I can’t believe nobody commented on this! It’s the *coolest* thing I’ve ever done as a human!

OK, I’ll comment. This will sound sarcastic but I’m trying to be sincere. I finally undrestand what all those kooks on YouTube, er, urban shaman, um, artistes (?) are doing. I really do grok the thing when you add an explaination.

I expect that the natural reaction to this will be for all of us to retreat further inside into our own private worlds of fantasy and imagination. Within these worlds, we will not only have freedom, but a feeling of absolute control. So we’ll develop rich inner lives, what’s wrong with that? More than likely, corporations will offer us exciting technologies (immersive VR networks) to enable us to completely indulge in these private fantasies.

At which point two things happen: we retreat from the battlefield and the all-important challenge of the world that we can’t change or control, and we become bathed in effusive self-indulgence. We become slaves to our own inner whims, fantasies, desires, and unconscious impulses - because we know with absolute certainty that they can be fulfilled through the magic of our imaginations coupled with the power of our (hypothetical) technology. And then we are not truly “free” either.

Maybe the danger I’m articulating is the one Buddhists have been talking about for ages. We tend to equate “freedom” nowadays with “doing what you want.” But wanting things doesn’t make us free; it enslaves us. We project the completion of our identity onto the acquisition of some object, the fulfillment of some desire. Whether that desire is internal or external seems to be incidental.

I realized yesterday that buying products which “fit my character” induces in me the perceptual state of “loving myself better.”

More simply: buying cool things makes me love myself. I love the things, I put an element of my identity out onto the thing itself, and somewhere between the GUI interface of the two, spirit is born, the relationship of two states communicating.