For humans at least, reality is largely defined and a priori shaped, preformed structurally by the quality of our experiences; not just the quality itself per se but the TYPE of quality, the WAY in which we experience the quality of our experiences. This is like the proverbial colored glass lens through which something is viewed to change our perception of it. This is how we are. How our minds work. And most of the time, at least in our nascent years (can’t really speak to senescence just yet but I can extrapolate) it is more about the direct experience of the quality of the TYPE of experiences we have more so than those experiences themselves. Actual experience is filtered through qualitative-affective types which are primarily experienced underneath or fundamental to actual experiences. This provides the colored lens but also the underlying interconnectedness between experiences, forming otherwise disparate events/people/etc into a line of meaningfully connected similarity. This goes on to lay down tracks in our memory upon which larger constructions of identity are made. These “chunk” together via their own types of linkages (of meaning, of perceptual vivacity, of temporal-spatial co-occurrence, etc.) and become building blocks for further derived, larger constructions of identity. The mind eats this up, culture eats this up, we become “real” in the world and to ourselves.
Speaking of which, the voyeurism latent to our form of consciousness is no accident or fluke, but the primary mode of giving meaning-form as rendering (with or without colored lenses) experience more tangible and perfected. What is “perfect” approaches physicality and the nature of the physical as remainders become impossible and everything is translated into one form of receptive experience by virtue of brute force. Possibility fades away and coalesces into undeniable actuality, this undeniability of the ‘body’ in all its many ways becoming a nice anchor for the mind to root itself logico-metaphysically inside its own world-experience. The secondary nature of this, when all other possibility and excess-space has been flattened away, reveals the stunning actuality of expansive and breath-taking meaning. Good, bad or neutral are all bound up together in the secondary experience, distanced meaning optimized for both the perfection of flattened-collapsed metaphysical become actual-‘physical’ as well as the sufficient closeness-to in order to render meaning substantial enough in its impact upon not only our senses but also our immediate necessity as a living being instinctually govered by needs and desires. What becomes real enough to matter, but also remains distant enough to remain perfect.
The mental image of the optimized perfection of this formal sentience-structure is most easily noticed in the form of TV and movies. When we watch something like this we are experiencing something closer to the actual optimized state of our own minds insofar as our minds are reality-machines, this is more substantial even than our lived experiences out in the world. Why? Because while the lived experience has a much higher undeniability and realness the voyeur experience has been optimized not only for undeniability (in a way that is sublimated more or less into metaphysicality i.e. mentality) but also for its perfection, for a lack of flaws and errors and escaping possibilities. The experienced TV show or movie is only ONE THING, and not only is it only one thing but it has been honed and refined and carefully constructed as an art-form; meanwhile reality ‘itself’ is by no means only “one thing” but is many things and incorporates countless escaping possibilities impossible to track down, let alone the fact that reality itself is, for the most part anyway, not a product of intentionally-constructed art.
Bringing this back to qualitative meaning-experience, when we understand the nature of how this works and the double- and triple-logic feedback loops involved, the meta’d metas so to speak and how these cross-dimensionally play upon each other in fractal superforms of tectonic maximized expressivity and sensitivity-to (to what? I’ll let you ponder that) it becomes self-evident why we care more about the next Netflix series release than mowing the lawn outside. Maybe you are an old-timey brute and care more about mowing the lawn than Netflix and chilling, good for you. You are probably less likely to be obese. You may also be a Virgo or you may happen to score exceptionally highly on the personality dimension of conscientiousness along with a low score of openness to experience; regardless of the particularities, the virtual and simulated-created art-forms experienced secondarily become optimized for their perfection and their meaning-provocation which ends up translating almost immediately into meaning-production, one held up de facto upon the back of technological process. This was more pure back in the 70s and 80s before technological forms of media and media production had really been subsumed underneath the ethos of techne and its nature of technological rationality. Still, even today the quality and grade of the media content is so pure that we often fail to notice the underlying lack of meaningful content. This trade-off is allowed because of how the optimized perfection clouds-over the collapse of substance into form, clouding over in this way only effectively because our minds are still immersed deeply in meaning-experience itself and for its own sake, linked both internally to our own substance of mind and memory as well as outside of ourselves perceptively and interpersonally in terms of social webs and nodes shared between us and others, us and key points out in the world (key points human or otherwise).