In the modern world, a quiet but profound shift has occurred: mainstream pop culture increasingly casts us as spectators. We are not doers, but observers. Whether we are fixedly watching a screen, navigating the perfectly curated spectacle of social media, or attending highly professionalized performances like stadium concerts and theater, we are encouraged to consume, not create. Even the very notion of "culture" has been reduced to something we passively witness: a museum exhibit we view through a velvet rope, a distant foreign land we visit on a structured vacation, an "authentic" restaurant we sample, or the observation of indigenous people in their native, often idealized, environments.
This spectacle-driven reality has created a spiritual vacuum. Devoid of immediate, participatory meaning, we instinctively look away from our own lives. We stare through the screens, absorbing interpretations of a distant past—romanticized historical epochs, lost mythical civilizations—or we immerse ourselves in the meticulously constructed landscapes of fantasy worlds, ranging from grand magical epics to the towering, technologically advanced civilizations in distant galaxies. These crafted worlds, brimming with purpose, conflict, and endless possibility, seem to offer a depth of experience and meaning that our daily, predictable reality simply cannot match.
We have come to accept this divide as a fundamental law of existence: the vibrant, imaginative life exists "in the mind," while we are tethered to the "boring reality" of modern civilization. The fantastical is obviously fantasy, a harmless escape, while our actual lives are defined by the iron cage of work, verifiable facts, concrete physical realities, and inevitable tradeoffs. Our physical spaces—our homes, our cities, our workplaces—appear permanent, unchangeable, and dictated solely by economic necessity and logistical constraints, rather than by human imagination or shared purpose.
But what if this pervasive divide is not a law of the universe, but merely a quirk of modernity? What if the feeling of flatness is not the fundamental nature of reality, but a temporary cultural artifact? The past was fundamentally different from the present—a truism we forget in our current stasis. And the future can be different, too.
This book posits that a path exists to introduce more meaning to our culture. By gaining a greater understanding of distant past, emerging technology and timeless human nature—our innate drive for belonging, challenge, and narrative—a vast array of possibilities for creating deep, tangible meaning is now open to us.
The journey outlined in these pages is taking us from spectator to participant, from passive observer to active creator of meaning. This book will explore the core elements of meaning-making—shared narrative, experience design, and aesthetic intention. It will draft a perspective on a natural human drive for status and its relation to economics and social structures.
And it will present a possible ideas of where this new culture-making might lead, in near and more distant future. Some of them might be unfeasible, or even incorrect in assumptions or results. But some, I hope, will lead to a greater diversity of new proofs of concept and their real attempts.
This book was created using Google Gemini (in majority via Gemini 2 Research), as well as some parts using Notion AI.
All or almost all the major arguments and ideas in the book are the author’s, or by other authors, when cited. AI was used to brainstorm, research them, and to create textual representations of those ideas.
And in line with the spirit of the book, ultimately what matters is human experience and society’s organizational structures that enable it, not just words on pages.