Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert and trained hypnotist, operates under a belief system that most people would consider bizarre: he believes we’re living in a computer simulation created by a higher intelligence. He doesn’t necessarily think this is objectively true—he’s agnostic about what truth even means in this context. But he’s discovered something remarkable: people who act as if reality is a simulation tend to get better results than those who don’t.
In Reframe Your Brain, Adams presents the Simulation Hypothesis not as a metaphysical claim but as a practical tool—a filter on reality that makes certain strategies and outcomes more accessible. And while the idea might sound like science fiction, the psychological mechanisms it activates are grounded in well-established principles of cognitive psychology and performance optimization.
The question isn’t whether we’re actually in a simulation. The question is: what becomes possible when you treat reality as if it were programmable by your intentions?
The Core Argument for Simulation
Adams presents the basic case for why we might be living in a simulation with characteristic clarity: “As soon as any advanced species—including humans—develops the skill to create such a simulation, they would surely make more than one. Maybe millions. And the simulations themselves would evolve to make their own simulations.”
The logic continues: if there’s one base reality and potentially trillions of simulations, the statistical likelihood is that you’re in a simulation rather than the original. This argument has gained traction among serious thinkers including Elon Musk and cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, lending it more credibility than it might otherwise deserve.
But Adams is refreshingly honest about his relationship to this idea: “I’m a believer that we live in a simulated environment. I don’t believe it because I’m convinced it’s true. I have no way to know what even is true. It would be more accurate to say I find The Simulation a useful filter on life because it answers all my questions and gives me extra, special strategies for success.”
This is the key insight. Adams doesn’t need the Simulation Hypothesis to be objectively true. He needs it to be operationally useful. And he’s discovered that it is, in specific and measurable ways.
What Simulation Thinking Changes About Your Behavior
The most immediate effect of adopting the Simulation frame is that it makes reality feel less fixed and more responsive to your intentions. If you’re in a simulation, then perhaps the simulation responds to your focus and beliefs. This might sound like magical thinking until you notice the behavioral changes it creates.
Adams describes his approach: “I like to think that being aware you are simulated allows you to author the game as you go. In other words, you can focus intensely on what you want—and that alone will hack the simulation to produce the change.”
Whether or not this is “real” in any objective sense, the practice produces results. When you intensely visualize what you want and treat that visualization as programming code for your reality, you create several concrete advantages:
First, you clarify what you actually want. Most people operate with vague desires—”I want to be successful” or “I want to be happy.” The Simulation frame encourages specificity because you’re trying to program a specific outcome. What exactly does success look like? What specific circumstances would make you happy?
Second, you prime your attention to notice relevant opportunities. Psychologists call this the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or frequency illusion—once you’re thinking about something, you start seeing it everywhere. The Simulation frame supercharges this by treating it as a feature rather than a bug.
Third, you take action more consistently. If you believe your focused intention is literally programming reality, you’re more likely to do the physical work that supports your visualization. The frame doesn’t replace action; it amplifies your commitment to action.
The Affirmations Practice Adams Uses
Adams is specific about his method for what he calls “authoring reality”: “The specific technique I use involves visualizing what you want and repeating it or writing it down fifteen times a day.” He’s clear that the details don’t matter as much as the intensity of focus.
The key is making the visualization vivid and specific. Adams emphasizes: “In my experience the potential futures I could see most clearly for my own life seemed to be the futures that happened. I don’t know if that is because of causation or coincidence, but I choose to treat it as real.”
This is classic Adams—maintaining intellectual honesty about uncertainty while committing fully to the practice because it works. He doesn’t need to know the mechanism to use the tool.
Adams also recommends “permissive affirmations that allow lots of ways to succeed. For example, I would focus on wealth instead of a specific promotion, and I would ask for a good romantic life as opposed to a specific partner. Give yourself more than one way to win.”
This approach combines the Simulation frame with systems thinking. You’re not programming a rigid outcome but rather a direction, allowing the “simulation” to deliver results in unexpected forms.
