35 min to read
The World We Forget to Feel
🫀 On the tragedy of being alive without fully experiencing it.
There are certain smells that can transport me back to places I haven’t visited in years.
The smell of Modell’s Sporting Goods, where I would go with my parents to buy baseball cleats before a new season. My grandmother’s basement. My aunt’s backyard after it rained, when we’d look for a rainbow.
These are not particularly extraordinary places. There is nothing inherently remarkable about a sporting goods store, a basement, or a wet backyard. I doubt a fragrance company would have much success selling a candle that smells like my grandmother’s basement.
But to me, those smells contain entire worlds.
They are associated with particular people, periods of my childhood, and experiences that can no longer be reproduced. The physical places may still exist, perhaps largely unchanged, but the circumstances that made them meaningful have passed. I’m older. My family is older. The people and relationships associated with those memories have changed. Some are no longer here.
And yet a familiar odor can suddenly make those years feel remarkably close.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
Not simply the sense of smell, but the extraordinarily rich relationship between our sensory experiences, memories, consciousness, and what it means to be alive.
More importantly, I’ve been thinking about how little attention we seem to devote to these experiences despite their intimate relationship with nearly everything that makes life worth living.
How many people live in a world they aren’t actually alive in?
That probably sounds like an absurd question. Obviously, if you’re living, you’re alive. But that’s not what I mean.
I’m interested in the difference between merely existing in the world and consciously experiencing the fact that you exist within it.
There’s a distinction between being a human being and a human doing. I’ve discussed this before in At the Plateau of Meaning, but lately I’ve been considering the problem from a more explicitly sensory perspective.
We have become remarkably good at doing.
I’m not convinced we’ve become equally good at being.
The Decorporealization of Everyday Life
I have no desire to become another person evangelically denouncing technology. I use it extensively. I find artificial intelligence genuinely useful. Much of my intellectual productivity depends on tools that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.
But I think we’ve developed a peculiar relationship with the technologies that increasingly mediate our perception of reality.
Consider how much time we spend looking at screens.
We scroll, watch, read, click, react, and scroll some more. Information is delivered continuously, optimized to capture our attention. We can occupy ourselves for hours without ever meaningfully engaging with the physical environment around us.
Fortunately, I don’t have any social media, save for LinkedIn. Yeah, I can’t believe it myself, but I guess it kinda makes sense considering how I am as a person and why social media just never resonated with me. But that still doesn’t stop me from being sucked into my phone for the LinkedIn algorithm.
And sometimes, after putting down the phone, I have to ask myself:
What did I just spend time doing?
What did I get out of that experience?
Not in the abstract sense. I know I was consuming content. But what did I experience that was memorable? What did I learn? What can I recall? What did those moments contribute to my life?
Often, remarkably little, and that’s what bothers me.
We’ve become so accustomed to having our attention occupied that occupancy itself can masquerade as experience.
I call this decorporealization: becoming increasingly detached from the body and physical world through which our lives are actually experienced.
I’m not suggesting that screens somehow eliminate our embodiment. Looking at a screen is itself a sensory experience. Digital environments can evoke powerful emotions, provide meaningful connections, and teach us extraordinary things. By extension of screens, I can foresee virtual reality making dramatic strides to unimaginable sensory experiences. But I won’t go in depth with that here.
The problem is not the existence of technology.
The problem is the relationship we develop with it.
Our attention is finite. Our time is finite. And increasingly sophisticated technologies compete for both.
What troubles me is the possibility that we are becoming exceptionally proficient at consuming representations* of the world while becoming less attentive to the world immediately available to us. Much like Plato’s Allegory where we just see shadows on the wall and not the things that produce these shadows.
We can watch a thousand videos of beautiful landscapes while remaining indifferent to the weather outside our own windows.
We can consume endless content about fitness while ignoring the sensations of our own bodies.
We can photograph nearly every meaningful occasion, only to revisit those photographs years later and realize how little of the original experience we actually remember.
We have tools for capturing our lives, organizing our lives, and optimizing our lives.
But are we actually living them?
Information is not experience
This distinction has become especially important to me as a PhD student.
I spend an enormous amount of time learning, reading, researching, and thinking. My intellectual interests are broad, perhaps excessively so. I enjoy understanding how things work.
But I’ve increasingly recognized that knowing about an experience is not equivalent to having it.
