THE OBSOLESCENCE OF REALITY

 

I am concerned that... ...well, as an aging grump I naturally would say 'young' people, but I bet it's not solely those who may not know better... ...but to the topic soon...  I'm concerned that human beings are evolving to consider reality tedious and painful, favoring nonsense generated by hapless computer dorks, corporations and now supposedly the computers themselves. Apparently there are those who would call this progress, steps forward, the slathered yellow butter road of slippery sloped slide, leading directly to endless lives of leisure. Rather than merely shrug, mumbling something like: "To each his own," I must protest. For like air pollution, certain 'choices' no nothing of seeping borders, and though some may not share enthusiasm in the 'choice,' we are all left standing in their filth, hazmat boots or not, despite our objections. Not all of us have agreed to 'go along for the ride,' and I must insist that you ask - lest you me have 'napped.'

 

I simply propose that reality will ALWAYS be better that "virtual" reality, despite the boredom and the suffering. It would follow that my duty therefore is to demonstrate that we are diverting off course from something of the ancient human experience in significant and alarming ways, though part of the future perspective would of course suggest 'good riddance.' And it would be my assumption that I am obliged explain that this is actually terrible. I concede up front that it is the dinosaur that defends the human experience of recent centuries, and that if I make a camp with those defending 'old ways' I sleep too close to a lot of men for which I have little respect, god boys, patriarchs, warlords, flat-earthers, you name it. Well, I'll take shot at it, this Sisyphean stone.

 

 

As with the commercialization of the web. And as with this 'post-factual' world in which we apparently now dwell -  Are young people simply encouraged in this by the sophistication and illusory potency of the expanding techno-reality tools? Of course they are. But taking a hand full of pills instead of only the two the label suggests, may give you a more intense experience, should you survive - is this the life your mother intended for you? Many care not what their mothers may think, and why would anyone owe their mothers any satisfaction?

 

Backstory:

 

So to the commercialization of the web: We observed the movement from the traditional knowledge bases that are universities and libraries, and other institutions and houses of human knowledge, and for that matter, the village and its experts - to the incessant 'clicking of the mouse.' The transformation, in this 'age of information' (as if no information was available prior) perhaps initially, was merely an attempt, in the fog of the rhetoric of 'efficiency,' to construct digital databases to supposedly aid in the ease of the 'search.' The tech-euphorics will be quick to rattle on about how this system is still quite operative, and I wouldn't want to necessarily disagree; technically there are no large barriers to the construction of straight-forward and comprehensive pages of useful, innovative details on any subject.

 

However, as any 'searcher' of the web learns in a quick moment, with regard to the garbage (in lipstick or otherwise) the 'engines' put forward after the entry of 'terms:' Not only is it common for the 'efficiencies' to fall away, the 'results' are so mixed and colored with falsehoods, raw opinions, questionable science, vernacular ramblings of the uniformed, trivialities, and meaningless spinning distractive eye-candy. Can we call this a modern update to the old mantra: "Don't believe all that you read." ? There have always been falsehoods, gatekeepers to be side-stepped to achieve position as a content provider to the 'informative' texts, that the knowledge-base seeker had to warily muddle through. The 'scientific' process was to filter the cream-top, to minimize falsehood in the card catalogs, by something of a meritocracy; if operative, the world's thinkers were to call bullshit on nonsense claims, and do the weeding out and paint the red flags on the index cards.

 

The Wiki idea was to address the modern catalogs in the digi-encyclo pages we now use, should we resist the incredible slog to the library. So I here contend that the web-anizing of the database has its attraction, especially to the non-skepitcal digital zombie. But if there are gains in efficiency, universal access or other benefits, they are degraded in many ways, deep and shallow, ranging from a faulty meritocracy, full of giant holes in quality and enforcement, to real information so cluttered with flashy, irrelevant garbage; from the anointment of every unemployed 20-something wannabe journalist writing 'blog' about dishwasher repair, to computers thought to be intelligent, lapping down the questionable rotting server binary and barfing up Joan Didion milk toast summaries for your children's school essay assignments. In other words, the 'commercialization of the web' seeks to describe the poisonous gas injected into the potential of perhaps reasonable digital maintenance of mankind's collective notes and experiences, that is the salivating, greedy, and corruptive motives of capitalists that I have described all too often in other forums; this gas so distractive, corrosive, so complete in its multilayered adhesive sludge as to coat the redeeming qualities of the internets with impenetrable nonsense, to force the most aggressive knowledge seeker to the coffee machine for a fourth visit before noon. And here I suggest this reiteration of this phenom as an analog and a relative of the following analysis of this 'obsolescence of reality,' - as we shall see.

