“‘Industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. We must have self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning,’ said the Controller. […] ‘Civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended; there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance. You’re so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and longsuffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gram tablets and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. Christianity without tears… that’s what soma is.’ […] ‘What you need,’ the Savage rebutted, ‘is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough now.’ […] ‘We prefer to do things comfortably,’ replied the Controller. ‘But I don’t want comfort!’ the Savage cried, ‘I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’ ‘You’re claiming the right to be unhappy?’, ‘I'm claiming the right to be unhappy,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.”
—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, dialogue between the Savage and Controller (edited for length)—
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This one’s not an essay, it’s a thought I had in the shower, but it’s one I couldn’t let go until I wrote it down.
So I thought I’d share with y’all.
A great big hullabaloo is made in our culture about why “We have to learn to take care of ourselves first before we can take care of others”, which, despite its built-in assumption that the eventual goal is taking care of others, is really just a ruse to get one to not think about others at all ever again. What—on the surface—sounds like a benign phrase, is actually just a clever form of marketing aimed at the tenderhearted as a gateway to selfishness.
And through this gateway to socially-sanctioned selfishness, a whole host of related attitudes and concepts have entered the societal bloodstream: “I don’t wanna trauma dump”, “I’m your friend not your therapist”, and most odious of all, “emotional labor”. All of which essentially amount to the notion that the people who are supposed to be closest to us neither want to hear extensively about our problems nor should presume that we want to hear extensively about theirs. No no, instead, if you want your problems to be heard for any length of time beyond two minutes, you should only pay a “professional” over $100 an hour in order to hear them. Or post your problems on TikTok to receive validation from faceless strangers. But you should never be so (selfish??) as to expect to stay up late with a friend until 1 AM drinking beers to hash things out. Doing that would be exploitative.
This has led to hollow relationships and friendships where presence is conditional; granted only if we emotionally benefit from every interaction. This in turn reinforces the lie that pleasure—not intimacy or truth or the righting of wrongs—is the highest order good to be attained in life. In a culture where we seek personal comfort as a moral absolute, the ethics of obligation/duty is an unwanted (even angering) reminder that human bonds were never meant to be efficient, transactional, or infantalizingly “safe”.
The Jewish-American philosopher Robert Nozick, in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, & Utopia, wrote about the internal conflict we all feel inside of whether to prioritize immediate gratification or meaning, when he described a thought experiment famously known as the Infinite Experience Machine.
The thought experiment goes as such: You’re taken to a mysterious laboratory where a mad scientist shows you an even more mysterious contraption called the Infinite Experience Machine. As you behold it, the scientist pats you on the back and tell you that you have two choices…
You can have a bunch of wires attached to your head and float in a tank, and the Infinite Experience Machine will generate an entire universe wherein you can live an entire lifetime filled with nothing but amazing experiences. You will have an extraordinary career, an extraordinary house, an extraordinary partner, an extraordinary car, extraordinary kids, etcetera etcetera. You will never again live in the real world, but you also will lose all awareness that the world being generated by the Infinite Experience Machine is not the real world.*
You can reject the Infinite Experience Machine and choose to continue life as normal, even though that involves enduring the highs and lows of real relationships and friendships, along with a host of other unpleasantries: sickness, death, heartbreak, boredom, failure, acidic diarrhea.
No doubt, if both choices are presented in this way, given the sad state of our civilization, at least 50% of people would take Option 1. At least. Maybe more. Maybe 60%. And if you think 50-60% is too high an estimate, remember that we’re talking about consistent perfect pleasure and the delusion of a life well-lived being offered. Now consider how many folks pay a pretty high price these days—bankruptcy, homelessness, addiction—just to numb themselves. Not experience pleasure or delusion. Just numbness.
If you read Anarchy, State, & Utopia, it’s clear by Nozick’s tone that he can’t imagine anybody would say yes to Option 1. His thought experiment wasn’t written as a genuine dilemma. He wrote it as a polemic; thinking that the Infinite Experience Machine scenario was such an obvious slam-dunk against utilitarianism and hedonism. Yet if Nozick were still alive, I think his mind would be blown if he realized just how many people in 2026 would absolutely plug in without a second thought.
