As the New Year rolls around again, I”m doing a quick review of my life so I can skip it when I reach the pearly gates. Has no one told the spirits in the other realm we are constantly reviewing our lives while we’re living? What did I come into this room to do? Why am I always picking up after everyone else? Is doing the dishes the only reason I am here?

I’ve spent a lot of my life not curing cancer, or solving physics equations, or jetting off to the moon. Most of us live ordinary lives, and in service to others. If you folded socks today, paid the household bills, or made dinner, you likely fall into this category. We live in the physical realm in a physical body and life in the physical world is full of tasks and work and using our energy to take care of ourselves and others. Sometimes we get to go to Hawaii and smell the orchids, or sit on our EZ Boy all day and watch football, but for the most part, we are task oriented and have little time to contemplate the big questions, like, why are we here?

It could be that’s a good thing.

But the people we’ve left these questions to have been fast at work trying to figure out the nature of reality and so far, the theories being thrown around are contemptible. The newest, and one that has gained a lot of traction, is that we’re living in a simulated reality. Simulation theory is a hypothesis that suggests our reality, including the universe and everything within it, might be a computer-generated simulation. According to this hypothesis, conscious beings, including humans, would essentially be characters or entities within this simulated reality. The concept has gained popularity in discussions about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the universe.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that life might be a bit like a video game. We perceive life as real, but we could all just be video characters in a game someone is playing in the future, simulating a world full of people and watching how their little universe evolves.

I can’t help but laugh at the irony of someone, maybe even a kid from the future, being in charge of my life, but there are days it makes a lot of sense. Whole sets of keys have disappeared from this house and now I can just blame it on a kid from 3025 who is in charge of making sure I feel batty half the day. It explains missing socks, horrid weather, and the incredible speed in which life seems to pass.

Elon Musk, a god in the flesh to many, believes in the simulation theory. And so does the director of the New York Planetarium Neil deGrasse Tyson, as well as a handful of physicists and scientists. Some of it makes sense: is the speed of light programmed in as computer code so it never varies? Same with the speed of sound and gravity. There are certain physical laws in life which seem to be permanently fixed, while most everything else is subject to constant change. Does computer code explain it?

And there’s more: after splitting atoms, scientists realized that atoms are mostly empty space. And since everything is made up of atoms, is the physical world mostly empty space that we only perceive to be solid? Perhaps there’s nothing in our universe because it isn’t real.

And did you know scientists have found that a particle can be in two places at once, and that the will of the observer dictates where it goes? This phenomenon is called superposition, which suggests that a particle can exist in multiple states or locations simultaneously. This is an established fact, and one I’ve been living my whole life as a mother.

Since you are all busy wrapping gifts and making eggnog, I thought I’d report in about the new science and what it might potentially mean for the rest of us. You can all thank me later.

Of course, simulation theory is highly speculative and lacks evidence. And the idea raises philosophical questions rather than providing concrete answers. But it’s interesting to think about, no? Personally, there’s a whole lot of things I wouldn’t mind simulating into existence. I hope to walk into my closet and find that all of the Christmas presents there have been beautifully wrapped. It’s the least someone from the future can do for a person who has washed a lot of dishes.