A Truly Modern Delusion In cultures where reality television and surveillance technology have become mainstream, the “Truman Show” delusion—the belief that your life is being filmed as a show—is increasingly common. The Truman Show is a 1998 hit movie about an insurance salesman who discovered that his entire life was secretly being filmed for broadcast. When experiencing the Truman Show delusion, Ohio college student Nick Lotz even took an acting course to improve his “performance.” At first he thought he was angling for a $100 million prize, but later he came to believe that the goal of his delusional reality show was to join the cast of Saturday Night Live—a truly culturally specific, modern delusion (Marantz, 2013).

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