Jo Howell explores how reality became subjective and cognitive dissonance turned into survival.
Jo Howell is a photographic artist whose practice revolves around questioning perception, memory, and the fragile ways we construct meaning.
Her work often experiments with alternative photographic processes, found objects, and collaborative community projects, turning the act of image-making into both inquiry and commentary. What unites her projects is a refusal to take “reality” at face value.
Photography, often celebrated as evidence of truth, becomes in her hands a medium of exposure—not just of light on paper, but of the tricks, biases, and distortions through which we see the world.
For Howell, photography is not about capturing “what is.” It is about interrogating the gap between what is seen and what is believed. In that space of dissonance lies the real subject of her art: the slipperiness of truth.
And perhaps that’s why, beyond the darkroom, she has become so attuned to the cultural and political distortions shaping our present. The camera may never lie, as the saying goes, but humans certainly do—and we build entire systems of power out of those lies.
The Discomfort of Our Age
I don’t think I am alone in feeling that, for at least the last decade, we’ve been inhabiting an alternate dimension. Not the multiverse of comic book fantasy, but a deceivingly similar, parallel Earth where familiar landmarks remain intact while the rules that governed sense-making have been rewritten in absurd and sinister ways. A dimension where strange orange oligarchs rise to power, where criminals become presidents, where billionaires style themselves as saviours of humanity whilst hoarding unimaginable wealth, and where the consensus of what is real seems endlessly up for debate.
It is as though our shared reality was hijacked and replaced with a parody of itself. A doppelgänger Earth with all the right scenery but none of the stability. The problem is: no one agreed to this swap. We were just flipped into it. Those who still cling to what they know as truth are left exhausted, derided, or accused of being delusional themselves. The rules of engagement are no longer fixed. Language itself—our most fundamental tool for building shared meaning—has been weaponised against us.
This is where the metaphor at the heart of this essay comes into play:
“Don’t pee in my pocket and tell me it’s raining!”
It’s crude. It’s funny. It’s deeply working-class in its bluntness. And yet it captures, with eerie precision, the defining phenomenon of our times: gaslighting on a societal scale.
Gaslighting as Culture
Gaslighting, once a private cruelty carried out in toxic relationships, has metastasised into a cultural operating system. Entire governments, corporations, and media outlets have perfected the art of making people doubt their own perceptions. One day, up is down. The next, down is sideways. The constant shifting of narratives makes the ground beneath us feel unstable.
We are told—sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication—that we must doubt the evidence of our eyes and ears. Orwell, of course, predicted this.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Yet here we are, in an age where we can’t even agree on whether two plus two makes four, or five, or whatever number someone with enough influence says it is that day.
The saying about rain in the pocket cuts through this in a way that high theory never could. It’s the lived recognition of being humiliated and then being told to just smile and accept it.
The deception is not accidental. Someone has to actually do the peeing. Someone has to carry out the act of humiliation.
And, then they have to sell you the lie that it was a blessing, a gift of rainfall, a natural event.
The cruelty, as ever, is the point.
The Tyranny of “My Truth”
One of the most troubling features of our cultural moment is the popular embrace of the phrase “my truth.”
What began as a language of empowerment—particularly for marginalised voices—has been hollowed out and twisted into something highly corrosive.
My truth now functions as a shield against critique. It allows anyone to construct a private universe that requires no accountability to facts, evidence, or a broader consensus. Of course, perspective matters. Of course, lived experience shapes understanding. But to collapse all of reality into these infinitely branching individual “truths” is a dangerous absurdity.
The truth—the actual truth—exists independent of us. It is the stubborn reality of the physical world, the irreducible facts of history, the evidence that can be tested and verified. Your truth may be your perspective, your feelings, your opinion. And those matter. But they are not the same thing as the truth.
Without some commitment to shared truth, we cannot address collective problems. Climate change, inequality, injustice—these are not “opinions.” They are realities that demand recognition. Yet our culture of fragmented truths leaves us endlessly distracted, chasing our own private universes while those with power continue to shape reality for their benefit.