 

 

So now we have some number of young people, in their deep entitlement, to the extent that they seem to think they deserve a success, by some measure, fame and fortune - perhaps no more in such realms as the ambitious among boomers or X-people. But the current young seem to have a secondary tumor and have extended a general anxiety to the fear of tedium and failure or at least relegation to work less glamorous than celebrity status. In other words, they seem frightened of boredom and suffering, though of the latter I would suggest they really know nothing. It is not a new notion, that of insatiability, which I might think is nothing but a norm, a modern human dementia born of the base man quest to hoard resources, 'more and more I must have, and I have tired of yesterday's acquisitions.' So we have a deep dissatisfaction with reality, which does not supply 'goods' or not without effort and the odds of the lottery. And without the senses to find awe in the world, they quick draw on the 'What's the point?' fatalism, as a result of their addiction to the utter bullshit feed pace on their glowing screens, combined with the fear of actual labor.

 

But perhaps this is not quite fair. Fodder is not a new occupation, though those resigned to the slog of life may naturally have no choice but to listen to their stomachs and take the opportunities before them in life, be it wandering the country on the rails of depressive transport, immigrating across the world to lands of genocide and slavery, enlisting in the military to pass the rites, find adventure or at least death, and so on. Further, if the choice is to become fodder or become resigned to the slog of retail toil, or if old-world wealth or enormous debt can lubricate college educations, one can try to enter the pencil-pushing trades or at least computer 'science' to then join the ranks of webpage tinkering or at least a firm following J.P. Morgan's model of, if not burning the product directly after purchase, encouraging consumers to put the monthly software upgrades on auto-pay.

 

But the 'arts' then leak into the picture, because if you are susceptible to the alluring dog-poo of glam, having somehow failed the hazing tests of the visionary class, unable to make it through 'business' school, or unable to avoid spending your stock broker skims on cocaine, then you and your endless web surfing expertise, finding an eye for 'development' of software that claims to wipe your ass, or at least ride an elevator pitch, rich in suggestions that your new 'app' will lead directly to leisure time and convenience, then maybe the crap shoot of app fruit is your ticket to stardumb.

 

But I don't want to dwell too heavily on disrespect for the young, who are charging off into the world with whatever current possibilities lie there, just like any other generation. There are still some varied metiers, even if they all involve staring at a computer screen. I have no statistics as to what percentage of any given generation believed they were special or were resigned to their fates. Most may have indeed 'tried their best' or ran off to 'see what they could do' and in the end concluded that 'they had a good run.' And what more reasonable approach to life is there really? What parent ins't pretty much satisfied that their spawn didn't appear in the dock, made a decent go at life, supported the grand-children in some reasonable way, built some pride in workmanship regardless of the banality of the jobs they found.

 

And do I overstate the case: Most young people may have more opportunities, more computer programs that can mount their great ideas, the coding they do in the cafe or on the train, could be deeply satisfying, offer solutions to the problems the world faces, and though the six figure salaries on offer may be fleeting, the office furniture soon to be carted out of one start-up real estate location to another. But gone are the days of 50 years of devotion to a single firm, and good riddance, a fair trade to work from home, and check your Tinder feed in between working dead links out of your html5 lines. Or one can still follow traditional paths, should you make the grade, and your parents have the money: In medicine, business, in insurance, in advertising. Or if you haven't taken to math or writing, and you can read schematics and architectural drawings, perhaps you can manage construction or any other tumors associated with real estate manipulation, or if you can really break out on your own, consultation of various sorts, whereby 'clients' overpay for your opinions or products for which you have or haven't faith.

