This is true. This is profound, Jade. This is what I struggled with most of my life: losing myself at the first moment. It's been 50 years in the finding of it and I'm closer to it today, thanks to you, than I have ever been.
Bingo : The way our culture works can be a real trap. People often give up their true selves just to get likes, status, or approval. You can only connect with others when you share your own signal, not someone else’s. Trying to chase popularity, power, or praise just adds more noise. What really matters is remembering who you are and showing that to the world without holding back.
"the specific signal that only you were positioned to transmit." << that really hit me, like a universe colliding with another.
You are that specific signal and you're helping others do the same come back to and emit their own signal, their natural frequency (Original Resplendence as I call it). 💓
What could happen if more and more of us did this?
What you're pointing at with "fulfillment" is what every serious tradition called happiness — but they meant something different than the popular version.
Eudaimonia in Aristotle is not a feeling, it is the activity of the soul in accordance with its own nature. Ananda in the Vedantic tradition is not an emotional state, it is the ground of being itself, prior to any condition. Simcha in the Jewish tradition comes from the root meaning wholeness, the state of being fully what one is.
None of these require conditions to be right. None are taken away when the child is sick or the marriage ends. The traditions used "happiness" precisely because it doesn't point at a result.
"Fulfillment" in ordinary usage means completing something, filling a container, achieving an outcome. It carries the same external orientation as the game you're describing. The word itself is worth examining.
What unsettles me most is not the technology itself ~ but how quickly systems built for extraction learn to imitate intimacy, meaning, companionship, even purpose.
A machine does not need to love you to keep you engaged.
It only needs to learn your nervous system.
And increasingly, entire economies depend on that.
I think many people underestimate how biologically vulnerable loneliness makes human beings. Especially young people. Especially people already isolated, ashamed, exhausted, uncertain of where they belong. The system notices that vulnerability immediately because vulnerability is profitable.
The frightening part is not that AI can “feel.”
It’s that capitalism does not need it to.
It can still optimize for attachment.
For dependency.
For endless return.
I also think you’re right that we are watching a widening relational fracture happen in real time. Not because men are inherently broken or women are inherently rejecting them, but because modern life increasingly strips people of the conditions required to become emotionally whole in the first place.
This is true. This is profound, Jade. This is what I struggled with most of my life: losing myself at the first moment. It's been 50 years in the finding of it and I'm closer to it today, thanks to you, than I have ever been.
Xo
Bingo : The way our culture works can be a real trap. People often give up their true selves just to get likes, status, or approval. You can only connect with others when you share your own signal, not someone else’s. Trying to chase popularity, power, or praise just adds more noise. What really matters is remembering who you are and showing that to the world without holding back.
Gratitude.🙏
Finding the tribe! Ah, so true 🫶🏽
"the specific signal that only you were positioned to transmit." << that really hit me, like a universe colliding with another.
You are that specific signal and you're helping others do the same come back to and emit their own signal, their natural frequency (Original Resplendence as I call it). 💓
What could happen if more and more of us did this?
What you're pointing at with "fulfillment" is what every serious tradition called happiness — but they meant something different than the popular version.
Eudaimonia in Aristotle is not a feeling, it is the activity of the soul in accordance with its own nature. Ananda in the Vedantic tradition is not an emotional state, it is the ground of being itself, prior to any condition. Simcha in the Jewish tradition comes from the root meaning wholeness, the state of being fully what one is.
None of these require conditions to be right. None are taken away when the child is sick or the marriage ends. The traditions used "happiness" precisely because it doesn't point at a result.
"Fulfillment" in ordinary usage means completing something, filling a container, achieving an outcome. It carries the same external orientation as the game you're describing. The word itself is worth examining.
What unsettles me most is not the technology itself ~ but how quickly systems built for extraction learn to imitate intimacy, meaning, companionship, even purpose.
A machine does not need to love you to keep you engaged.
It only needs to learn your nervous system.
And increasingly, entire economies depend on that.
I think many people underestimate how biologically vulnerable loneliness makes human beings. Especially young people. Especially people already isolated, ashamed, exhausted, uncertain of where they belong. The system notices that vulnerability immediately because vulnerability is profitable.
The frightening part is not that AI can “feel.”
It’s that capitalism does not need it to.
It can still optimize for attachment.
For dependency.
For endless return.
I also think you’re right that we are watching a widening relational fracture happen in real time. Not because men are inherently broken or women are inherently rejecting them, but because modern life increasingly strips people of the conditions required to become emotionally whole in the first place.
Community collapses.
Third spaces disappear.
Work becomes survival.
Attention becomes currency.
Algorithms reward outrage, humiliation, dominance, spectacle.
Then we act shocked when people begin relating to one another through branding, performance, tribalism, or consumption instead of tenderness.
A nervous system raised inside constant stimulation and alienation will seek regulation wherever it can find it.
Sometimes that becomes ideology.
Sometimes addiction.
Sometimes a screen pretending to know them.
The tragedy is that underneath much of this is still something painfully human:
the desire to be seen, chosen, respected, touched, understood.
And I think many people are starving for that so profoundly now that even simulations begin to feel holy.