New Mycologist theory says you’re a mushroom having human experience
Fungi and animals split from a common ancestor roughly a billion years ago. Before that divergence, whatever existed was neither mushroom nor animal. It was something that became both.
The serious version of this idea is not that you are literally a mushroom. It is that fungi and animals are far more closely related to each other than either is to plants. Genetically, biochemically, and in terms of cellular architecture, humans have more in common with a fungus than a oak tree does. Both animals and fungi are heterotrophs that digest food externally and absorb nutrients. Both store energy as glycogen. Both have cells surrounded by similar membrane structures. The divergence happened, but the shared ancestry left marks that are still readable in our DNA.
The mycologist framing goes further. The fungal kingdom operates through mycelium, vast underground networks of thread-like filaments that connect trees, transfer nutrients, send chemical distress signals across forest floors, and respond to environmental changes in ways that look, functionally, like distributed information processing. Some researchers use the word intelligence loosely here, though that remains contested.
What is not contested is that the largest known living organism on Earth is a fungal network in Oregon, a single Armillaria ostoyae colony covering roughly 10 square kilometers and estimated to be several thousand years old.
Fungi were among the first complex organisms to colonize land. They broke down rock into soil that plants eventually grew in. Without that fungal groundwork, the terrestrial ecosystems that produced every land animal including humans would not exist.
So the theory is not purely metaphorical. You emerged from a lineage that fungi also emerged from. The forest floor you walk on was partly built by organisms more closely related to you than to the trees around you.
Whether that makes you a mushroom having a human experience is philosophy. The biology underneath it is real.