>>90414299It’s an understandable predicament. Our culture fetishizes authenticity, the singular, and the intense. There’s a constant enunciated desire for variety. This need for novelty is shallowly satisfied by the algorithmic intensification of perception, consumption, and simulated experiences, whether in cyberspace or through mind altering substances. Virtual surrogates of risk taking have replaced actual risk-taking. Empire building is restricted to strategy games, romantic conquests are substituted with virtual-reality porn, and the drive for greatness and heroism is passively sublimated into the latest Marvel movie or RPG. Although they are marketed as providing intensity and novelty, hyperreal technologies like vtubers, in which reality and simulation dissolve, sublimate our propensity to take risks into virtual, often commodified experiences. Instead of making a sacrifice, you simply restart the stream.
Welcome to the age of spirituality without religiosity. It’s no longer God, the afterlife, or glory that provides ultimate motivation and meaning. Rather, we look for an intensification and enhancement of experience that compensates for the void of transcendence and the sacred in our lives.