You can understand the neurophysiology of proprioception without being particularly aware of your own body.
You can explain olfactory transduction without appreciating the smell of your morning coffee.
You can study the neuroscience of emotion without being particularly receptive to your own feelings.
You can understand consciousness as an intellectual problem while overlooking the astonishing fact that you are conscious in the first place.
And that’s the contradiction I’m interested in.
We know an extraordinary amount about the machinery of experience, yet knowing how the machinery operates does not guarantee that we appreciate what it produces.
We’ve confused explanation with participation.
The Biological Miracle We Treat as Ordinary
In my essay on consciousness, I explored the relationship between the brain, body, and environment.
My central position remains that consciousness is inseparable from the organized activity of a living system interacting with its world.
We do not simply receive sensory information. Our nervous systems interpret it, integrate it with prior experiences, anticipate its consequences, and construct an experience of the world from it.
This is something I’ve been interested in since my undergraduate research.
For my senior thesis, I investigated the rubber-tail illusion, a phenomenon involving multisensory integration and the perception of one’s own body. Illusions of this kind are fascinating because they expose the normally invisible processes by which the nervous system constructs a coherent bodily experience.
We generally assume that our senses provide a relatively straightforward representation of reality.
But perception is not a snapshot camera since the brain is continually reconciling information from multiple sensory modalities, bodily states, memories, and expectations.
What we experience is not simply what physically stimulates our sensory receptors. It is the resulting interpretation generated by a living, adaptive nervous system.
I think that makes sensory illusions scientifically interesting; they reveal that perception is constructed.
But I think there’s something equally interesting about the ordinary perceptual experiences that require no illusion whatsoever.
Consider drinking a glass of water.
You feel the weight of the glass. Its temperature. The movement of your hand. The contact between the vessel and your lips. The sensation of liquid entering your mouth. The temperature difference between the water and your body. The feeling of swallowing.
All of this happens almost automatically.
An enormous amount of biological activity produces an experience so familiar that we hardly give it any consideration. And rightly so! We cannot possibly consider the infinite series of incoming information. It understandably gets filtered out or is merely imperceptible.
Yet under different circumstances, that same glass of water can become extraordinarily satisfying.
- After exercising. During a hot afternoon. When you’re particularly thirsty. When you’re sitting somewhere peaceful with somebody you love.
The water may be essentially identical.
But the experience is not.
Physiological state, attention, expectation, memory, and context change how we experience it.
The ordinary world is not necessarily lacking in sensory richness. We may simply be failing to notice how much is already there.
That’s a substantially different problem from insufficient stimulation.
And I think it’s one of the most overlooked problems in how we design our everyday lives.
A Body You Didn’t Know You Had
Brazilian jiu-jitsu taught me something about embodiment that I don’t think I could have learned nearly as effectively from a textbook.
It made me aware of muscles, positions, forces, and bodily relationships I had never consciously considered.
Before training, those muscles obviously existed. They had been contributing to movement and posture throughout my life.
I wasn’t missing the anatomy. I was missing the awareness.
Through physical engagement, I began developing a different relationship with my body. Positions that initially felt confusing became recognizable. Subtle differences in pressure became meaningful. Movements that once seemed impossible to distinguish became perceptually obvious.
I didn’t need somebody to lecture me about the philosophical importance of embodiment. The activity itself demanded my participation, and I think that is a crucial distinction.
We often approach personal development through instruction. We read books, attend lectures, download applications, and consume information about the things we should supposedly be doing.
But experience is not always best cultivated through explanation; it has to be encountered.
And perhaps the most effective way to help people become more attentive to their senses is not to tell them to pay attention.
Perhaps it is to create conditions in which attention emerges naturally.
This is why I’m not particularly interested in developing another meditation application, olfactory training kit, or complicated wellness routine.
There may be value in those products. But they often require a highly motivated individual who already recognizes the importance of the activity.
I want something more universal.
- Something my grandparents would understand and use.
- Something that doesn’t require specialized knowledge, a subscription, an instruction manual, or an established interest in neuroscience.
- Something that fits naturally into ordinary life.
Because everybody already participates in ordinary life, and ordinary life is precisely where I think the opportunity exists.
Why This Matters to Me
There is another reason I think about these questions so intensely.
My best friend was murdered in a carjacking.
I don’t particularly care to disguise that reality with euphemisms.
