Real Life, Perceived Life – Living without Resistance
On experience, orientation, technology, and the growing gap between living and understanding
Introduction
I’ve carried a growing sense of misalignment for some time now.
Not a dramatic one. Not anxiety or despair. Just a persistent feeling that the way we experience life and the way we are required to live it are drifting apart.
This didn’t arrive suddenly. It has surfaced gradually — through books read years ago, through watching how different people orient themselves in the world, and through the steady expansion of screens, media, abstraction, and simulation into everyday life. Lately, with the rise of AI and increasingly immersive technologies, that sense of misalignment has sharpened rather than changed.
What troubles me is not technology itself. Nor is it nostalgia for some imagined past. It’s the sense that something fundamental is going unexamined: that we are losing clarity about what counts as real experience, and what is increasingly a powerful approximation of it.
The unease I’m describing is better understood as a gut feeling — not an emotion to be acted on impulsively, but a coherent, embodied summary of things already known but not yet fully articulated. A signal that something no longer aligns, arriving through the body before it finds language.
This piece is an attempt to slow that signal down — not to offer solutions, but to make a few necessary distinctions before the conversation runs too far ahead of us.
1. A Persistent Unease
The unease I’m describing isn’t new, and it isn’t tied to any single development. It has been present, in different forms, for much longer than our current debates about AI, social media, or virtual reality. What has changed is not its nature, but its intensity.
At its core is a growing sense that something no longer lines up: that the experiences most available to us, and the lives we are actually required to live, operate under different rules. We consume narratives, images, and possibilities at a scale and speed that far exceed the rhythms of work, responsibility, relationships, and physical limitation. The result is not confusion so much as quiet strain.
This strain is easy to overlook because nothing is obviously broken. Life continues to function. Systems run. People adapt. Yet adaptation does not always mean alignment. Often it simply means tolerating a mismatch for as long as possible.
What makes this difficult to name is that it doesn’t announce itself as a crisis. It appears instead as restlessness, distraction, dissatisfaction, or a low-level sense that meaning is always just slightly out of reach. Many of the explanations offered for this focus on personal resilience or psychological adjustment, but those accounts rarely address the environment in which the experience is formed.
The unease, as I see it, is less about individual weakness than about living inside conditions that quietly pull experience and reality apart. When that happens slowly enough, it can feel normal. When it accelerates, it becomes harder to ignore.
2. A Necessary Distinction We Rarely Make
Before any meaningful discussion about technology, psychology, or the future, a basic distinction needs to be made—one that is often assumed, but rarely stated clearly.
There is a difference between real life and perceived life.
By real life, I mean the domain in which we are physically present, subject to time, effort, consequence, and limitation. It is where things resist us. Where outcomes are not immediate. Where misunderstanding, delay, fatigue, and compromise are part of the texture of experience. Real life unfolds at a pace that cannot be significantly accelerated without cost.
Perceived life is different. It is the life we encounter through screens, media, images, narratives, and increasingly through interactive systems. It is visually rich, cognitively stimulating, and comparatively low in friction. It responds quickly. It compresses distance and time. It allows us to observe, simulate, and sometimes participate without bearing the full weight of consequence.
This distinction is not a moral judgement. Perceived life is not false, and real life is not pure. Both are now inseparable from modern existence. The problem arises when the two are treated as equivalent—when the demands, expectations, and rewards of one are unconsciously imported into the other.
Much of the confusion surrounding technology stems from this collapse. We speak about agency, fulfilment, and wellbeing as if they are formed under stable conditions, when in fact the conditions themselves have changed. The environments in which attention, identity, and meaning are shaped no longer push back in the ways they once did.
Without recognising this distinction, it becomes impossible to explain why so many people feel overstimulated yet under-fulfilled, connected yet disoriented. The issue is not that perceived life exists, but that it increasingly sets the terms by which real life is judged—without offering the same grounding in consequence.
If these two domains are not clearly separated, every conversation that follows becomes muddled. We argue about effects without understanding the conditions that produce them.
3. Acceleration Without Adaptation
Once the distinction between real and perceived life is made, the source of the pressure becomes easier to see. The issue is not that one has replaced the other, but that they now move at radically different speeds.
Perceived life has accelerated dramatically. Information, imagery, stories, opinions, and stimuli arrive continuously, with little effort required to access them. Social media, streaming platforms, gaming, and online discourse compress events from across the world into a single, ever-present feed. Experience is no longer bound by place, sequence, or physical effort.
Real life, by contrast, has changed far less. Work still demands time and repetition. Relationships still require patience and negotiation. Bodies still tire. Responsibility still accumulates slowly. Consequences still unfold on delayed timelines. No amount of connectivity can remove these constraints without distorting the experience itself.
The result is a widening gap between expectation and lived reality. Minds adapt to speed, novelty, and immediacy, while lives remain governed by duration, limitation, and effort. This gap creates a form of strain that is difficult to articulate because neither side is malfunctioning. Each is behaving according to its own logic.
