The Map is Not The Territory

The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

The journey is not the adventure.

The goal/plan is not the accomplishment.

The menu is not the meal.

These and many other things are merely ingredients, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, dreams, and fantasies that make up our life’s experiences.

Conceptions/ mis-conceptions

Understanding/ mis-understanding

Failures/ learnings

Our models of situations are not the real thing—actual stuff of life — but we often confuse the map and the model with reality and then forget they’re not the same. But why does it matter?

Something to Think About

Our life stories are just a map (our interpretation of circumstances or situations) that we, and others with whom we communicate, use, to arrive at conclusions that may or may not be the real whole truth.

We’ve all grown up with maps. Those maps have contributed to our own internal maps. Our parents, culture, school, religion, society at large raised us, believing in the maps they found most useful and passed them on to us. They’re in our DNA. We identify with them, i.e. Liberal, Conservative, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Atheist, LGBTQ, etc.. Often we’re unaware of them. And especially our self-identity with them.

Sometimes (often) they cause conflict when our maps are not in agreement with the maps of other groups or individuals.

When you think about it, it’s no different from how so many of us anticipate the future. Some look with fear and others with eagerness or a hundred other emotions. Some see loving humans occupying the planet and others see scary people out to hurt them. But in the end, the stories we anticipate are just map filters we use consistently/routinely to view the world. In the end, those maps may or may not be the reality we will actually experience. Remember that a map is not the territory, any more than shadows on a cave wall are reality.