His life was taken from him.
He didn’t reach the end of a long life. He was murdered. Another person’s actions deprived him of every future experience he otherwise might have had.
Every conversation.
Every meal.
Every familiar smell.
Every ordinary afternoon.
Every opportunity to love somebody, laugh with somebody, experience something new, or revisit something familiar.
Gone.
I find that profoundly upsetting and you’ll agree that it is upsetting.
Death is not some abstract philosophical exercise for me. The finality of it is real. The consequences are real. The absence of somebody who once existed is real.
One of the hardest things to comprehend is that the world continues afterward.
The seasons change. People go to work. Restaurants open. Children grow older. The rain falls. The sun rises.
But the person is no longer here to experience any of it.
I cannot meaningfully fathom what existed for me before I was born. There was an incomprehensibly long history of the universe during which I did not exist.
And when I die, I have no reason to presume that my subjective experience will continue.
I am privy to this one particular interval of existence.
A remarkably small interval, cosmically speaking.
And so are you.
This is where my interest in sensory experience becomes something much more than an academic curiosity.
When somebody’s life is taken, we recognize the tragedy of everything they will never experience again.
But why are we so willing to overlook the extraordinary opportunities available to us while we’re still here?
Why do we voluntarily surrender so much of our finite time to things we barely remember?
In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins mused something to the extent that among the innumerable people who could have been born, most never will. Yet somehow, against these incomprehensible odds, we find ourselves conscious and alive on a planet overflowing with experiences, afforded only a fleeting moment before returning to the same nonexistence that preceded our birth. Dawkins regards this as a reason to understand and discover the universe; I would extend that sentiment to the equally extraordinary privilege of experiencing it. To see, smell, taste, touch, love, grieve, and simply feel—these are not trivial features of existence, but the very substance of being alive. The tragedy is not merely that our time is finite, but that we can spend so much of it forgetting how improbable and extraordinary it is to be here at all.
Why are we so concerned with optimizing our productivity, accumulating possessions, and managing our public personas while neglecting our own immediate experience of being alive?
I neither think these are trivial questions nor do I think confronting them requires a religious or supernatural explanation.
Some of the most profound experiences of my life have emerged from completely ordinary circumstances.
Walking outside. Exercising. Drinking something cold. Talking with somebody. Recognizing an old smell.
Moments in which I become extraordinarily aware that I am alive.
Perhaps some people interpret such experiences as divine. I can understand why. They can be difficult to communicate and even more difficult to reproduce.
But I personally don’t need to invoke anything supernatural to appreciate them.
The fact that a biological organism can consciously experience the world is already astonishing enough.
I also don’t want this argument misunderstood as a moral accusation against people who struggle to be present.
Grief, chronic pain, illness, exhaustion, disability, financial insecurity, and countless other conditions can profoundly constrain somebody’s ability to engage with the world.
Being alive does not mean being perpetually happy, grateful, or attentive.
Nor does it mean that every moment must be meaningful.
There is no virtue in turning presence into another performance metric.
My frustration is with the conditions, habits, and incentives that make it unnecessarily difficult to appreciate our own lives.
I don’t want people to feel guilty for being human. I want them to have more opportunities to experience being human.
Smell, Memory, and the World We Carry With Us
Of all the senses, olfaction has become especially interesting to me.
Smell is an intimate part of our relationship with the environment, yet it receives comparatively little conscious attention in everyday life.
We are constantly exposed to odors.
Food. Rain. Wood. Grass. Clothing. Buildings. Other people.
Many pass unnoticed.
Yet a particular odor can evoke an autobiographical memory with an immediacy that is difficult to describe.
This is not merely a pleasant curiosity. Olfaction participates in how we recognize places, evaluate food, detect environmental hazards, and associate experiences with emotional significance.
It is part of the sensory architecture through which we inhabit the world.
I find it particularly interesting that our ability to describe odors often seems so inadequate compared with the experiences themselves.
Sometimes I don’t know what something smells like.
I only know that it smells like a particular period of my childhood.
And that’s enough.
I don’t need to identify every volatile compound or classify the odor into a standardized category.
I don’t need to improve my olfactory vocabulary.
I’m interested in awareness, not necessarily literacy.
The smell of my grandmother’s basement is meaningful because it belongs to me in my life. Somebody else might encounter the same odor and experience something completely different.
