So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.
However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.
As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.
Is there a word for this?
I have these moments too and it feels really sublime as a sense of beautiful terror.
I believe it could just be "awe" or "awestruck" with it's roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of "awe" is maybe not quite right.
The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I'm not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.
The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don't know much about it.
Whenever I pay attention to the world it seems to real and wonderful to be believed.
I have made a special attempt to avoid almost all smartphone use beyond googling things, getting directions and checking emails and it has made reality a lot more real.
I hate those moments. Unironically. Every time I have to remember that there's something beautiful and inexplicable and genuinely terror-inducing outside the pane that separates the real from the hyperreal, I remember that there are people making money off of so thoroughly destroying it. I remember, for all of about a second and a half, that there WAS once magic, wonder, ethereal paracausality that didn't NEED for explanation, it could just exist-- and that the order under which we live is such an utter perversion of nature that the magic has died, and that the people who killed it, are killing it, and will kill it all have addresses.
Those moments of leaving the cave make me reckon with the potential that I could do something glorious, but awful; necessary, but stupid; liberatory, but sacrificial. I hate those moments, because they never fail to make me jeopardize myself and the peace I try to cultivate, if even for a moment.