 

I'm grasping at straws here, trying to find the ennui responsible for an acceptance of such fatalism. And the young for which I speak may not view it this way at all. The tossing of awe in the world may not in fact be occurring - nothing is abandoned if no one notices it is there. The young may really believe that the incoming world of computer generated 'reality' is not just nifty: It is 'better.' Despite my personal disbelief, I can't tell my son that looking at spiders is better than looking at video games, he does not agree. Is it that reality with its boredom and suffering can just be ignored, replaced? I do go on about making the world one wants to live in. But ignoring reality is not proactive 'making' of anything, it's just a head in the sand. This behavior smells of justification for selfishness; if working to improve the world is a futile, undefinable waste of time, what is left in human action besides consumption and narcissism?

 

There are those who are still willing to work for a simple smile, those who work on something one might still recognize as for a 'common good.' I cannot dismiss their efforts therein, though they may be a minority.

 

I wanted to get to an exploration into my hypothesis: That reality will always be better than technological realities, despite the boredom and suffering. I need to prove this. But how?

 

 

Let's shift gears to the topic direct: Is there a new tedium associated with reality? We can say with some certainty that the young of all eras, and perhaps everyone else who has left innocence, have faced boredom or suffering or both in turn, and wished something better for themselves. What has traditionally been available? As to suffering, the rat runs from the hawk in some haste; as to boredom, the rat might tempt the hawk to the chase. So the states are related.

 

There is nothing particularly new or unusual about the rat or the man on the hunt for personal gain; there are limited definitions of success therein: Food, sex, entertainment, admiration, variations of fame and fortune. The section of reality we call boredom is where these aims are inaccessible or have otherwise grown tiresome or repetitive. The suffering in reality arrives on the wind of misfortune, via incompetence, the bad luck of the draw, and the distaste for reality begins with the dropping to knees, the questioning of the skies that remain silent.

 

Must we go on to describe the modern twists? We watch the constant reports of random death at the hands of bored youth, the brandished firearms to confront 'disrespect,' the fatalism that quickly envelopes the young when there is 'nothing to live for,' when struggling in labor is seen to bear no fruit, when all roads appear to end dead, and end in death, when death is seen to be a 'stone grove,' when the young mind finds the idea of old age a burden, not worth pursuing. This is not even modern; barring the (marginally) updated methods of massacre: Lying in your own blood clutching your ghost gun in one hand, your cellphone in the other.

 

But I want to address the young somehow worthy of less respect: Those entitled, who know nothing of suffering, who have never lived in want, those for which ennui has no real source, those who think they have something to say, those who think themselves a conduit for poetry. Should they twist inside endlessly searching for invisibles, I have no concern. But for them to engage and worse actively construct the details of this era of false-reality, salivating the tech-glee, corrupting the coming generations, preventing them from studying the awe of the world, the earthly features that illustrate what the word god wishes to describe, by waving the glowing screen, blocking the rays of life and hope with their plastic and 'rare earth' mineral doo dads - for this I have no mercy. I have merely a ticket on Elon's rocket going to the sun. Alas, I haven't the printer to produce such tickets.

 

 

To re-focus for a moment:

 

Perhaps at the center of my inquiry is a pressure, a desirable pressure on the mind to act. For if looming at you is either something singular and rare, something exciting and fruitful albeit encased in a fat of boredom, or worse, the short sharp shock of terror and suffering that eventually pounces on everything nature touches - you best be prepared to act in self-preservation or get up off your fanny to accomplish something non-idle, to answer your mother's question: Why on earth did I carry merely a sloth for 9 months within my frame?

 

But then we here want to control the items worthy of the term accomplishment. Achieving a video game score of 24,760 is apparently thought of as such. But is this just a matter of style? 65,000 years ago, maybe hacky-sack volleys beyond 42 constantly airborne rocks would be equivalent; but again, moving your legs around strikes me as better than not doing so. Though 'something useful' and a 'game' can perhaps be separated; though there are 'serious' players who may not stand down.

 

It appears that this quest to modify the human experience, dispense of reality in favor of an alternative seen to contain less toil, more pleasure, more serotonin, requires we redefine life's possibilities and widen (or collapse) the notion of a proper life. The definition can be thought of as pliable because there is no objective viewpoint to say the journey of a species contain any particular attributes. Who is to say that a 'progressive' human experience cannot include the installation of computer components under your flesh; this idea can be abhorrent or 'neat' depending on one's whim. But what separates this intervention from a vaccine, a gold tooth or a titanium knee? These may be more concrete interventions for the sake prolonging life, rather than altering the bulk of quiescent or intellectual action through the walking years. In other words, a head in a jar, with unceasing robotic life support systems and fantastic connectivity to the inter-webs could easily be deemed by some to be wonderful progress.

