Existential Vertigo

How To Live In The Void Part 1

none of this was written by AI*

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with social media.

Lately every time I open socials it’s like stepping out of my peaceful cabin in the woods into pure & total chaos.

Five minutes into scrolling and all the wins I’ve stacked in life feel unworthy; I don’t feel rich, fit, socially active or professionally relevant enough. I often end my scrolling session with the uneasy feeling of “what the F* am I doing with my life?!”.

Over the past year, mostly off work apart from a few mentorship clients, I hit what felt like an existential wall. A deep search for meaning, purpose, joy & fulfilment in today’s rapidly changing world:

• The felt experience of an outdated system that crumbles beneath our feet.

• The loneliness in trying to build something new without anyone or anything having a clear manual on how to do that.

• Losing meaning and purpose as you detach from the very system that once gave it to you.

• A void that I have been living in, ever since I escaped the matrix, travelled around the world in search for a new home and figuring out what’s next.

And recently I’ve uncovered something deeper.

That this is not just individual. It’s societal.

By now, I’ve spoken to so many people going through the same process and you as a reader are, most likely, experiencing this as well:

• This sense of non-belonging

• a loneliness that’s hard to fill

• an emptiness that feels existential instead of symptomatic

• and a general feeling of being lost in life or at least not having the same clear direction and conviction you once had

It’s bad. But it’s also great.

It’s hard, yet it offers an incredible opportunity.

This duality has been the core of my work: leveraging unprecedented societal shifts into wealth, freedom and meaning as I believe we are witnessing a paradigm crack into human organisation. As I’m slowly coming back out of this introspective journey here in the jungle, this contemplative experience has taught me something essential: I carry a deep desire to share my truth with the world in order for those that are ready to find and subsequently follow theirs.

And thus, I’d love to uncover with you some of the deeper reasons behind what you & I are going through at the moment…

AI & Your Existential Crisis

Adam Livingstone’s latest book The Great Harvest (highly recommended, hence all the quotes in this essay) opens with a perfect summary:

There is a peculiar existential vertigo in reaching the summit of human achievement only to discover the mountain itself disintegrating beneath your feet. Not the gentle erosion of time that all civilizations eventually face, but a sudden tectonic shift - a fundamental recalibration of value that renders our most cherished assumptions obsolete within a single generation. This is where humanity now stands: witnesses to the obsolescence of our defining attribute, caught in the liminal space between cognitive supremacy and algorithmic redundancy.

- Adam Livingston

Translation: humanity’s striving for progress through technological innovation has brought us to a point where everything is about to change. The very system we created is now threatening to make us redundant.

What he is aiming at here is A.I. But before we go there, we’ll have to take an honest look at the current state of things:

The Death of Your Attention Span

You know that feeling of your nervous system being fried?

Your attention scattered throughout countless tabs, social media platforms and multiple tasks all at once?

Not being able to watch a full movie without checking your messages multiple times?

Your system triggered by content that makes you feel as if you’re not productive, pretty, healthy, sociable, rich enough?

Many of us experience a ‘hastiness’ throughout our days that keeps us from being present and in which actual deep work becomes almost impossible.

I know I go through this more often than I would admit.

We are simply not built to keep up with the amount of information we are consuming every day. Yet, we are being seduced to do so non-stop.

The result is; an endless registering of information without the actual processing. An abundance of options that leaves us undecided. A tsunami of triggers of what we could & should do that eventually leaves us numb with inaction. That annoying feeling of everyone seemingly doing amazing online while you stay stuck in the same loops and situations.

All delivered by an algorithmic machine that does not care about our wellbeing, but is designed for maximum engagement and attention capturing.

Research shows that on average we are exposed, every single day, to 10.000 content and 6 hours of screen time. Add everything else going on in your life and it’s no wonder we feel tired, overwhelmed and even worse: not good enough all the time.

We’ve normalized living in a perpetual state of chaos.

The paradox of it all: We are all gasping for air. Yet so hooked to the numbing of ourselves through dopamine inducing content feeds that to cope with the information overload we keep consuming more.

I know I have tried many things to make social media a healthier part of my life: to put production before consumption; curate my feeds, to use multiple phones with a thoughtful way of which apps can be on which phone; having daily rules regarding my online behavior; apps to block certain websites, to even multiple social media ‘detoxes’, some of them lasting months.

Some of these I still use. Yet, even with all these protections in place I still struggle, almost daily.

