Imagine someone who watches first person hiking youtube videos. They like the feeling of adventure, awe, and like the nature. This is sad. They’re collapsing the beautiful experience of a hike into something low dimensional and low signal. Worse, this will partially satisfy and thus dull their desire for actual hikes. It’s better to sit alone twiddling your thumbs than it is to consume this hollow facisimile of reality.

Prefer real things, substitutes take the edge off your desires.

How much better would life be if none of us had ever seen the Eiffel tower unless we had the chance to go to Paris and see it for our own eyes? I don’t get much out of pictures of the Eiffel tower, but I’d get a lot out of that initial moment of wonder and discovery. How much better would Monet and Rembrandt be if you had to wait until the pieces were on display at a gallery to know what all the fuss was about? How much better to arrive in Manhattan and find yourself awash in the sea of people, dominating buildings, and vibrancy having only heard of the Magnificent New York City?

Substitutes dampen your desires, but they also spoil experiences. It’s like reading plot summaries and analyses books before you read them.

Sometimes the substitutes whet the appettite. Watch some Korean street food videos and you won’t feel satiated but you might end up going to Korea. This is good! But it’s rarely this way.

I used to read fanfiction where a modern man would go back in time into the body of a historical figure, and succesfully save the Roman/British/Soviet Empire through incredible hyper-competence. Escapist fantasies that let me feel agentic and capable, a substitute for being able to feel this way in my life. I managed to get out of this hole, but I can see a 35 year old Alex still reading competence-fiction and being “happy”. You could fuck up your brief time on earth up like this.

Is it okay to imagine yourself as an internationally famous singer when you’re in the shower? That’s a dream that is never going to happen, so it’s not displacing some potential real experience, right? No, you’re getting the feeling of fame and you’d be better served trying to become famous in your actual community. Go and get applause and cheers at the (western style) karaoke bar, or on a street corner. Or get the fame of impressing a girl with your voice.

There’s the life where you socialize online and you use twitch, youtube, netflix, spotify, discord, whatever. You consume porn. There’s the life where you don’t and you’re so bored you actually go and meet your friends, go to concerts (or just listen to buskers), read books, do meaningful work, or talk to strangers at parks. One of these lives is healthier and happier.

Don’t accept local maxima.

And maybe once you’ve seen the ocean, you can hang a painting of it in your living room so you can reflect and remember.