Over time, this produces what might be called expectation inflation. Life begins to feel flat not because it lacks meaning, but because it cannot compete with the density and drama of mediated experience. Ordinary progress feels inadequate when measured against constant exposure to compressed narratives of success, conflict, or intensity.
This is not a failure of character or discipline. It is an environmental mismatch. Human orientation evolved in conditions where perception, action, and consequence were closely linked. When those links loosen, the nervous system adapts as best it can—but adaptation is not the same as coherence.
As acceleration continues, the cost of this mismatch increases. What once felt like mild distraction begins to register as restlessness, dissatisfaction, or quiet exhaustion. The pace of perceived life continues to rise, while real life offers fewer and fewer points of meaningful alignment.
That growing imbalance is the pressure beneath much of the unease we now experience, even when we cannot yet name it.
4. We Have Felt This Before
One of the reasons these concerns are often dismissed is that they are assumed to be products of recent technology — speculative, futuristic, or driven by novelty. But the unease itself is far older than the tools we now associate with it.
Long before digital systems existed, writers were already probing what happens when human experience becomes abstracted from the conditions that once grounded it. One of the clearest expressions of this appears in A Living Soul, published in 1981. Jersild’s novel explores continuity of consciousness stripped of bodily existence, asking whether function, memory, and cognition are sufficient to sustain something recognisably human. What makes the book unsettling is not its technical premise, but its emotional restraint. There is no apocalypse, no spectacle — only the quiet erosion of orientation.
Jersild was not alone. Across the twentieth century, particularly in European literature, a recurring concern emerges: systems, institutions, or forms of knowledge that outgrow human scale and leave individuals navigating realities that no longer answer back in familiar ways. Whether through dislocation, abstraction, or existential ambiguity, these writers were circling the same fault line from different directions.
In some cases, the concern appears through memory and landscape, where inner life becomes untethered from place. In others, it appears through altered cognition, where acceleration produces clarity without coherence. Elsewhere, it surfaces as bureaucratic or philosophical systems that operate flawlessly while meaning quietly drains away.
Even earlier, in speculative form, writers sensed the danger of intervention without understanding. Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1928 short story When the World Screamed imagines technological curiosity awakening something vast and indifferent beneath human assumptions of control. The warning is subtle but familiar: not that inquiry is wrong, but that action without orientation carries consequences that cannot be managed once set in motion.
What unites these works is not prediction, but recognition. They identify a persistent human vulnerability: the tendency to mistake technical continuity for existential continuity, and functional success for lived coherence.
Seen this way, our current moment is less a rupture than an amplification. The questions were already there. What has changed is the scale, speed, and reach of the systems now capable of acting on them.
5. When Technology Starts to Answer Back
What distinguishes the current phase of technological development from earlier ones is not immersion, scale, or even influence. It is response.
For most of the past century, mediated experience was powerful but essentially passive. Books, film, television, and even early digital media delivered narratives, images, and stimulation, but they did not meaningfully adapt to the individual. They shaped perception, but they did not converse with it.
That boundary is now dissolving.
Artificial intelligence systems do not merely present content; they reply, adjust, remember, and refine. They appear attentive. They can be queried, confided in, corrected, and engaged over time. This creates a form of interaction that feels less like consumption and more like relationship — even when we know, intellectually, that no such relationship exists.
The early and widespread anthropomorphising of AI is not a cultural oddity. It is a warning signal. Humans are predisposed to attribute intention, understanding, and presence to anything that responds coherently and consistently. When a system mirrors language, emotion, or concern, the mind fills in what is missing.
What matters here is not whether these systems are conscious, sentient, or “really” understanding. The psychological effect does not wait for philosophical resolution. Perceived life has crossed a new threshold: it no longer just stimulates — it answers back.
This changes the balance between the two domains described earlier. Real life resists us. It misunderstands. It delays. It pushes back. Perceived life increasingly does the opposite. It clarifies. It accommodates. It responds on demand.
The risk is subtle but significant. When coherence, reassurance, or agency can be obtained without friction or consequence, the incentives shift. The problem is not that people are deceived, but that the environment now offers forms of engagement that feel more immediately responsive than the world they are embedded in.
This is where acceleration becomes qualitatively different. It is no longer only about speed or volume of experience, but about substitution. Functions once shaped through embodied interaction, social negotiation, or internal orientation begin to migrate into systems that simulate those processes without requiring the same commitments.
At this point, the distinction between real and perceived life becomes harder to maintain — not because it is invalid, but because perceived life has begun to perform some of the same roles, while quietly removing the conditions that once made them formative.
6. Orientation and Anxiety
One way to understand the pressure created by these conditions is through the idea of orientation — not in the geographic sense of locating oneself on a map, but in the internal sense of recognising coherence within experience.
Inner orientation is the ability to sense when things line up: when attention settles, when one thought can be followed without being constantly interrupted by another, when experience stops pulling in competing directions. It is not an emotion and does not announce itself as calm or happiness. It is simply the condition in which experience feels internally consistent.
This capacity does not arise from reflection alone. While introspection, contemplation, and inward practices can deepen awareness and sharpen attention, they cannot by themselves carry the full weight of orientation. Inner coherence is not generated in isolation; it is stabilised through repeated contact with environments that push back, require adjustment, and impose consequence. Without that anchoring, inward clarity risks becoming self-referential — ordered, but untethered.