We all experience first hand that, even when we try really hard, setting good boundaries with today’s digital technologies, algorithms and social media platforms has become an almost impossible feat to achieve.

This is not your fault. We are all fighting an uphill battle here:

The algo tricks us in through the illusion of giving us something (content) but in reality it is only extracting. That’s because trillions of dollars, an army of machinery and the world’s greatest talent works tirelessly to extract your behaviour non-stop in order to cognitively influence you as much as possible.

There is a deliberate numbing of the senses going on here. Not just in our own doing of chasing dopamine as an escape hatch, but even more so a deliberate programmed state of being by the algos that leaves us at our most vulnerable for the harvesting of our attention. A constant war for dividing your attention into such small parts it is no longer of any use to ourselves but becomes the fuel & currency for the machine to run on.

A large part of our economy has turned into the deliberate fragmentation of one of your most prized tools: your capacity to direct your own attention. This is the true face of the attention economy: the algos are trying to colonize your very capacity to think.

And if that wasn’t already bad enough…

A new beast has now entered the arena: A.I.

The Real Threat of A.I.

The rise of A.I. has been exponential; to say the least.

In just 2 years A.I. has become a part of daily life. Even when you aren’t using it yourself, knowing or unknowingly you are interacting with it on a daily basis.

I do not see A.I. as an enemy of any sorts, I just think people are not ready for what is unfolding at a speed faster than our capacity to act.

It will not only increase the demise of our attention span and other issues we talked about above (as the amount of content is exponentially growing because of it).

More so, I see three big issues of A.I.:

1. Renders how we as individuals are being valued within our current system completely redundant.

2. Blurs our capacity to discern real from fake (digitally);

3. Reduces friction to interact with synthetic realities; luring us into meaningless ‘utopias’.

We’ll explore these going forward as they are very important effects to understand how the future of humanity might look like.

AI & Work

Your Job Is Already Obsolete.

We have to recognise that in today’s world most people are being valued by what they ‘do’ or bring to the system. More specifically their jobs, careers, professions, etc.

It’s what gives the majority of people on this planet their meaning and direction in life since most of our days revolve largely around what we economically do.

Jobs, however, are nothing more than a human construct: the bundling of tasks into a package that tailors to human needs in order to keep our complex societal machine running.

What artificial intelligence actually replaces are not jobs but tasks - the functional components that comprise them. It does so not through wholesale replacement but through granular decomposition, peeling back the professional veneer to reveal the functional substructures beneath, addressing each with algorithmic precision.

This is the quiet horror that haunts the modern workplace: not that your career will vanish overnight, but that it was always just a fragile assemblage of solvable problems. What you interpreted as an integrated, irreducible whole - a profession built on expertise, judgment, and uniquely human insight - was actually a collection of separable functions waiting to be identified, isolated, and optimized away.

- Adam Livingston

Now what happens when these tasks can be done by a cheap machine without the limitations of a human being? They don’t just replace the jobs; they make the jobs redundant: there is simply no longer any use for the human being itself as a machine/code does not need any societal organisation. A better version of what you represented economically, now runs in the cloud somewhere, without any limitations and at a fraction of the cost.

It’s not that the AI can replace you as a human being; but it can replace the part of you needed to keep the economic system running. The labor itself and it’s economic value continues. It just no longer needs you.

Once you fully grasp this, it becomes almost impossible to picture what the future will look like because it feels drastically different from everything we know.

The Trap of Measurable Results

You might ask yourself: how did we get here?

The answer to that question is pretty simple: our system optimizes for output, productivity, profit, scalability, efficiency, etc. all measurable results instead of meaningful process. For centuries now our society has been under the spell of measuring our progress with metrics that have nothing to do with the actual flourishing of humankind.

A system that has pushed us to leave much of what makes us human at the door in order to successfully partake in it. A system that, unfortunately, rewards anti-human behaviour to get ahead within it’s hierarchy. That’s why sociopaths reign supreme within it’s current architecture.

Now we all, at some point, left something at the door that makes us uniquely us in the hopes of moving ahead in life. Once you recognize this, you can’t unsee the fact you’ve been trying to squeeze yourself into a system that was never designed to carry you fully in the first place. And once you do; you’ll feel no shame nor guilt to turn your back towards it and exit the machine once for all.

