“I wish I didn’t know what the best food in the world tasted like.”
The quest to maximize “experience” is not a worthwhile project at scale. There have always been adventurers, people whose innermost nature propels them to scour the world for endless material and sensory inputs. But the truth is these people are rare, and vigorous societies are those that properly limit, cultivate, and harvest the energy from these anomalies. Most people’s optimal state is rather banal, and better tied to things more persistent like family and a rooted sense of place. While those rare adventurers can be tossed about by the world and bear the scars without being destroyed by them, this does not hold true for all drawn to the promise of some experiential infinity like sailors drawn by sirens. For them there is anxiety, dopamine overload, and perpetual lack of fulfillment. A burnout of the internal heat sink fueled by a torrent of 3x3 mosaics of the most perfectly appointed people and places and things.
This is a reason most people should settle down early into committed relationships. A perception of endless choice and frequent failed connections can fry the emotional circuitboard. There are things to learn from dating and courtship — skill gained through some good ol’ trial and error — but true heartbreak has little value and can cause serious damage that time doesn’t really heal. The writer Harlan Ellison once compared the human heart to a starfish in this way. A few small bites here and there and the starfish can regrow itself. But with bites that are too big or too frequent, the starfish cannot regenerate. It’s a reduced creature, forever. And so the modern romantic landscape is stalked by millions of people with permanent emotional damage and limited ability to bond. Social systems that minimize this are systems that have a shot to survive.
A few generations will go down as ravaged by all this. There’s no avoiding that. The Millennial generation has been especially eviscerated, a naive cohort ushered blind into the digital panopticon and a group for whom the time for course correction dims every day. The Zoomers are native to the modern and the plastic, and their wounds are different and perhaps more etched into their DNA. But they have time yet, and the most clear-eyed among them might reconstruct durable systems with the necessary vigor.
The future will likely see strange and unexpected correctives to the modern chaos. Arranged marriages might make some sort of comeback, as could communes — the hippie communes of the 60s and 70s were after all responses to social disintegration. There might be a wave of “Cultural Christians” who don’t really believe in Jesus but who’ve rediscovered the benefits of the social glue their parents or grandparents had. The current return of some young people to Orthodoxy is a signal in this direction, as it’s often a conscious decision to saw off branches of life’s decision tree with the hope that true faith will take hold someday by means of process.
There’s much beauty in the world to take in, to pursue with radical thirst. Just be mindful of your bandwidth.
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