What if I Told You Your Living Room Wall Is Mostly Empty Space?

If you’re someone who thinks spirituality, "energy," and anything unseen is total nonsense—hey, I get it. You can't see it, touch it, hear it, or taste it. If you can’t measure it, why believe it? On the flip side, if you're into meditation or energy work, you probably just know in your gut that there’s more to reality than meets the eye, even if you can’t prove it to your skeptical friends.

Regardless of which camp you're in, if you think "reality" is limited strictly to what your five senses can perceive... well, buckle up. Physics is about to ruin your day.

The Football Stadium in Your Living Room

Let’s talk about that solid brick wall in your home. It feels completely solid, right? Go ahead, try walking through it. (Spoiler: Please don’t, you'll get a concussion.)

Yet, according to basic chemistry and physics, that wall is roughly 99.999999999% empty space.

Every piece of matter—including that wall, your coffee mug, and your own body—is made of atoms. An atom is composed of a tiny nucleus with even tinier electrons zipping around it. To put that in perspective: if the nucleus were the size of a single marble sitting on the 50-yard line of a massive football stadium, the electrons would be like gnats buzzing around the very top row of the stadium seats.

Everything in between? Absolute void. Pure emptiness.

So why don't you fall through the floor right now? Why can't you phase through your wall like a superhero?

It’s Not Solid, It’s Just Repulsive

It all comes down to vibrations, forces, and fields.

When you push against a wall, your hand doesn't actually touch the wall’s atoms. Instead, the negatively charged electrons orbiting the atoms in your hand come face-to-face with the negatively charged electrons in the wall. Since like charges repel each other, the electrons push back. Hard.

What you perceive as "solidity" is literally just electromagnetic repulsion—energy pushing against energy. It’s the exact same force you feel when you try to force two identical sides of a magnet together. Nothing is actually touching; you’re just feeling a force field.

Sound waves do the same thing. Think about standing right next to a giant speaker at a concert. You feel that bass pounding in your chest. That's invisible sound energy vibrating the physical matter that is you.

Energy dictates matter. Matter is just energy slowed down to a crawl.

Your Brain Is Doing You a Favor (And Lying to You)

So why does everything look and feel so solid?

Because your brain is an evolutionary survival engine, not a truth-revealing supercomputer. To keep you from getting run over by a saber-toothed tiger (or a city bus), your brain simplifies reality. It takes billions of microscopic energy fields bouncing off each other and renders them as a nice, solid, easy-to-understand 3D world.

Your brain "lies" to you for your own good. It gives you a highly edited, simplified interface so you can navigate life without overthinking every atom.

Opening the Door

When we realize that our senses only capture a tiny fraction of what’s actually happening around us, the line between science and spirituality gets pretty blurry.

Spiritual traditions have been telling us for millennia that the physical world is an illusion (Maya) and that underlying everything is a sea of unseen energy and consciousness. Quantum physics just showed up to the party a couple of hundred years ago with a calculator to say, "Hey, actually... they're kind of right."

Once you accept that your brain's version of reality is just a heavily filtered preview, you stop asking, "Is energy real?" and start asking, "What else am I missing?" And that’s where the real magic—and science—begins.