The physical stimulus may be similar, but the autobiographical associations are uniquely personal. This is one of the things I find so beautiful about sensory experience.
We inhabit a shared physical world, but we experience it through distinct histories, bodies, and minds.
Our senses can connect us without requiring us to experience everything identically.
Not everybody has access to the same sensory capacities. People living with congenital or acquired sensory loss experience the world differently. Someone with anosmia may not be able to access the odor-associated experiences I describe, while another person may have especially rich associations with sounds, touch, or visual details.
My interest in olfaction has also led me to think about supporting research into acquired smell loss and parosmia.
These are not merely abstract sensory impairments. Changes in olfactory function can disrupt familiar experiences of eating, memory, environmental awareness, and everyday enjoyment.
I would like any future work I undertake in this area to contribute, where possible, to scientific research addressing those losses.
But my broader mission is not to privilege smell over the other senses.
It is to recognize that sensory experience, in all its forms, is intimately connected to our quality of life.
From Problem-Solving to Problem-Finding
Lately I’ve been trying to approach innovation differently.
A common engineering approach begins with an identifiable problem and searches for a technological solution.
Something is insufficient, inefficient, expensive, unpleasant, or inconvenient.
We add a component, modify a mechanism, automate a process, or introduce a new material.
The problem is solved.
At least in theory.
But I think this approach can become overly algorithmic.
We become so accustomed to solving predefined problems that we rarely question whether those are the problems worth solving in the first place.
Consider the food industry.
An enormous amount of research and development is devoted to making products more appealing, more convenient, cheaper, more stable, or more commercially competitive.
Those are legitimate objectives.
But what if we begin by questioning the assumptions that underlie the entire product-development process?
Why does improving a sensory experience necessarily require changing the chemical composition of what we’re consuming?
Why do we assume greater sensory intensity is always preferable?
Why are we so quick to introduce another product when the experience we want may already exist?
And why do we so rarely consider whether the consumer actually needs more stimulation rather than a better relationship with the stimulation already available?
These questions led me into an extended period of brainstorming about sensory neuroscience, multisensory integration, nutrition, and consumer technology.
Initially, I considered approaches involving the physical modification of beverages.
The underlying public-health motivation was straightforward.
Childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease represent substantial health challenges. Excessive consumption of added sugars, including those found in sugar-sweetened beverages, is one contributing concern.
But sugar itself is not the enemy.
Glucose is fundamental to energy metabolism. Our bodies require it, although we do not need to consume added sugar to obtain it.
The concern is excessive consumption, not the mere existence of sugar.
This distinction matters because a healthier relationship with food shouldn’t automatically require sacrificing its sensory enjoyment.
I became interested in whether biological and perceptual mechanisms could help reconcile these objectives.
Could we preserve or enrich an enjoyable sensory experience while reducing unnecessary nutritional burdens?
Could a relatively inexpensive intervention make an existing lower-sugar alternative more appealing?
Could we exploit what is already known about multisensory integration without requiring consumers to dramatically change their habits?
These are interesting scientific questions.
But turning a scientific question into a consumer technology introduces an entirely different set of constraints.
Physical chemistry does not care how compelling your business pitch sounds.
Neither do reaction kinetics, material capacity, manufacturing costs, or patent claims.
I encountered concepts that were theoretically possible but practically cumbersome. Others were elegant from a molecular perspective but difficult to reconcile with ordinary consumer behavior.
Some required too much material. Others required too much time. Still others introduced unnecessary regulatory complexity.
The lesson was not that these ideas were inherently bad.
It was that scientific feasibility is not the same as practical value.
A sophisticated solution can be worse than a simple one.
And sometimes the most important innovation is recognizing which problem does not need solving.
When Somebody Has Already Invented Your Idea
One of the more frustrating parts of this process has been discovering how much prior work already exists in sensory consumer technologies.
An idea that initially feels compelling and original can become considerably less exciting after a few patent searches.
Companies have already commercialized ways of incorporating olfaction into everyday drinking experiences. The broader intellectual-property landscape contains numerous approaches to sensory delivery, beverage enhancement, and consumer customization.
At first, this was discouraging.
I had spent considerable time developing an idea, only to discover that other people had already approached similar problems.
But I began reconsidering what that discovery actually meant.
The existence of a patent does not establish that the invention was commercially successful.
