In 2012, a psychiatrist named Joel Gold published a paper in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry describing a trend he had noticed among his patients. In the course of the preceding decade, he had seen a number of young men who believed that they were being watched—that, in fact, their entire lives were being recorded by, and orchestrated for, hidden cameras that followed them at all times. A few of the patients compared their situation to “The Truman Show,” a 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey as a man who discovers that he’s living in an elaborately produced TV program.
In this video from an episode of “The New Yorker Presents” (Amazon Originals), based on a 2013 story by Andrew Marantz, a man who suffered from the so-called “Truman Show” delusion talks about what it felt like to have the belief that his life was a TV show—and that his friends, family, and everyone else he encountered were all actors—creep up on him. He describes waking up one day and having what felt like a realization that he was being watched and “had probably been watched my entire life.” The realization made him feel not paranoid but emboldened—excited for “the big reveal” that he thought would come at the end of the show.
Gold, who also appears in the video, explains that “delusions have been around since people have been around,” but that delusions often bear a complicated relationship to the cultural context in which they occur. During the Cold War, for instance, there was an uptick in people believing they were under surveillance by the C.I.A. or F.B.I. The rise of the “Truman Show” delusion has coincided with the advent of reality television and other media in which people actually are recorded and broadcast all the time. “We’re raising our children,” he comments, “with the notion that you, too, can be famous tomorrow.”
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