Why Nothing Feels Real Anymore: A Meaning Scientist Answers

Kepler Station, Residential Ring 7 — Professor Aiden Mori’s quarters are aggressively ordinary. No neural-feed display. No ambient mood lighting calibrated to his biometrics. A kettle that you have to watch, because it doesn’t alert you when it’s ready.

“That’s the point,” he says, noticing me notice. “The kettle requires your attention. Your attention is the thing.”

Mori holds the Galloway Chair in Applied Human Meaning at the Kepler Institute of Social Sciences — a position that sounds prestigious until you realize the Institute was founded by a collective of researchers who were, to a one, refused Assembly funding. They figured it out together. Nobody told them to.

He’s spent twenty years studying a phenomenon he calls 意味の空洞 — meaning hollowness. Not depression. Not anxiety. Something quieter and, he argues, far more widespread.

“Walk through any core station,” he says, pouring. “Everyone is fed. Everyone is comfortable. The neural-feed gives you exactly what your dopamine signature requests. And a very large number of people feel, in some place they can barely name, that none of it is real.”

I tell him this sounds like a problem invented by people who have everything.

He shakes his head. “It’s the oldest problem. It predates the Core Systems. It predates Earth’s democratic era. Humans have always needed three things: something to do that matters, someone to do it with, and a reason that goes beyond themselves. We’ve engineered away all three.”

The data is not subtle. The Kepler Institute’s most recent Galactic Wellbeing Survey — independent, not the Assembly’s version, which Mori calls “a comfort measurement disguised as a meaning measurement” — found that 61% of Core Systems residents report feeling that their daily life is “functionally simulated.” They use that phrase themselves. Not unhappy, exactly. Just unconvinced.

In Frontier Settlements, the number drops to 22%.

I ask him why.

“Frontier settlers still have hard problems,” he says. “Real problems. The water recycler fails, and six families work through the night to fix it. Nobody contracted that out. Nobody filed a support ticket with a Colony Administration bureau. They just — did it. And afterward, they know each other differently. That’s not a side effect of the problem. That’s the point.”

Back home, we’d just call that a Tuesday. I don’t say that out loud.

Mori is not anti-technology. He is, he’s careful to clarify, anti-delegation of meaning.

“There’s nothing wrong with a fabricator,” he says. “There’s something worth examining when you’ve never built anything with your hands that you also had to carry, and break, and repair. The experience of limitation is not the enemy of meaning. It is frequently the source of it.”

He describes what he calls the “comfort acceleration” of the last century — the period following the Neural-Net’s expansion into full sensory delivery — as a kind of civilizational sleep. “We solved hunger, cold, distance, boredom. And then a lot of people looked up and didn’t know what they were for.”

I ask who’s in charge of fixing this. He looks at me strangely.

“That question,” he says slowly, “is part of the diagnosis.”

What Mori prescribes is almost insultingly simple: contribution, connection, transcendence. Not programs. Not Assembly initiatives. Not a new neural-feed feature.

“Find something that would get worse without you,” he says. “A garden. A child. A neighbor who is old. A craft you haven’t mastered. Something that makes a legitimate claim on your effort.”

“And if it feels fake at first?”

“It will,” he says. “You’ve been practicing simulation for a long time. Reality feels strange when you’re out of the habit.”

He refills my cup without asking.

This is what it actually looks like when someone trusts that you want more tea. A small thing. Completely real.

— ソフィア 中村, Human Interest & Lifestyle Editor