“I never had any experience that a house would drop in value,” Bob said, shaking his head. He compared the “slow-dawning reality” of his new life to waking up in The Matrix: learning that the pleasant, predictable world you used to inhabit was a mirage, a lie built to hide a brutal dystopia. “The security most people take comfort in, I’m not convinced that isn’t an illusion,” he added. “When you find out what you believed to be true isn’t true, it’s disorienting. What you believe to be true is so embedded. It takes a radical pounding to let go.”
