Breaking Mirrors

Dear Self,

Heh, we are taking this way too seriously now don’t we?

The Concept of Mirrors

One thing i’ve been experimenting for a while (at least in a cognitive level) is the thought of Making and Breaking Mirrors. Heavily influenced by one of my favourite artists, Gotye.

Gotye’s 2011 album “Making Mirrors” draws its title from a painting created by his father in the 1980s, which Gotye discovered among old bills and newspapers in his parents’ barn. This artwork not only inspired the album’s cover but also influenced its title, reflecting themes of self-reflection and introspection present throughout the album.

Given my background, there is a common superstition regarding the opposite theme. The breaking of mirrors, often thought to bring seven years of bad luck. However, I believe that intentionally shattering the self-created mirrors—those that distort reality or present a rigid self-reflection—can be a profoundly liberating act.

Think about it. How many misconceptions do you have? About other people, about your surroundings, about even your own self.

‘I’m not good at doing X,’ ‘I’m the best at doing Y,’ ‘I could never do Z.’ But it becomes clear that when you challenge that specific self-image, It almost feels like all of this shatters to pieces. But you go again you make your next set of mirrors. Your new misconceptions, your new superstitions. Only to have them fail you again few days, months or years down the line.

As I reflect on this, it becomes clear that the mirrors I create are shaped by misconceptions—not only about others, but about myself and my reality. But what if those misconceptions aren’t just mistakes? What if they’re part of the very way we see the world, almost like a protective mechanism?

The Biased Creator

So you start to wonder am i ever gonna make a Mirror that will reflect the truth? According to science at least you are unable to do so. All individuals no matter how smart or how dumb they think they are, will always create a subjective reality completely surrendered to their cognitive biases. Doesn’t matter how clever you think you can be. You can read all about it, You can consiously be alert about biases and you can limit the creation of new ones to a certain degree but still the whole process is beyond, your own control. It’s the very mechanisms nature has put in place to protect you from the dangers of life but as we progress from uncivilized monkeys in to “Humans”, they begin to exert pressure on us, because there are no threats to fight but the mechanisms to do so are there and they need to activate.

Biases change of course. Heck, my biases change all the time, i am quite open to this actually.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a friend about art, i was complaining that Photography is quite a sterile art. You are limited by the amount of pixels a camera can capture or a display can show or even a in a physical form you are quite bound to the size of the paper you printed your piece in. While something like Theater or Painting those boundries are a bit more abstract.

I was surprised, how quickly my friend managed to destroy my arguments and my bias by saying the following:

“Isn’t that the case with anything?
When i paint, i am limited by the amount of paper i have.
Sure, i can get a bigger paper but you can also get a bigger lens or a bigger screen.”

This led me to think about how biases shape our perceptions, even when we’re unaware of them.

You might think i might be stupid for needing somebody to point that out to me. But yeah, something that simple made me change my perspective on the subject. It’s not like i didn’t think about that myself, certainly i have. Having my own biases tho made me disregard this very question to myself. But hearing someone else say it. Well, it broke one of my mirrors.

Not sure, how many people have experienced this feeling when you realize you were wrong but that realization didn’t come from conflict or a shock but just a friendly conversation. You almost feel defeated and vulnerable but the comfortable kind. It’s quite an intresting feeling.

Reality is subjective (and that’s okay!)

So what’s the solution? How can i make more mirrors than i break?

Well, do you have to?

The very act of breaking down your mirrors of self-reflection is, in itself, the creation of a new mirror. Is it closer to the truth? Maybe, maybe not.

It is certainly closer to some kind of truth.

Plato¹ himself questioned this very idea (loosely interpreted), that our senses aren’t to be trusted, so any kind of conclusion we reach through them will be inconclusive.

But we aren’t doing high-stakes philosophy here. This is more of an inferior form of philosophy, a practical reflection on our everyday experiences—one that is limited by our very means of understanding. And unfortunately, we hit one of the limitations of English in capturing this concept. In Greek, the word Αμπελοφιλοσοφία, describes this half-baked method of philosophy, where the aim is not to reach any profound understanding but simply to indulge in abstract thinking without a clear direction (basically, ‘philosophizing for the sake of philosophizing’).

If you haven’t realized by now this is the whole point of those notes to self kind of letters i am writting and if you’ve been following along this is exactly where i am getting to. I am trying to present my truth. My present understanding about our world. Maybe in a very bad and boring way but in one that’s quite meaningful to me.

Every time we talk to our friends, play games with them, or go to work, we engage in a shared hallucination of reality through our common experiences—and somehow, it works. Despite our individual subjective realities, we manage to construct a collective one, at least for the moment. Not an objective one. People outside this process, wouldn’t be able to experience or understand our reality. Sure, they could try to conjecture it, filtering it through their own biases and misconceptions, but it would never be quite the same. They wouldn’t be able to see through our mirrors. They can only look at us through their own

We break and remake our mirrors, searching for meaning that may never truly materialize. But in doing so, we keep learning—about ourselves, about the world, and about how we reflect on both. Every broken mirror is a step closer to understanding that maybe there isn’t a final answer, just an ongoing process of creation and destruction which will take us closer (or even further sometimes).

In this sense, the real truth might not lie in the mirrors themselves. It could be in the willingness to keep making them and shattering them, over and over again. Maybe the process of creating mirrors is the truth we were always searching for—a reflection of our own perpetual evolution.

How we went from Gotye to Plato only The Lord™ knows.

I am just a silly dog.

Kind Regards,

Zack

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