The Cheapening of the Real Thing
Some thoughts on how our new experience with landmark life experiences are cheapened by their hyperreal images
Most of us have gone on an expensive vacation a time or two. For my generation and a few generations past, the perceived best experience you can have with your family is leveraging credit or saving up for a year, to go on a vacation somewhere extravagant for a week. For some it’s the Rocky Mountains of Colorado or a cruise in the Gulf. For some, who can afford it or have saved up credit rewards with an airline, go to somewhere fancy like Switzerland or North Italy. Or if you’re deluded enough, Paris.
You probably remember being underwhelmed. These aren’t ever life-changing experiences, but they are glistening in novelty which acts as a substitute for spiritual experiences of growth. You remember the food, the tours that don’t give history justice, the boring boat rides, and how novel you are to the locals. However, there’s an emptiness. You got to see somewhere so different from your own home, and ultimately, in a week, you get back home and nothing really changes. You spent an immense amount of money to do something you could have gotten the same value out of from watching a guy on YouTube do it.
Just like every other experience of the global industrial world, your experience is a process. Your parents probably didn’t want to go off the beaten path on a rote vacation millions of others have taken. Even if they did garner a genuine experience of the new place they were visiting, you’d still be back home in no time. This thinking is a sequestering of the real individual’s curiosity; a sacrifice to material machine gods. Because you aren’t really meant to have genuine experiences, but only allowed to choose paths deemed worthy by committee. By cogent technical methodology.
No doubt now, these decisions are outsourced to the internet, where the abolition of human individuality and the illusion of choice has occurred on a whole new level. When you choose a degree, buy a car, buy a home, or even look for a future spouse, your decisions are at the behest of algorithms, preconceived notions of what will bring immediate material success, and then are further qualified by committees of salesmen and professionals who deem what is best for you.
And this culminates into the cheapening of the real thing. All of life’s great landmarks are nothing more than industrial bucket lists. You do the thing, you move on. The image of the product one sees online is where they live, not in the immediate experience of the real thing. Life becomes a tour of the real thing via its hyperreal image. When you drive in a car that has already become a computerized mockery of cars previous, you are not travelling upon roads but a GPS map which then cheapens your inexperience with your immediate environment. Curiosity becomes a curse, and it is decided that you will only take the path provided to you on a microprocessor-powered two-dimensional corporate landscape.
The scars of experience are no longer present, as these electronic pathways take you on an algorithmically predetermined adventure on the cartoon roads, making coffee with a smart Keurig, smoking meats on a smart smoker, buying a house on Zillow, or taking a tour through Venice.
All European countries are to an American are old buildings where things once happened, big mountains where soldiers once trudged, or villages of old people who remember when it was better. It’s a continent of scam artists and pickpocketers, overpriced gift shops and cafes, and fancy hotels. As a medieval or renaissance nobleman could venture through Europe on a ten-year grand tour for both diplomatic and spiritual purposes, the American simply can’t do the same thing in a week.
Even an Indian or Chinese immigrant who comes to America or England for strictly material means, abandoning their family and culture behind, still has a stake in what will become an unintentional nightmarish destruction of their lineage from immediately declining birthrates among their family. They come for the process, completely oblivious, due to their own pride.
The genuine experience of life as the thing is, at least momentarily, gone. One in years past could just build or buy a house. They could just do the thing. Now, the ability to do the thing is inhibited by:
Usury that divvies up the experience into a bastardization of the serf-lord covenant.
Industrial perspectives that inhibit the individual’s personalized experience of the “product.”
Technically and algorithmically derived processes that assert the superiority of utility over spirituality and curiosity.
We often lament that boomers could just get a job through a firm handshake, nepotism or simply looking around for work. Now even that is a process that extinguishes any personal and satisfactory element of obtaining a job. The satisfaction of buying a house could only really be fully embraced as an individual’s experience of discovering it. Same with any other product, though a house is the most important nonliving material wealth an individual will ever be able to experience having.
As my good friend David Wayne has expressed, this second anthropological filter (first one being alcohol) of the internet is not something we can just hope is destroyed, but rather that it blooms into something just as wholesome and wonderful as alcohol. Just as alcohol has its deep-rooted problems in cultures that cannot handle it, there too will be an issue with hyperreality.
The only counter I have to this is witnessing the worst, primitive societal spiritual ails it causes. Our minds have become accustomed to simulacrum and simulation, and not the real experience of the thing. The same joy of life is muted and dulled to a hyperreal process, our landmarks in life are simply par-for-the-course achievements on the same level of reaching a deadline at work. How does one restore love in a world so drab and mind-controlled? Not sure.
This all goes back to my generation’s obsession with analog horror and liminal spaces. We are obsessed with what something looks like metaphysically — what its purpose is away from the process and from what we are programmed to think it is. It’s the same reason on road trips I like taking backroads after a few hours of highway boredom. Restoration of the real thing only happens in tandem with the internet becoming an inquisition of the real. For ourselves, it is expositing what we have here into the outer world to build what glorifies what is good, what is true, and what is beautiful.
“A major fact of our present civilization is that more and more sin becomes collective, and the individual is forced to participate in collective sin.”
Jacques Ellul, Presence of the Kingdom