notice it’s there. To see that your framework is a way, not the way. To choose which furniture to sit in based on what you value and what the situation demands, not because someone told you that’s reality.

That’s harder than it sounds. When things get tough, your native framework will reassert itself and feel like the only truth. But if you can recover perspective afterward—if you can remember that you were sitting in furniture, not touching the ground—you’ve gained something real.

It’s a kind of freedom. Not the easy freedom of “believe whatever you want.” The harder freedom of “no framework owns you, but you still need frameworks to function.”

That’s not much. But it’s something. And it beats being the fish who never even knew there was water.