 

I well see the young, who may find 'work' in fields of tech, still flocking to 'recreational' lands in their electric cars for a nice Sunday 'hike,' who might well claim to find a 'connection' to nature, to get in some exercise, sniffing at flowers, possibly keep the phone in the pocket for a solid 90 minutes, be ripe to claim they know something of the earth from which they have come. And well, good for them; their consciouses apparently clear. I will still cling to the idea that toil, and years of it, riddled with setbacks, fingernails filthy more than they are clean, and little to show for it; this is more worthy of my respect than: "I helped my uncle build a shed once." But my lines here are tired, outdated, reminding me of a guy who perhaps in defensive posture singing the praises of cameras with (at the time) 'auto-focus,' proclaiming: 'I need this - I don't have time to worry about focusing.' And Jacques Ellul stated it best when after hearing a friend celebrating the high speed train from Paris to Montpellier: "And what did you do with the time you saved?" To which the friend couldn't quite say, perhaps he sat down in his hotel room hours before he would've in the old days. It was easy to be skeptical that the hours extracted many poignant and expanded moments of visitation with the people or places the friend was aligned to greet.

 

If one wants to think the new goals merely an expression of insatiability, just longing for more serotonin, more pleasant sensations, I have not the throne from which to suggest that the human experience shall have only a limited supply of bon-bons. The experience of our forefathers is not thought to have value, it is something to be escaped; few teenage sons have wanted to follow into the fields of toil, at least until hunger reveals there is nothing better on offer. (Here I ignore aspects of historical guidance, like the insistence that females alternate solely from the kitchen to the bed, pausing in the hall to deal with poopy diapers. But that's another story.)

 

My point here I guess is that like building a muscle by way of using it, reality is calling for action and therein is something that I find difficult not to think of as success: When you are bored, you must act to climb out of the coffin you are waiting to use in future or find you are using even now; and as to suffering - you best remember your own suffering, recognize your luck to have circumvented it for now and prepare to avoid it in future. And for that matter, (dog again forbid) you can observe the plight of others, and act to do something about it (though this seems a little too unselfish for our current age.) To make a self-perpetuating positive action, almost insists that you deserve a life free of the sticky wicket of bad luck. Or again for dog's sake, build anything, a tiny trinket that an alien might recognize as something left among the shrapnel of the universe by something besides indifference; one could think of it as a minor payback for your lifetime of consumption.

 

But I can hear the young calling this climbing from ennui to pride in accomplishment just toil in itself, And there is nothing wrong, what is the problem I am trying to solve? I am just moralizing, I don't understand the whim of modern youth, I am a dinosaur and I think I know what is best or have any clue about what they are actually doing. When anyone says to me and with an air of pre-dismissal: "What would you have us do exactly?" I'm usually caught with pants at ankles, without coherence. "Fuck off and die." seems reactionary and unhelpful... ...and "Adopt my perspective on things." suggests I know what to do and that anyone has reason to listen to me.

 

 

 

Let the tools of sensation keep up ready entertainment and let robots keep us safe from nature. Our species of heads in jars, lining the tunnels of safe and cool bunkers, can conceivably go on having positive virtually real sensations without any of that other nonsense. After a few generations, who will miss boredom and suffering?

 

 

 

Let's talk of awe for a moment: And by this I mean, in the demonstrable duality of all things in this universe, awe of this world must include most things banal and extraordinary, and as such incorporate the boredom and suffering before mentioned, in addition to sheer wonder in the traditional instances when something of beauty that we somehow think of as other-worldly, brings tears to the eye. Let us concede that awe is found in the human mind as much as somehow objectively there to be seen should someone NOT be in the forest to hear the tree fall; in a similar way that we understand that 'seeing' is done in the brain not the eye. In other words, when my being has over-boiled, when I have twitched by way of the color of a reptile's skin, the twinkle of radiation on the surface of moving waters, the sound of nightfall's insect conversations, it is always a milieu of the random activities of the universe therein, the expressions of earthly creature's adaptive developments and equally the sensations my mind apparently gives me, whatever I am - that soak the beauty and brutality of the world with my own longings, my own unfinished businesses, my memories that somehow suggest to me that I have not lived a meaningless pan flash, that what I think I have to say about it all suggests I have any value whatsoever. The air in my lungs and the blood and electricity in my networks are equally responsible for this notion of awe as the details of the universe, as brilliant and fantastical as they objectively can be.

