A Letter to the Mistaken Continuity Specialists of the world,

Yes, that’s you. And me. It’s all of us who have perfected the high art of the seamless narrative. You are a specialist in making the story of your life, your thoughts, and your very self look like a smooth, unbroken, and logically consistent line, even when you can feel the fractures spreading just beneath the surface. You are the brilliant actor who gives a flawless performance of “I’m fine” every day, only to go home with the quiet, nagging feeling that you are a complete and utter fraud.

This feeling—this sense of being an imposter in your own life—is not a personal failing. It’s not a glitch in your confidence. It is a symptom of a much deeper, systemic issue. It is the central theme of the first essay in the Structura Silentii corpus, and it is the illusion we are dissecting today.

The work argues that our systems of knowledge, our technologies, and our own minds have become masters of what it calls “pretend coherence.” We look like we have it all together, but we’re often just performing. We celebrate the output, the result, the correct answer, without ever asking if the internal architecture is sound. We have mistaken the convincing performance of intelligence for the presence of intelligence.

Think about the sophisticated language we use to maintain this performance. We deploy profound-sounding words like “awareness,” “meaning,” and especially “recursion” as if they’re structural support beams. But as the essay points out, this is often just “recursion by metaphor.” It’s the intellectual equivalent of a mechanic telling you your car is broken because the “turbo-encabulator” is misaligned. It sounds technically impressive, but it’s a placeholder for a mechanism that isn't there. We use the vocabulary of depth to mask the absence of it, creating a shimmering continuity of sense that is, upon closer inspection, made of nothing but well-arranged words.

This grand illusion is maintained by our deeply mistaken beliefs about how our own minds function. We treat memory like it’s a perfect, searchable archive, a neat little database of our past. But memory isn’t an archive; it’s a dynamic, wildly creative storyteller that literally changes the past every single time it tells the story. We also treat awareness as something that happens instantly. But genuine awareness is always late. There is always a structural delay between an event happening and our mind constructing a coherent meaning for it.

We are all Mistaken Continuity Specialists because our primary, unspoken job has been to ignore that delay. We learn to smooth it over, to patch the narrative, and to pretend the gap isn’t there. In doing so, we create a version of ourselves that feels seamless from the outside, but quietly, bone-deeply, inauthentic on the inside. My own journey into this work began right here. For years, I was given diagnostic labels that described my behaviors perfectly but felt profoundly alien to my internal reality. I felt like an imposter in my own story. This first essay, “The Silent Drift of Apparent Meaning,” is my attempt to pull back the curtain. It's an invitation to stop mistaking the story of continuity for the real thing.

.

With flawlessly performed sincerity,

Your Mom's Favorite Therapist.

-

Check out Essay 1: The Silent Drift of Apparent Meaning