You’ve Never Touched Anything — And That Changes How You See Reality

Try this right now.

Put your hand on a table.

Feels solid, right? Obvious. Undeniable.

Except… you didn’t actually touch it.

That sounds like clickbait, but it’s not philosophy, and it’s not wordplay. It’s straight-up physics.

The Illusion of Contact

On the smallest scales, matter is mostly empty space. Atoms are made of a tiny nucleus surrounded by electrons buzzing around in probability clouds. And here’s the key part:

Electrons don’t like each other.

When your hand approaches the table, the electrons in your skin repel the electrons in the table through the electromagnetic force. That repulsion creates resistance, and your nerves interpret that resistance as the sensation of touch.

So what you’re feeling isn’t contact—it’s force.

No atoms ever meet.

No surfaces truly collide.

Your hand and the table remain separated by an invisible barrier of electromagnetic fields.

So Why Does Everything Feel Solid?

Because your brain is extremely good at lying to you.

Evolution didn’t care about accuracy—it cared about survival. If your ancestors had to consciously think, “I am currently experiencing electron repulsion mediated by quantum fields,” they wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Instead, your brain compresses all of that complexity into one simple story:

“Solid object. Don’t walk through it.”

That story works so well that we forget it is a story.

Solidity Is a Collective Agreement

Zoom out, and “solid” stops being a property of matter and starts being a behavior.

A wall isn’t solid because it’s full.

It’s solid because the forces inside it strongly resist rearrangement.

That’s why:

Glass is solid but transparent
Steel is solid but bendable
And air feels like nothing… until you’re falling through it at 200 mph

Solidity isn’t about what things are.

It’s about how forces respond when you try to move them.

You Are a Walking Field Interaction

Right now, your body is:

exchanging forces with the floor
exchanging photons with the room
exchanging air molecules with your lungs

At no point does “contact” actually happen.

You are a pattern of forces, interacting with other patterns of forces, in a universe where emptiness vastly outnumbers matter.

And yet—

you can hug someone, feel warmth, feel pressure, feel comfort.

Those experiences are real.

But they’re interpretations, not direct perceptions.

The Mind-Blowing Part

This means your entire physical reality—the feeling of keys, cups, skin, walls—is not how the universe is…

…it’s how your brain makes sense of it.

You don’t experience the universe directly.

You experience a user interface tuned for survival.

And somehow, that interface convinces you that invisible force fields feel like solid objects.

Which might be the most impressive trick your brain pulls off every single second.