But here’s where my thought that I had in the shower comes in: what if—as a condition of being hooked up to the Infinite Experience Machine—somebody you love had to die the moment the switch to the machine was flipped on. Let’s say the mad scientist whispers to you “Hey, um, no biggie or anything, but one of the weird li’l hiccups of the machine we’re still trying to patch, is that as soon as the thing is turned on and you go to Fun World, one of your loved ones will immediately burst into flames and die a pretty agonizing death. Sometimes it’s dad. Sometimes it’s mom. Sometimes it’s just the family dog.”
“What?!”
“Mhm. But don’t worry, you won’t know it! I shit you not, as soon as the machine’s switch is flipped, you won’t even remember you have those particular loved ones, because in the Experience Machine you’re given new family members that have flawless personalities and never die. So you won’t even feel any guilt.”
Even as depraved as our culture has become, I think with this added element to the thought experiment, the percentage of the population willing to enter the Infinite Experience Machine plummets from 50-60% to 1-5%.
This is because we care about others independent of our experience of them. And the fact that we care about others independent of our own experiences indicates that there is something planted in the cavern of our psyche that informs us but is not us; and this something lets us know that by denying the value of others in chasing objects of appetite, we are committing a great act of immorality that will fundamentally alter the kinds of people we are destined to become. You can call this something whatever you want: “the voice of conscience”, “divine laws written on the heart”, “nudgings of a benevolent spirit”, etc. But the point is that whatever the thing is that the entity that occupies the depths of us is telling us, that thing is normally strong enough to stir up some involuntary sense of conviction. Even removing the threat of a loved one dying from the equation, I suspect a lot of people would decide at the last minute not to plug in to the Infinite Experience Machine if the mad scientist was ethical enough to inform them that they would have no memory of their real family and friends, because deep down in their unconscious they value those relationships beyond their own surface desires and impulses. They see these bonds as having an objective transcendence that subordinates their selfish wants in a vague-but-still-detectable moral and ontological hierarchy.
This doesn’t mean—of course—that all human beings can articulate this (again, it’s largely unconscious). And some people may indeed ignore their internal warnings, and forsake substantive accomplishments and relationships in order to endlessly pursue shallow pleasures. (People who are especially vulnerable to doing this are those who have had traumatic pasts being overweight or poor or ugly, who reach a surprise stage in their lives where they feel like they’re finally close to being able to experience how “the other side” lives.) But forsaking accomplishments and relationships in favor of shallow pleasure always winds up with the person hating themselves, because they’ve traded meaning for pleasure and pleasure cannot tell them who they are or why they matter.
Setting morality completely aside, our personal pride/ego is bound up with achievement. We see our own value (rightly or wrongly) as being tied to impressive things we manage to pull off. Yet when gratification is given to you without any effort on your part, by default achievement becomes forfeit. Granted if the Infinite Experience Machine were real, you wouldn’t know you hadn’t really earned all the great things that were happening to you and therefore wouldn’t feel bad about any of it; but since the Infinite Experience Machine isn’t real, and getting gratification without achievement has to take place in the actual world, you increasingly feel dehumanized. Like a grunting animal, trapped in cycles of hunger and satiation. Because you’ve eschewed the regular trials and milestones of personhood, and having done so, become less and less like a person everyday.
This is the condition that Nietzsche warned about when he described the “last man” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra; a man who asks “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” and then grows bored with the questions he’s asked.
Conclusion?
Everything good is firmly rooted in the real. Conversely, everything that distorts and deforms and confuses and manipulates can exist only in realms where the real is deliberately hidden or discouraged.
We can only become who G-d destined us to be if we stay as close as we can to physical reality, where things are tangible, heavy, risky, limited, and demanding, and where we’re expected to carry the burdens of others and to have our burdens carried by others. The older I get, the more convinced I become that dopamine traps offered in digital spaces are products of a malevolent spiritual force. The older I get, the more convinced I become that the souls and personalities and integrity of people who spend large amounts of time on their phones and computers become gradually disfigured; until their souls, personalities, and integrity becomes so disfigured that they can never have hope of recovering the destiny G-d originally had planned for them.
We may not have an Infinite Experience Machine, but we have plenty of devices that come pretty damn close.
These devices—promoted to us and widely adopted by us under the guise of promoting increased connection—have absolutely demolished our social fabric and social skills. And what resisting the ever increasing amounts of time and attention these devices take in our lives probably entails, is determination on our part to create separation from our devices for periods so long that it will make us look strange (even reckless) to the rest of society… who will become increasingly reliant on the digital space for feelings of reassurance, justification, and control.