Orientation forms through lived engagement. Physical space, effort, resistance, error, and return all play a role. When action and feedback are closely linked, orientation develops quietly, without needing to be named. The body, the environment, and attention are aligned often enough for coherence to become familiar.
In heavily mediated environments, that linkage weakens. External systems increasingly provide structure, pacing, and coherence on demand. Attention is guided, responses are immediate, and ambiguity is reduced. For some people this is relieving. For others, particularly those already sensitive to overload or disruption, it can gradually displace the need to form internal reference points.
When external structure dominates experience, inner orientation may never fully stabilise. In such cases, anxiety is not simply a psychological condition to be corrected, but a signal that coherence depends too heavily on environments that no longer support it once they are removed. Outside those environments, nothing holds experience together in the same way.
By contrast, lives shaped in settings where space, movement, and consequence cannot be avoided tend to foster orientation more naturally. Direction matters. Mistakes register. Return requires effort. Coherence is not supplied; it is built. Over time, this produces a steadier sense of agency that does not rely on constant external scaffolding.
This contrast is not a judgement about character, discipline, or intelligence. It reflects the conditions under which orientation forms and is maintained. As perceived life becomes more responsive and self-contained, fewer environments demand the kind of engagement that quietly builds inner coherence. The cost of that absence often appears later — as restlessness, anxiety, or a persistent sense of being unmoored.
Seen this way, anxiety is not always the core problem. Sometimes it is the marker of an orientational gap — one created not by individual failure, but by lives lived in conditions that no longer require us to find our way within them.
7. Drift, Not Dystopia
It is tempting to frame these developments in terms of dystopia — to imagine dramatic futures marked by control, collapse, or coercion. But that framing misunderstands how systemic change usually unfolds.
What we face is not a sudden break, but a gradual drift.
Dystopias arrive loudly. Drift arrives quietly. It advances through convenience, optimisation, and substitution. No one is forced into it. Each step feels reasonable, even helpful. Over time, however, functions once carried by lived experience migrate elsewhere, and the conditions that formed agency begin to thin.
This is how many institutions weaken without being attacked. Democracy offers a clear parallel. It was not undone by a single moment of rejection, but by a slow erosion of participation, responsibility, and shared orientation. As political life became mediated, abstracted, and performative, the habits that sustained democratic systems quietly decayed. By the time concern became widespread, much of the underlying structure had already changed.
A similar pattern is now visible in everyday life. As perceived environments grow more responsive, engaging, and accommodating, they begin to absorb roles once played by physical presence, social negotiation, and internal orientation. Friction is reduced. Delay is removed. Ambiguity is smoothed over. What is gained in efficiency is lost in formation.
The danger is not that people are misled or manipulated. It is that substitution occurs without being recognised as such. Real life does not disappear; it is simply measured, judged, and experienced through standards set elsewhere. When that happens, dissatisfaction is often directed inward, as if the problem were personal inadequacy rather than environmental shift.
“Waiting to see how it goes” is often presented as a sensible response to complex change. But in accelerating systems, waiting is not neutral. Defaults harden into norms. Habits form before they are noticed. By the time consequences are clear, the conditions that produced them are already embedded.
Drift does not announce itself as a loss of freedom. It presents itself as relief — from effort, from uncertainty, from resistance. The cost is only visible later, when agency feels thinner, responsibility heavier, and meaning harder to locate.
That is why the question ahead is not whether technology will overwhelm us, but whether we will notice when it begins to quietly replace the conditions that once shaped us.
8. The Actual Challenge Ahead
Seen this way, the challenge we face is not primarily technological. It is orientational.
The question is not whether artificial intelligence, immersive media, or virtual environments will continue to develop — they will. Nor is it whether these systems are good or bad in themselves. That debate tends to arrive too late, once the conditions it argues about are already in place.
The more fundamental issue is whether we can maintain a clear distinction between forms of experience that push backand those that respond. Between environments that shape agency through consequence and those that offer coherence without it. Without that distinction, responsibility, meaning, and even freedom become harder to locate, because the ground on which they once formed is no longer stable.
This does not require rejecting technology or retreating into nostalgia. It requires recognising substitution when it occurs, and resisting the assumption that responsiveness is the same as reality. Some forms of experience exist precisely because they do not adapt to us, because they insist on effort, patience, and adjustment in return.
If we fail to notice where this boundary lies, dystopia will not arrive as oppression or catastrophe. It will arrive as convenience — as a series of reasonable choices that quietly narrow the space in which agency is formed. By the time the loss is felt, it will be difficult to say exactly when it occurred.
The task ahead, then, is not to predict the future, but to preserve clarity in the present. To be precise about what kinds of experience we are cultivating, and what kinds we are allowing to wither. Recognition must come before regulation. Orientation before solution.
If we can hold that distinction — between real and perceived life, between resistance and response — then the technologies we build may yet remain tools rather than replacements. If we cannot, the drift will continue, not by force, but by default.