Nor does the existence of a competitor mean the entire market has been exhausted.
On the other hand, a crowded patent landscape does not automatically demonstrate commercial demand.
There may be substantial investment in technologies that consumers ultimately find insufficiently valuable.
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
A category can be scientifically fascinating, commercially proven in certain settings, and still contain considerable room for improvement.
Or it can be populated by inventions that repeatedly fail to establish enduring consumer demand.
The distinction is critical.
I don’t want to build something people purchase because it seems novel for two weeks.
I want something perennial.
Something that remains useful after its novelty disappears.
That requires a different standard for evaluating ideas.
Rather than asking whether a product is interesting, I want to ask whether it solves a recurring problem with a sufficiently low burden that people continue choosing it.
And rather than claiming originality simply because an idea occurred independently to me, I want to understand the existing work, identify its limitations, and determine whether any meaningful opportunity remains.
There is a difference between scientific novelty, patentable novelty, and commercial differentiation.
An entrepreneur does not necessarily need to discover a new law of nature.
But they do need to create value.
And they need to do so legally, safely, and sustainably.
A note on what I’m developing
Some of this thinking has led to an early consumer-product concept involving the relationship between olfaction and familiar everyday activities, particularly drinking.
I’m deliberately withholding the technical implementation, functional design, and other potentially protectable details while I investigate the intellectual-property landscape and appropriate development strategy.
This is not a claim that the invention is unprecedented, patented, or ready for commercialization.
It is simply an acknowledgment that public disclosure can have consequences for future patent rights, and I would rather establish those boundaries before discussing the engineering openly.
The specific product is also not the central point of this essay.
It is one possible application of a much broader philosophy.
If that particular idea proves infeasible, commercially unattractive, or legally impractical, the mission remains.
I am much more committed to the problem than to any individual mechanism proposed to solve it.
The Economics of an Experience
There is something paradoxical about trying to build a business around sensory awareness.
I find it almost dystopian that companies can profit by teaching people how to breathe.
Breathing is one of the most fundamental activities associated with being alive.
And yet we have managed to turn even that into a subscription service.
To be fair, guided breathing and meditation can be genuinely useful. People may reasonably pay for instruction, structure, convenience, or expertise.
My concern is not that every wellness business is illegitimate.
It’s that we have become extraordinarily accustomed to monetizing things that are intrinsic to human existence.
We pay for applications to help us focus, sleep, breathe, relax, and remain present.
At what point do we start asking whether the solution is simply another manifestation of the underlying problem?
I don’t want to sell people permission to experience their own lives.
I don’t want to convince somebody that their ordinary existence is deficient until they purchase a product from me.
Nor do I want to manufacture an endless stream of physical accessories that eventually become clutter.
I have a strong aversion to unnecessary material possessions.
The world is already filled with things.
Why add more?
This introduces a very high standard for any product I would consider developing.
It must provide enough benefit to justify its existence.
My current framework is deceptively simple:
Value = Quality / Cost
But cost should not be limited to the purchase price.
It includes money, time, attention, effort, maintenance, waste, and behavioral disruption.
A product costing five dollars may be extraordinarily expensive if it creates a habit of unnecessary consumption.
A product costing substantially more may be worthwhile if it reliably provides enduring value.
Likewise, quality isn’t simply how intensely somebody experiences a stimulus.
It includes the usefulness, accessibility, reliability, and personal significance of the experience.
This is where the practical business problem becomes difficult.
If the objective is to make ordinary life more deeply felt, who pays for that benefit?
The individual?
The institution providing the experience?
A distributor?
A healthcare organization?
And who ultimately captures the value?
These questions led me to think about healthcare reimbursement, institutional purchasing, and the complicated relationship between clinical benefit and economic incentives.
Something can be medically useful without belonging to an existing reimbursement category.
Something can improve patient experience without producing savings for the institution responsible for purchasing it.
And something can be remarkably inexpensive while remaining commercially unattractive because the wrong stakeholder bears the cost.
The same problem exists outside healthcare.
A consumer may appreciate an experience without wanting to purchase additional equipment to access it.
But an institution that already serves thousands of people may have a reason to offer that experience as part of its existing operations.
This is why I’ve become interested in organizations operating within everyday foodservice environments, including companies such as Aramark and Sysco.