Why This Isn’t Just Magical Thinking
The obvious objection to Simulation thinking and affirmations is that it sounds like The Secret or other manifestation pseudoscience. Adams addresses this directly by grounding his approach in known psychological mechanisms.
First, there’s the reticular activating system (RAS)—the brain’s filter for what information reaches conscious awareness. When you prime your RAS with specific goals and visualizations, you literally start noticing opportunities you would have missed otherwise. This isn’t magic; it’s neuroscience.
Second, there’s the psychological principle of commitment and consistency. When you visualize specific outcomes repeatedly, you create internal pressure to act consistently with those visualizations. You’ve essentially committed to a self-image, and humans strongly prefer to act in ways that align with their self-image.
Third, there’s the motivation factor. Believing you can influence outcomes through focused intention creates a sense of agency and control, which are among the strongest predictors of sustained motivation and resilience in the face of obstacles.
Adams writes: “My current view of reality is that I am in some sort of simulated environment, and I am projecting a subjective bubble of reality everywhere I go just in time to make me think it all seems real.” This frame gives him maximum agency. He’s not a passive observer of reality; he’s an active author.
The Video Game Frame
Adams offers an alternative version of the Simulation frame that some readers might find more accessible: treating life as a video game where you’re solving problems to get to the next level.
“You are in a video game, and you have certain problems to solve to get to the next level,” he suggests. This reframe has several advantages. It makes setbacks feel like part of the game structure rather than personal failures. It creates natural curiosity about what strategies will work. And it reduces the emotional intensity of challenges because they’re game problems, not existential threats.
Adams applies this practically: “When I go to bed, I direct my thoughts toward wonderful things that happened to me recently as well as to incredible things I fantasize about happening later.” He’s treating his mental state as part of the game interface—something he can actively manage rather than passively experience.
The video game frame also explains why Adams interprets his repeated plumbing disasters as A/B testing different approaches to plumbing problems. “The odds of one person having so many continuous plumbing emergencies over several decades seem insanely low. That’s why it looks programmed. It seems as if I’m A/B testing different ways to approach residential plumbing catastrophes.”
Whether or not this interpretation is “true,” it changes the emotional experience from “why is this happening to me?” to “what’s the optimal solution to this recurring challenge?” That shift alone has practical value.
The Pattern Recognition Principle
One of the most powerful aspects of Simulation thinking is how it changes your relationship with patterns and synchronicities. When you’re operating in a Simulation frame, meaningful coincidences don’t feel random—they feel like feedback from the system.
Adams describes noticing when his bad luck seems eerily related to things he’d been thinking about: “Even my bad luck seems eerily similar to things I had been thinking about too much, as if I created it by mistake.” This observation leads to strategic focus management—being careful what you repeatedly visualize because you might be programming it into your reality.
This isn’t magical thinking. It’s a sophisticated understanding of how attention and behavior interact. When you’re intensely focused on a potential negative outcome, you’re more likely to notice evidence supporting that outcome, more likely to act in ways that create it, and more likely to interpret ambiguous events as confirming it.
The Simulation frame makes you conscious of this dynamic and encourages you to manage your focus strategically. You’re treating your attention as the programming interface for your experience.
Why Successful People Gravitate to This Frame
Adams notes that many highly successful people operate with some version of the Simulation mindset, though they might not use that language. They treat reality as more malleable than the average person does, and they act with unusual confidence that their intentions will manifest.
Elon Musk, who Adams cites as a Simulation believer, famously approaches engineering challenges that others consider impossible. Whether he actually believes we’re in a simulation or just finds the frame useful, his behavior reflects someone who doesn’t accept consensus reality as the final word on what’s possible.
Adams writes: “The people with the least respect for our so-called reality are the ones changing it.” This is a crucial observation. If you fully accept reality as fixed and objective, you’re less likely to attempt interventions that challenge the status quo. But if you see reality as somewhat programmable, you’re more willing to test unconventional approaches.
