The Truman Show and Ecological Illusion: Self-Fragmentation, Wholeness, and the Ecological Self

Despite extensive evidence of environmental degradation and high levels of public awareness, ecological crises often remain psychologically distant and weakly integrated into everyday experience. This conceptual paper introduces ecological illusion as a framework for understanding this paradox. Ecological illusion is defined as a lived psychological condition in which environmental harm is cognitively acknowledged yet experientially muted, emotionally regulated, and relationally disconnected from the self.Drawing on environmental psychology, ecopsychology, and critical social theory, the paper theorizes ecological illusion as emerging from the interaction of psychological distance, socially organized denial, greenwashing, moral licensing, and environmental generational amnesia. Rather than treating these processes as isolated mechanisms, the analysis integrates them into a single explanatory model that accounts for the normalization of ecological degradation within everyday life.Central to this framework is the concept of self-fragmentation, whereby dominant constructions of the self as bounded and autonomous limit the incorporation of human–nature relationships into identity. In contrast, the paper advances the ecological self as a relational orientation grounded in wholeness and interdependence. Using The Truman Show as an epistemological metaphor, the paper illustrates how constructed environments, normative scripts, and attention regimes sustain ecological illusion while preserving psychological coherence.The paper concludes by outlining implications for future research on environmental perception, identity, and engagement, and by calling for greater attention to lived experience and selfhood in psychological responses to ecological crises.