They occupy different positions in the foodservice ecosystem, but both are relevant to thinking about how a simple consumer innovation might eventually reach people through activities they already perform.
I’m not interested in asking someone to redesign their entire life around a product.
I would rather identify an existing behavior, preserve what already works, and introduce the smallest meaningful improvement.
In some cases, that might involve a physical object.
In others, it might involve a service, an experience, or an adjustment to an existing environment.
The exact form should follow the problem.
Not the other way around.
The Grandparent Test
I keep returning to a simple question whenever I evaluate a consumer idea:
Would my grandparents use this?
Not because older adults are the only consumers who matter, but because this question forces me to confront complexity, accessibility, and whether the value proposition is immediately understandable.
It’s easy to develop products for people who are already enthusiastic about a particular subject.
An olfactory training kit might appeal to somebody deeply interested in sensory science.
A mindfulness application might appeal to somebody already invested in meditation.
A specialized perceptual experience might attract an audience that enjoys unusual psychological phenomena.
But these are relatively narrow groups.
My interest is broader.
Everybody eats.
Everybody drinks, in some form.
Everybody inhabits a body.
Everybody encounters a physical environment.
And everybody has some relationship with sensory experience, even if the modalities available to them differ.
I want to begin with activities that are already ubiquitous rather than asking people to acquire new interests.
Smartphones are instructive in this regard.
They became widespread because they provide substantial, recognizable value within everyday life.
Communication, navigation, information, entertainment, commerce.
The utility is immediately apparent.
I’m not suggesting that a sensory product should become as pervasive or psychologically commanding as a smartphone.
Quite the opposite.
I’m interested in whether we can achieve the same simplicity of adoption without the same demand for attention.
A product that enriches the world should not need to become the center of the user’s world.
That’s a difficult design problem.
But it strikes me as a worthwhile one.
And the long-term ambition should not be confused with the first commercial audience.
A universally relevant mission doesn’t require a universal initial customer.
A small institutional pilot, for example, could be an entirely reasonable way to establish whether a product or experience provides genuine value.
The first market is an entry point.
It is not the moral boundary of the mission.
The Difference Between Manipulation and Participation
There’s another distinction I want to make explicit.
Sensory neuroscience can be used to influence behavior.
We already know that sensory signals interact in ways that aren’t always obvious to the person experiencing them.
Visual information can influence perceived flavor. Expectations can influence taste. Sounds, textures, smells, and bodily states can shape what we experience.
These relationships are scientifically interesting.
But they also introduce ethical questions.
If I develop a consumer technology based on multisensory integration, I don’t want to manipulate somebody without their awareness or consent.
I don’t want to disguise a product’s properties, exaggerate its benefits, or exploit perceptual vulnerabilities.
The experience should be transparent.
The consumer should understand what they’re participating in.
And participation should be voluntary.
This matters especially when a product has potential public-health applications.
If a sensory intervention might encourage somebody to choose a beverage containing less added sugar, that is worth investigating.
But the intervention shouldn’t be advertised as reducing sugar intake unless that outcome has actually been demonstrated.
A subjective perception of sweetness is not equivalent to a change in chemical composition.
And choosing a lower-sugar beverage on one occasion does not automatically demonstrate a durable reduction in dietary sugar consumption.
These are separate outcomes.
I want the science to discipline the claims rather than simply decorate the marketing.
That is especially important because I don’t think the mission requires exaggeration.
Sensory experience is already extraordinary.
We don’t need to invent fictional benefits to make it meaningful.
Making Life More Deeply Felt
After all this reflection, I’ve arrived at a mission that seems remarkably simple:
Make everyday life more deeply felt.
Not by maximizing stimulation.
Not by demanding constant attention.
Not by transforming every ordinary activity into a productivity exercise.
And certainly not by convincing people that they need to purchase access to their own senses.
I want to explore how simple, transparent, scientifically informed interventions might make ordinary experiences more engaging, accessible, and personally meaningful.
The underlying philosophy is one of sensory re-engagement rather than sensory excess.
I don’t necessarily want people to experience more things.
I want them to experience the things they already encounter more fully.
There’s a significant difference.
I also don’t want to promise profound or life-changing experiences on demand.
Those moments are intensely personal. Their significance depends on circumstances that no company can completely control.
Nobody can manufacture the emotional meaning of my grandmother’s basement.
