Imagine your life as an illusion. That everything you see is actually not real.

Long before the Matrix, there was Plato.

This dear ancient philosopher (5th century) with a flower beard, pupil of Socrates, has left us an allegory to make us think about the nature of reality.

In an underground cave prisoners have been chained since birth. Their only entertainment? Casted shadows on a wall. Not crazy so but they don't know it since they obviously take these shadows for absolute reality. Kind of like us when we consider our news feed as a faithful reflection of the world.

The difference? Their world is even narrower: no fleeting stories, no inflamed tweets, just choreography of shadows on a stone wall.

But then one day, one of them escapes and comes out of the cave. Dazzled by the light of day, he discovers that the world is infinitely more vast, beautiful and complex than he imagined. It's a bit like realizing that the Earth is round when we thought it was flat, but in a lot more dizzy.

Our hero, drunk from his discovery, returns to the cave to share this revelation. But, oh surprise! His former comrades think he is enlightened. "Return to your shadows, visionary!" "they are intimate with him. As what, even in ancient times, the bearers of truth didn't already have an easy task...

This fable, as whimsical as it may be, raises fundamental questions. What is the reality?

How do we know what we know?

And above all, are we all, in some way, prisoners of our own mental cave and the shadows cast upon us?

Plato invites us to a dizzying exercise: what if everything we took for granted was just an illusion? What if real knowledge required us to break our conceptual chains, step out of our intellectual comfort zone (and our screens)?

In a world where information of all sorts is cluttering, where it's believed to know everything with a click, the cave myth reminds us that true wisdom maybe begins with an elegant "I don't know."

But Plato's allegory does not just question our perception of reality. It also invites us to reflect on our responsibility once we've "seen the light." Like the released prisoner returning to the cave, do we have a duty to share our knowledge, even if it disturbs or destabilizes? Plato suggests that the quest for truth is not just a personal adventure, but also a commitment to others and society. This is a call to action, education, and intellectual courage in the face of ignorance and comfort of shared illusions.