Reality is only the extrapolation of simple principles into ultimately equivalent complex principles and back again.

i.e. a man goes out for a walk in the evening, he rests on a bench and admires the sunset, which he realizes is actually a video recording of a painted dinner place illuminated with a spotlight and projected from a very short distance directly into his retina, the reason for this extrapolation is that the sun had to be replaced because it was deemed too dangerous to just be allowed to loom over the sky all the time where anybody and children could look up into it and blind themselves. This knowledge is not secret in this society, there is no evil conspiracy concerning the false sun for if one asks their internet terminal “why is the sun a dinner plate all of a sudden” they are immediately directed to a government FAQ site which answers everything in a cheerfully matter-of-fact way. Pictures of ethnically diverse people smiling and shaking hands in profile frame the edges of the text like images of protective deities line a pharaoh’s tomb doors.  

Most people, upon discovering this information, decide not to bring up the solar discrepancy with anybody for fear of causing the same sort of disappointment which they experienced and potentially being censured for rudeness. The exact means by which the image is projected onto the retina is never really properly elaborated upon in the FAQ because the real reason the sun has been replaced is that corporations have embedded faint images of their logos and other subliminal messages onto the dinner plate and found them to be quite effective marketing techniques. And so a CEO of one of these corporations is walking around outside rather morosely bearing this knowledge as he takes in the fictive sunset. Since he is at once aware that the image of the sun he sees is both a total hoax and an insidious one at that, but also quite necessary in the whole scheme of his personal things, not anything so conspicuously consumptive as a yacht or a private jet, for this man instead is contented merely with traveling often and sparing no expense, employing a private chef, and funding his wife's fashion sense and his children's higher education at schools where they would be far too lazy and stupid to be accepted, let alone graduate, without all the proper wheels greased with that metaphorical grease which is altogether so incredibly more expensive than the literal variety, which could be easily obtained at the bottom of several baskets of fries or potentially from the sebaceous glands on the tip of one's own nose, given enough time and that certain sort of passion fueled by a zeal for mundane pursuits, which coincidentally are the two things which catapulted our CEO to his current level of success.  

The high cost of such imaginary grease should not be so unimaginable given the rules of supply and demand (as raw metaphored grease does not exist, it is accordingly expensive to call it into being with a condensation of mere capital, which can actually convert the purely metaphorical, idiomatic, or even anecdotal into being at a similar rate as energy is converted into matter, made possible through an alternate understanding of the E=mc^2 equation which requires several pricey lawyers to stabilize the conversion via their own intricate misinterpretations of the laws of physics, the first of their highly proprietary suppositions being that the most elementary particles of matter are not electrons, leptons, hadrons or any other preposterously named quantum filth, but instead just cold, hard pecunions^TM  which now can be bought and sold on the public market. It's a highly controversial practice considering that if the market value of the pecunion^TM  ever drops low enough the universe will be foreclosed upon and cease to exist). He also had a very large house. It was so large that if you transported it a couple thousand years into the past to the middle of nowhere the very first tribe of nomadic peoples to come across it would immediately settle down and rarely find the need to venture out except to check if the pool boy had gotten that one leaf out yet and even so would require extensive ceremonial body painting and a heroic dose of internally cultivated hallucinogenic mushrooms for a tribesman just to consider undertaking the quest.  

In any case, this CEO and the aforementioned man in the beginning, whom we nearly forgot about, happened to be outside strolling beneath the dinner plate and were both quite aware of the fact that it should have been not a piece of dining equipment at all, but a nest of triumphant energy which at some point in the past pulled the trigger and invested aggressively in a few promising chemical reactions occurring in the earth's oceans in one of the most far-sighted acts of visionary venture capitalism, an ongoing expenditure which after four and a half billion years in R&D has yet to produce any conceivably useful returns or even a compelling business model and at this point is looking more like a vanity investment, a tax write off or some sort of poorly conceived inverted pyramid scheme. And as they walked along they both saw in the distance a bench and decided to make their way to it and rest for a while looking out blankly and resting their forelegs on their haunches. Against all odds they came up to the bench at the same time and sat at the far edges of it so as to maximize their distance from each other and institute a kind of demilitarized zone between them on the bench to discourage any communication.  

They sat there looking forward blankly at the dinner plate. The CEO tried to imagine that it had ever been a sun and found he could not. Intellectually he understood that there had been a sun somewhere at some point, but now he wondered if it were not the proper order of things for there to be a dinner plate there instead, that the dinner plate was, perhaps, better suited to going down slowly behind the horizon, that it was somehow more appropriate to this day and age, and he thought these things with just a dab of melancholy, just the same amount of melancholy as he put gourmet mustard on his sandwiches from a tiny glass jar with french words on it. The man sitting across from him thought wonderingly at how he could have mistook the dinner plate for a sun for so long. Over and over again he confirmed it was a dinner plate, it wasn't even a great job, you could still see a floral design about the perimeter of the plate, and those sunspots which the scientists always made such a big deal about were surely just the remains of a sloppy joe or a spaghetti sauce, he could almost smell it. He wasn't even that impressed, but he was impressed just a little bit, about as much as the CEO was melancholy. It is a curious fact that if they were to talk to each other about that dinner plate that their emotions, positive and negative would have canceled each other out exactly and they would have both gone home feeling nothing at all. They didn't though. They sat with their forelegs on their haunches and stirred once or twice and sighed to assure the other that they hadn't died, that all was well with their chemical reactions, and carpe diem and all that.