Inception's Core Stoic Lesson

For better or worse, you have this power

“But a dream is not reality,” says Alice to the Mad Hatter, to which he responds slyly, “Who's to say which is which?”

The ending of Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed film, Inception, is one of the best moments in contemporary cinema for a debate between film nerds. How did Inception really end?!

The movie stars Leonardo Dicaprio and is about a team of thieves who know how to travel in and out of people’s dreams and are capable of stealing or planting information in the subject’s subconscious. It’s a major mind-bender because the characters are going into people’s dreams and then into dreams within those dreams. By the end of the movie, they’ve gone four layers deep into someone’s dream state. In the final. moments, Dicaprio seems to have emerged from the dream and reentered the real world to be with his kids.

But fans are still divided on this 15 years later.

But here’s the Geeky Stoics take on Inception’s ending. It’s all irrelevant. Here’s why.

“Your focus determines your reality,” is what Jedi Master Qui Gon Jinn says to Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode I. It’s a foundational truth and one we always go back to for Geeky Stoics.

Your walls become your world. Early in life, those walls are built for you by parents or caregivers, but as you grow, you eventually build your own and tear others down.

Is the world a scary and evil place full of monsters around every corner?

Or — Is the world mostly beautiful and full of good people doing the best they can despite a few bad actors?

These are very different worldviews. What you read and spend your time consuming will inevitably impact which world you believe we live in.

In the Paramount series Yellowstone, a little boy survives abduction and abuse at the hands of some really evil people. He asks his grandfather how to overcome the nightmares he’s been having ever since that event. He says to the boy:

“Dreams, it’s your memories and imagination all mixed together into this soup of what’s real and made up. But the thing about soup is that you can change the ingredients — You can put in whatever you want to. Any memory, any fantasy — Decide what you’re going to dream.”

Yes! Someone put too much salt (pain and trauma) in that kid’s soup (mind and spirit). But he can now decide what goes in next to balance things out for the better.

Marcus Aurelius says in Meditations,

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature”

Inception’s Ending Wasn’t About Reality or Fiction

When Leonardo Dicaprio travels through dreams, he brings a spinning top with him. In the real world, the spinning top will always fall over after a few seconds. In dreams, it never stops spinning. This is how he keeps from going totally insane and disassociating from reality. Disassociation is more or less what killed his late-wife. It’s all very tragic.

In the end, he finally is seen going home to his children, who he has been estranged from for a long time. The whole movie is about whether or not he’ll be able to return to them. When he sees them, Dicaprio spins the top on the kitchen counter…..and walks away.

It’s easy to get distracted by debates over film plots and what did and didn’t happen in the canon of a story. But movies are about characters and what goes on within them. By the end of Inception, he has decided he wants to be with his children more than anything, even if it isn’t real.

But if you’re lost forever, four layers deep in a subconscious dream world, the only thing that is going to make that existence painful is the knowledge of its inauthenticity.

So he chooses not to know. Ignorance….as bliss.

It’s a sad and confusing ending, and we don’t necessarily support ignorance is bliss as a way to live out your life, but it’s important to know that this is how the mind works.

People play an active role in building their realities. You build yours.

Are you doing so responsibly and with care for the things you value most? Are you adding sugar where there’s too much salt?

This is part of why we made the Geeky Stoics Recommended Reading List for 2025 based on what we loved in 2024. If you’re on this journey with us, add these to your understanding of reality. Let them build or renovate some of your spaces.