This doesn’t mean successful people are delusional. It means they hold their beliefs about what’s possible more loosely than others do, which creates behavioral flexibility. They’ll try things that seem impossible because they’re not fully convinced about what’s possible and what isn’t.
The Two-Movies-on-One-Screen Extension
Adams extends his thinking about subjective reality with another powerful reframe: “We are watching two different movies on one screen.” This addresses the frustrating reality that people can witness the same events and reach wildly different conclusions.
In a traditional framework, one person must be right and the other wrong. In Adams’s Simulation frame, both people are experiencing their own subjective reality—their own simulation—which happens to overlap with others but remains fundamentally separate.
“The only two facts humans know for sure are that we exist and that some things appear to be predictable,” Adams writes. Everything else is interpretation, and interpretations vary based on each person’s simulation parameters—their beliefs, biases, and expectations.
This reframe is liberating because it releases you from the obligation to make others see reality your way. They’re literally watching a different movie. You can’t change their movie; you can only change yours.
Practical Applications of Simulation Thinking
For readers wanting to experiment with this frame without fully committing to metaphysical beliefs, Adams offers specific practices:
Morning Visualization: Spend time each morning vividly imagining your ideal outcomes for the day, the week, and the year. Make them specific and emotionally engaging. Treat this as programming your simulation.
Affirmation Writing: Write down your key goals or desires 15 times daily. The repetition creates neural pathways, and the specificity programs your reticular activating system.
Outcome Attribution: When good things happen, tell yourself “the simulation is working.” This reinforces the frame and builds confidence in the practice.
Problem Reframing: When challenges arise, ask “What solution is this simulation trying to teach me?” rather than “Why is this happening to me?” This activates problem-solving rather than victimhood.
Reality Testing: Pay attention to coincidences and synchronicities. You don’t have to believe they’re messages from the simulation—just notice them and see what patterns emerge.
The beauty of these practices is that they work regardless of whether the Simulation Hypothesis is true. They’re leveraging known psychological mechanisms (attention priming, self-fulfilling prophecies, pattern recognition) while wrapping them in a frame that enhances commitment and consistency.
The Authorship Principle
Perhaps the deepest insight from Simulation thinking is what Adams calls moving from “audience” to “author.” Most people experience life as something happening to them—they’re watching their own movie but not directing it. The Simulation frame shifts you into the director’s chair.
Adams writes: “You are the author of your experience” rather than “You are the product of your experiences and genes.” This subtle shift changes everything. Products are passive. Authors are active.
When you’re authoring your experience, setbacks become plot developments rather than disasters. Challenges are obstacles your character must overcome, not evidence that you’re failing at life. Successes are confirmations that you’re programming effectively, not lucky breaks.
This frame doesn’t guarantee any specific outcome—Adams is clear about that. But it changes the psychological experience of pursuing outcomes in ways that typically improve both the journey and the results.
The Pragmatic Truth
Adams’s final word on the Simulation Hypothesis captures his entire philosophical approach: “The question isn’t whether we’re actually in a simulation. The question is: what becomes possible when you treat reality as if it were programmable by your intentions?”
This is pragmatism at its finest. Truth isn’t what corresponds to objective reality (which we can never fully access anyway). Truth is what works. The Simulation frame works for Adams and for many people who adopt it.
Whether we’re actually in a simulation created by advanced beings, or consciousness creates reality, or we live in a purely materialist universe where free will is an illusion—these metaphysical questions might be unanswerable. But we can answer the practical question: does treating reality as programmable lead to better outcomes?
For Adams and many others, the answer is clearly yes. The frame creates agency, amplifies action, focuses attention, and transforms challenges into puzzles rather than threats. Those advantages compound over time into measurably better results.
You don’t have to believe we’re in a simulation to benefit from Simulation thinking. You just have to be willing to act as if your focused intentions can shape reality, and then notice what happens. Adams has been running this experiment for decades, and the results speak for themselves.
This exploration draws from Scott Adams’s “Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success,” a book that treats reality itself as something you can reprogram through strategic reframing.