TLDR:

  • Every morning you trust the floor exists without checking—that’s faith, not reason
  • We’ve never met the number “2” or visited “the past,” yet base our lives on these abstractions
  • Science celebrates these tools while ignoring they’re built on pure belief
  • Project management taught me we always work backward from faith in an unseen future
  • If we all share this foundational belief system, we should build societies that reflect it

The Floor Beneath Your Feet

You wake up. Your feet hit the floor. No structural analysis, no existential crisis, no flashlight to confirm reality. Just pure, unconscious faith that the world continues to exist between yesterday’s last glance and this morning’s first step.

This isn’t the dramatic faith of religious texts. It’s quieter, more fundamental—the kind that makes breakfast possible.

Mathematics: Our Collective Hallucination

We’ve never shaken hands with the number one. Never had coffee with “two.” Never debated philosophy with “infinity.” These aren’t things you can touch, taste, or photograph. They exist purely as shared agreements, collective acts of faith so deep we’ve forgotten they’re beliefs at all.

Yet we stake everything on these ghosts. We balance budgets with imaginary numbers. Build bridges using calculations based on abstractions. Send spacecraft to Mars guided by mathematical phantoms we’ve simply agreed must be real.

Strip away the empirical veneer of science, and what remains? Pure belief. Not the kind that requires temples or texts, but the kind that lets you trust that 2+2 will equal 4 tomorrow, just as it did yesterday.

Time: The Ultimate Fiction We Can’t Live Without

There’s no GPS coordinate for “yesterday.” No airline sells tickets to “next week.” You can’t drive to the past or take a train to the future. These aren’t places—they’re stories, constructs we’ve invented to organize the chaos of experience.

The past doesn’t exist. It’s gone, evaporated, accessible only through the unreliable testimony of memory and the physical traces we choose to call evidence. The future doesn’t exist either. It’s pure speculation, a blank canvas we paint with our anxieties and hopes.

Yet here we are, planning vacations to temporal locations that have no physical reality, learning from events we never witnessed, building entire civilizations on the assumption that tomorrow will arrive.

A Story from the Trenches

Years ago, a manager asked me how we set project targets. My answer surprised him:

“The same way we plan weddings. We choose the date first, then work backward. The wedding will be June 15th—now figure out the venue, the caterers, the invitations. The product launches Q3—now determine scope, resources, timeline. It’s all built on faith that a future we’ve never seen will arrive on schedule.”

He laughed, then went quiet. We both realized we’d just admitted our entire profession was an exercise in practical mysticism—believing hard enough in an imaginary future that we reshape the present to meet it.

The Responsibility of Shared Belief

This recognition—that we’re all believers—isn’t meant to undermine rationality or promote mysticism. It’s meant to reveal something profound: beneath our divisions, we share a foundational faith in continuity, causation, and meaning.

In a world fractured by debates over religion, politics, and truth itself, this shared substrate of belief might be our bridge back to each other. The militant atheist and the devout fundamentalist both trust the floor each morning. Both use numbers they’ve never met. Both plan futures that don’t yet exist.

This connects directly to what I call hic et nunc—here and now. Our shared faith in reality’s consistency creates a shared responsibility. If we all participate in this collective belief system that makes civilization possible, then we owe each other the basics that make participation meaningful: education, shelter, healthcare, opportunity.

Beyond Taking: The Mathematics of Meaning

But here’s where the equation gets interesting: a society thrives when its members give more than they take. Not as charity, but as a fundamental principle. Not from guilt, but from the recognition that we’re all co-creating this elaborate belief system called civilization.

Education shouldn’t just prepare people to consume—it should create beings capable of contribution. A truly good place to live isn’t where you can take the most, but where everyone is empowered and expected to add more than they subtract.

This isn’t socialism or capitalism or any -ism. It’s the simple mathematics of a belief system worth believing in.

Your Quiet Faith

So before you dismiss someone else’s worldview as irrational, pause. Remember your morning faith in the floor. Your trust in numbers you’ve never touched. Your plans built on futures that exist only in imagination.

We’re all walking on invisible bridges, navigating by fictional maps, building with imaginary tools. The only difference is which bridges we notice and which ones we’ve forgotten are even there.

What unconscious beliefs carried you through today? The floor was just the beginning. Share below—let’s map the invisible architecture we all inhabit but rarely examine.