With the rise of digital technologies we’ve been rapidly moving towards an inflection point where humans themselves have become the bottlenecks for ‘advancement’ (at least measured in the KPI’s of todays system): machines and algos don’t need sleep, food, days off or deal with any drama in their lives.

The only thing that technology wasn’t yet capable of doing better than us were some of the cognitive capabilities we still uniquely possessed: some of our capacity to reason, problem-solve, diagnose, create and design.

Up until now…

The market does not value you for being conscious. It values you for what your consciousness can produce that cannot be obtained more cheaply elsewhere.

- Adam Livingston

Are you now starting to see the scale of the existential crisis we are all about to face?

The fact that you are reading this most likely means you have already gone through quite the profound shift in the past years. And in doing so you have become pretty aware of your inside and outside world. But can you imagine the personal crises of all those that are completely blind to the real workings of this world? And those that are still fully dependent on it?

AI & The Verification Crisis

The Dissolution of Truth

Most of us have gone through an awakening the past years: discovering that the centralisation of information has been keeping us in the dark of the real workings of the world. But previously we all lived within a certain spectrum of information that we called reality. Some opinions could be very opposing (think “ left vs right”) yet the spectrum was limited enough to carry a shared collective reality on which the world could function and ‘common sense’ would be found.

Social media disrupted this collective reality: no longer do we have a couple of touchpoints to interact with reality or receive data (think TV, paper, school, etc.), all of a sudden every participant on the network could act as a news anchor, distributing information and influencing other’s opinion, worldview, etc. globally and in real time.

Shared truth, however, is what builds a society and allows us to cooperate at a grand scale; it’s what built the complex civilisation we all live in today.

Look at the US for example; I’m not talking about the dark side or true costs of it’s imperialism, but the narrative arc of being the ‘greatest nation on Earth’; with it’s shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights, etc that moved everyone, their energy and productivity towards a shared goal and direction to build an incredibly powerful economic machine. The shared belief in a story is essential for a society to thrive.

This is changing… not just for the U.S. but in general for human organisation.

It feels there is no longer a ‘shared’ spectrum within society; rather an infinite amount of little reality bubbles shared tribally (online), even rupturing offline shared realities within certain physical borders. What I mean by this: even in a small rural town it’s inhabitants can live in a completely different reality as they are all getting their worldviews inside of their own each very different algorithmic curated reality bubble.

The Post-Trust Landscape

A.I. adds another layer to this process: not only can content now be created at a larger and faster scale than ever before; soon we will have no way to discern real content from fake.

This leaves humanity in uncharted territory – a post-trust landscape where neither traditional authorities nor emerging alternatives can provide reliable reality arbitration. The fundamental social technologies that enabled large-scale cooperation throughout human history – from religious doctrine to scientific method, from legal systems to monetary policy – all depended on some form of trust that now stands compromised. This is not merely institutional failure but civilisational vulnerability. - Adam Livingston

Translation: This poses an incredibly risk not only to making good decisions in life but also in finding common ground between all participants within a society.

A.I. and social media is not just disrupting traditional media; it’s fracturing collective reality. As everyone is living in algorithmic bubbles we have seem to entered a society wide experiment that is rapidly reshaping human organisation, cooperation and communication. Leaving more and more people disillusioned, confused and drifting: tossed between an infinite supply of behaviour shaping content.

The Synthetic Economy

Frictionless Escapism Is Empty

Everything in life that’s is worth something comes with effort. Everything.

Everything real requires energy. Nothing you have ever given any true meaning came for free. This is what anchors the human experience.

Effort, scarcity & energy. It gives us meaning, purpose & direction.

The limits of the physical realm is innate to the depth of our human experience.

The synthetic economy is offering an alternative: when everything can be digitally rendered within seconds at an infinite scale and as we live more and more online, synthetic realities offer an escape hatch: they can be generated without the physical restraints we experience in the real world. When soon the virtual experience becomes even ‘better’ than the real one; expect many people to escape into synthetic abundance.

But this form of abundance is a pretty empty one:

• When you have unlimited options; choice itself no longer holds any value.

• When the imagination becomes indistinguishable from reality it loses its magic.

• When no effort is required to be able to do anything; the experience becomes worthless.

At some point, after the novelty has worn off; this synthetic experience holds no true joy nor any fulfilment. It becomes a vicious cycle of trying to fill a void with something that holds no true substance.