The AI Mirror
Here’s the ironic twist: in our pursuit of building artificial intelligence, we’ve accidentally created machines that mirror our own fractured psyches. Large language models are essentially children raised on the chaos of human input. We fed them our books, our articles, our tweets, our lies, our propaganda. And, predictably, they hallucinate. They get confused. They spin fictions when they don’t know the answer.
In trying to create intelligence, we replicated our own instability. These “AI children” are neurotic because their parents—that’s us—are neurotic. Their hallucinations are not glitches so much as reflections.
And maybe that’s the most uncomfortable revelation of all: our technology doesn’t just serve us. It reveals us. The mental health crisis in AI is a mirror of the mental health crisis in human society.
We are teaching the machine to survive cognitive dissonance because we have had to learn the same trick ourselves.
Cognitive Dissonance as Survival
Cognitive dissonance—the psychological discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs—has become the defining survival mechanism of our age. To navigate daily life, we are forced to compartmentalise. We scroll past news of humanitarian disasters sandwiched between cat memes and shopping ads.
We denounce authoritarianism while cheering for politicians who erode freedoms. We call out disinformation while forwarding memes whose accuracy we never check.
We live with contradictions because we must. To resist them constantly would be unbearable. So we develop coping mechanisms: ironic detachment, doomscrolling, selective outrage and cultivated numbness.
These are not solutions; they are survival strategies.
In a sense, the entire last decade has been an exercise in mass cognitive dissonance. We know the system is broken, but we continue to participate in it. We know we are being gaslighted but we shrug and carry on.
We know the pee in our pocket isn’t rain, but we pretend not to notice because what else can we do?
Language as Programming
Language is not just communication; it is programming. The words we use shape the nuances of the categories we can think in. When those words are twisted—when lies are smuggled in under the guise of “alternative facts” or “personal truths”—our mental operating systems get corrupted.
This corruption manifests like a virus. It breeds confusion, paranoia and helplessness. It fosters hallucinations, depression, psychosis—not only in our AI agents but in ourselves. If our inputs are poisoned, the outputs will be too.
To repair all of this we must reclaim precision. We must fight for clarity. We must insist on the distinction between truth and opinion, between rain and urine.
Humiliation as Power
It’s worth returning to the metaphor one last time. To pee on someone is one of the ultimate acts of humiliation. It is primal. It is degrading. And that’s precisely why it functions so well as a metaphor for our current condition.
We are not just being lied to. We are being humiliated by those lies.
It is not enough for the powerful to extract our labour, our attention, our money. They must also erode our confidence in reality itself. A population that doubts its own perceptions is easier to control. A public that can’t distinguish rain from urine is a public that won’t organise, won’t revolt and won’t demand accountability.
Humiliation is thus a political tool. The absurdity of the lie is part of its function. By forcing us to accept the absurd, they are reminding us of their dominance.
Towards Reclaiming Reality
So where does that leave us?
We cannot return to a mythical golden age of consensus reality.
Human beings have always lived with competing narratives and competing truths. But, perhaps what we can do is resist the deliberate corruption of language and the normalisation of dissonance.
We can fight for precision. We can defend the immutable levity of facts. We can acknowledge subjectivity without collapsing into solipsism.
We can laugh at the absurdity—because humor is a form of resistance—but we must not accept it as inevitable.
The rain metaphor endures because it is simple, visceral and unforgettable. It cuts through intellectual evasions and reminds us of what is really at stake: dignity, truth, survival.
To accept the pee as rain is to surrender.
To call it what it is—to name the lie—is the first step toward reclaiming reality.
Conclusion: Stop Pretending It’s Rain
The past decade has been a masterclass in societal gaslighting. We’ve been humiliated, distracted, and encouraged to live inside individualised bubbles of “truth.”
Our technologies reflect our instability back at us. Our coping strategies keep us afloat but not free. And yet, there remains the tantalising possibility of clarity.
The phrase “Don’t pee in my pocket and tell me it’s raining” is not just a joke.
It’s a demand. A reminder. A refusal to accept humiliation disguised as benevolence.
We don’t need to agree on everything. But we must agree on something.
That water is water. That truth is truth. That the rain is falling—or not. If we can’t do that then the lie becomes the only reality left.
And, that is a pocket none of us should be willing to carry.