 

I cannot dictate that all people have, could or should view life this way, though I may cling to the idea there is in fact awe in the world, because with the substantial miracle that is human language and its conduit, onto which my ear is pressed to hear that others have also experienced this phenom; I did not invent it, I do not merely wish it to exist to provide to me this cause celeb.

 

So when I claim that I have right to discount the activities of man, because they do not conform to my way, I rattle with just another random opinion. There no doubt be many more people who would loudly announce it just - to say that the dancing man in his fluorescent, buttock-revealing pants, lunging dramatically after the pigskin inflate, to touch down just so with the toes in the end of zones - is no less 'awe'some. Are we then to say: To each his own 'awe?'

 

We can however make the distinction between men actually flying through the air in the fashion I've just outlined, despite the the corporate exploitation of youthful bodies and ambition, the ridiculous explosive narrators screaming into microphones from the booths - at least, I think the 'wide-receivers' are actually agile and risking their lives, bipeds not really adapted to fly - and in point of comparison: The fully-digital, head-in-jar future humans that apparently we are breeding and educating, the armies the tech-bro euphorics claim they see as improved human beings, workers, consumers, investors and leisure-time enthusiasts. I suppose soon these people will look at a shovel and know less its purpose than an obsidian arrowhead.

 

And further, we have to discuss the room's elephant: What defines the human experience, or as the laymen may prefer: What does is mean to be human? My contention at the outset is to suggest that the coming young people who find nothing of my distaste for all things digital, who welcome the hardware, software, firmware literally into their bodies, who think it acceptable that any and all technological interventions shape mankind, be it in the flesh or otherwise, that the libraries of corporate facts, stretched and working for the bottom lines are installed in the mind and that these adaptations can only raise the higher animal to new levels of amerikan greatness - well, just so it's clear my perspective - Apparently the young find these notions to describe improvements not abominations. And as a dinosaur, how is it that my notions of proper use of the human lifespan isn't merely some variation of any other stick in the mud ranting that fixes the apex of human experience in any era? Can I hoist anything but a noose at my sentencing by proclaiming my approach be different than any god-boy patriarch waving the flag of confederate 1850, corporate 1950 or any other period?

 

No, I cannot celebrate 'my' era; it is riddled with catastrophe just all other eras. But I am not here to do my decades such accolades - I just need to proclaim that some 'advanced' experience, still ubiquitous in my time, can still see the analog: its connection to a day for a man of 65,000 years ago, which involved an awakening to the dawn, the duties of hunting and gathering, the fleeing and sheltering, the luck positive or poor, and the deep sleep from a real day's struggle which has hopefully brought sustenance to face a next dawn; a consistency in the minds of all men ancient and contemporary. If one is to believe in free will, the the choices of man influence his evolution, and it's seen as progress to move beyond toil, even drop the trade of labor for gym membership, and sloth be seen as no moral outrage, well, best of luck.

 

Alas, as this ramble comes to an impasse, I fear I have not gotten at the heart of my concern, to identify a series of choices, an unfortunate break with the past, or at least a tipping point, rather opposed to a gradual movement, more easily defended as a natural evolution that has governed the transformation of the human experience prior to the digital (r)evolution. The techno-euphorists will clamor into their headsets, on their A/V cluttered stages about the cumming digi-futures, much as those wide-smiled modern genetic tinkerers point to Gregor Mendel, tree grafting or selective dog breeding, suggesting interventions nothing new. It will be announced that stupidity or the use of human tools to advance evils is nothing novel either. And I can't so much stand on the statement: "Working your ass off is the only just use of human potential." though maybe I can; I think it is still demonstrable that if the ass be shed in toil, it is the original form of dieting. Can they defend the 'action' of slipping into the ample armchair with a bottle of Ozempic - this is far easier than digging ditches. And dying in a video game is much easier than dying in reality - sounds like progress, even to me. So we just need a little code-tweaking to allow us to climb into the video game when you're ready for your Kevorkian moment.

 

gibbs chapman, February 2026