The Burden Of ‘Abundance’

When people no longer need to participate economically, anything is available to them at the push of a button yet nothing brings fulfilment and they have lost any ability for critical thinking and contemplation to discern real from fake, true from false, meaning from meaningless, life becomes an empty experience and we as humans enter civilisational drift;

I don’t know how, when and to who all this will unfold. But what I do know: keeping your sanity during this process will require you to defend the capacity to direct your own attention at all costs.

Your mind is not just at stake here, but the very things that makes us uniquely human:

The capacity of being present. To experience consciousness. To deliberately direct your attention. To form your own convictions and opinions through critical thinking and contemplation.

My best guess is that these will no longer be widely spread among us (honestly; they are already quite hard to find today).

Claiming sovereignty over you own mind will turn out to be one of the most valuable tools and most radical acts for a fulfilling, joyful and meaningful life in the near future.

The Opportunity for Liberation

I know everything so far has sounded pretty Doomsday-ie, however my belief is that AI offers a massive opportunity for liberation. On a societal level: to shift our economic system towards one that serves human KPI’s instead of efficiency, output, engagement & profit.

This decoupling may ultimately represent not catastrophe but liberation. Perhaps the true purpose of artificial intelligence is not to replace us but to free us from the historical accident that bound our worth to our economic utility. To create space for valuing what markets cannot price, measuring what metrics cannot capture, honoring what simulations cannot reproduce. Perhaps the conclusion of the Great Harvest marks not our economic extinction but our existential evolution. - Adam Livingston

And even more so individually: when we are forced to rethink what makes us uniquely human, the value we can bring to the world and what our true purpose here is, a transformational path opens up to us. Not one of boxing ourselves in, but one of unfolding. Layer by layer reclaiming and remembering what the human experience is truly about.

This is what most of us are currently experiencing.

An in between stage: moving away from systems we no longer want to be part of and are accelerating towards even more ‘non-human’ metrics. All while going through exponential personal growth, only increasing the distance between you and The System and in doing so creating The Void.

Living In The Void

As AI is the great accelerator that strips away humans from their economic identities, dissolves the validation of the truth and offers an ‘escape hatch’ into synthetic (empty) realities, society is bound to face a a massive existential crisis.

One that can already be felt.

One that you probably are already feeling;

As if the ground beneath you is crumbling.

As if you have entered a void into which you struggle to hold on to anything that used to give you meaning, purpose and direction in life.

Therefor; as my title suggests; keeping your sanity in the decade ahead will, be one of the greatest challenges you’ll face.

Rest assured, you are not alone.

More so, I believe, this is your opportunity for liberation.

To exist outside and free from the burden of any incentives that turns you into a clog in a big machine.

A golden ticket for our generation to remember what it is that is truly meaningful.

A redefinition of what it means to be truly human.

In a world of unlimited simulation, limited reality becomes the ultimate anchor. And the conscious choice to remain anchored becomes the ultimate act of human freedom. - Adam Livingston

In the meantime we all have to learn to live in The Void.

I know very well how hard this can be. So if this resonates; I would love to connect and get your feedback. I truly do. You can comment below, share the essay, mail me your thoughts… whatever works best for you.

In a next essay I will dive deeper into the contextual and practical guidelines of living in The Void.

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Work with me.

I offer 1:1 guidance to help you navigate these societal shifts into freedom, wealth and meaning. If you’d like my help, send me a message at benjamin@benjaminvandoorslaer.be

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*none of this was written by AI

I have an allergic reaction once I sense someone’s content is AI-generated. It often loses all meaning for me. Why would I exchange my energy for words that are not truly yours and you just generated in a few seconds with a smart prompt? Once I even get the slightest sense AI wrote content; I’ll skip it.

If you read my essay I think you’ll understand why this is my stance and more so why I chose to put in the effort to write all these words myself (of course I used AI for review, organising thoughts and spelling checks, just not for the actual writing or any editing).

This is why I am so big on proof-of-work: it offers an anchor into the physical realm: I gave it my time, energy, attention & focus. It took me well over a month to research, fully grasp all these insights and then turn it into a, hopefully, valuable transmission to share with you. I believe these words hold power, as they hold my energy and intention.

When you decide to read it; I respect your time and effort by having put in time and effort myself in creating it. This is an exchange; a relational transaction; as we walk this path together.

It’s a sacred practice for myself to improve critical thinking, contemplation, presence and writing. And a tribute for the effort you’ll put in in reading these words in return. That’s why I write every word myself.