Why does nothing feel quite real anymore?
Because, to a large degree, it isn’t—at least not in the fullest sense.
Yes, real life is happening online (which is precisely what makes it so difficult to extricate from), and bleeding out into tangible results, for good or ill.
But in our daily lives, we are leaving more and more of the physical space where we are present to it in favor of swiping and clicking and tapping. Our various computation devices are truly something akin to miracle machines, absolutely unimaginable to our even recent forebears, and their usefulness and transformative power has been profound.
But they are also removing us imperceptibly but constantly away from a bright, cold, firm experience of reality in its fullness. And we are suffering for it.
Living in abstractions instead of reality
Many of us now live mostly online in a world of smoke and mirrors—or, as I’d rather put it, abstractions.
The real world is perpetually receding or at least holding a constant orientation to the digital versions, and this is having the effect of exhausting us, disconnecting us from ourselves, and giving a strange feeling of being suspended in a kind of lesser form of formless existence. We feel disembodied, like ghosts, haunting different corners online while our bodies barely move and the entirety of existence is playing out only inside our brains.
This is not how life was normally experienced throughout all of history, or even how it was experienced as children for many of us. It was embodied, visceral, felt. Nearly every experience carried a rich tactility. Even until fairly recently, at the very least most of life involved physicality between activities. We would become equally or more beautifully absorbed in things, which is a fascinating human phenomenon, but somehow always in the context of the robustness of our physical form.
The digital world and the loss of embodiment
Increasingly more, however, especially for the very young, it is lived inside of a digital world.
I remember when Mark Zuckerberg was first floating the metaverse. I hated the idea, but I also realized the temptation inherent in it: that I could escape the clutter and the noise of the place I was living in (through a series of events I won’t extrapolate here) if there were an all-encompassing digital space.
Although it seemed an absurdity at the time that would, in fact, eventually be rejected to the tune of extraordinary amounts of lost finances, it’s curious to me that the main reason it didn’t succeed seems to be that that something like the metaverse had already revolutionized our experience of life. We didn’t need the metaverse because we were already almost entirely absorbed in an online existence, especially in the months and years following the initial lockdowns. If anything, we were already starting to feel the decisive beckoning out of that world in revolt—one which many of us have articulated and lamented on repeat, but which many fewer of us have managed to actually, heroically implement.
As long as we persist in a mostly digital world, we will continue to feel a strange distance from ourselves, from reality, and from the things that most profoundly give meaning to our lives.
Returning to the tactile world
The answer is not necessarily to abandon all technology, but to instead immerse ourselves again, with full intention, into the tactile and embodied world: feel cold water, hug good friends, drink good wine, light beautiful candles, walk in the spinning up of the wind at sunset.
If we can do this faithfully we will find it all once again re-ordering: the digital will again become the unreal thing that it is, and perhaps we will smile at this proper subjugation.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 