Nobody can guarantee that a particular smell will remind you of your childhood.
And nobody should pretend to possess an algorithm for making an ordinary moment transcendent.
But perhaps we can make it easier for people to encounter the conditions under which ordinary moments become memorable.
Perhaps we can help people recognize how much of the world they ordinarily overlook.
And perhaps, with enough care, we can do so without creating yet another unnecessary dependency.
I find something appealing about the possibility that a successful product might eventually become less necessary as people develop a greater awareness of their surroundings.
That is a difficult proposition for a company dependent on recurring consumption.
But I would rather confront that contradiction than ignore it.
Maybe the appropriate organization is a conventional consumer business.
Maybe it’s a social enterprise.
Maybe institutional partnerships can subsidize experiences that remain free to the people enjoying them.
Maybe a successful commercial product can support philanthropic research into sensory loss.
Or perhaps the most valuable contribution will ultimately be a freely accessible idea that doesn’t lend itself to conventional monetization.
I don’t know yet.
What I do know is that I don’t want to build a business whose success requires people to become increasingly dissatisfied with their own lives.
I want to create value by making the lives they already possess feel more available to them.
That is a much more difficult ambition than simply selling another product.
But I think it’s a better one.
The World Doesn’t Need to Become More Interesting
I’ve often thought about the way children encounter the world.
Everything seems new.
The simplest activities can become memorable experiences. A trip to a store. Playing outside after the rain. Buying equipment for an upcoming baseball season.
As children, we don’t necessarily need elaborate experiences to become immersed in what we’re doing.
The world itself is enough.
As adults, familiarity changes that relationship.
We become efficient.
We form habits.
We learn what to expect.
Experiences that once demanded our attention become compressed into recognizable categories.
Another commute.
Another meal.
Another afternoon.
This is not necessarily a failure of the nervous system. Habituation and automaticity are useful. They allow us to operate efficiently without constantly reconsidering everything we encounter.
But perhaps efficiency has a cost.
Perhaps, by learning to anticipate the world so effectively, we sometimes stop appreciating what it feels like to encounter it.
I don’t think adulthood must inevitably become less creative, less curious, or less experientially rich.
But it may require us to become more deliberate about how we engage with familiar things.
And that deliberateness does not have to be laborious.
It might be as simple as noticing the smell of rain.
The weight of a glass.
The sensation of a breeze.
The warmth of another person’s hand.
The peculiar feeling of returning to a place you haven’t visited since childhood.
There is no product required for any of these experiences.
And that’s precisely the point.
The world is already here.
Our bodies are already here.
We have an extraordinary collection of sensory capacities, histories, relationships, and memories through which to encounter it.
We spend so much time trying to acquire more that we sometimes overlook what we already possess.
I think there’s a certain Stoic sensibility to this realization.
Not in the contemporary self-help caricature of suppressing emotions and optimizing productivity, but in the recognition that life is finite, circumstances are often beyond our control, and our relationship with the present deserves serious consideration.
Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus lived in radically different historical circumstances from ours.
Yet they occupied bodies.
They experienced warmth and cold, pain and pleasure, attachment and loss.
They encountered a world through sensory systems recognizably related to our own.
The same is true of our ancestors who lived long before the existence of modern technology.
Their environments, beliefs, opportunities, and experiences were profoundly different.
But there is something remarkable about the continuity of embodied human existence.
We are separated by centuries and millennia, yet connected through the basic reality of being living organisms capable of feeling.
And perhaps that is part of what makes our sensory experiences so meaningful.
They connect us with our own histories.
With one another.
And with the countless people who inhabited the world before us.
Sentio Ergo Sum
There is one last thought I keep returning to.
Before I was born, the world existed without me.
After I die, it will continue without me.
I have no idea how to meaningfully comprehend either interval from a first-person perspective, because there was no me in the first and, so far as I can establish, there will be no experiencing me in the second.
What I have is the present.
Not an infinitely extended present, but an ongoing sequence of experiences that will eventually end.
The physical world does not require my participation.
The rain will continue falling.
The seasons will continue changing.
People will continue living, loving, arguing, learning, and remembering.
But my opportunity to experience those things is limited.
So is yours.
My friend’s murder made that reality impossible to ignore.
His life was taken. The experiences he should have had were taken with it.
I cannot change that.
But I can choose how seriously I regard the extraordinary fact that I am still here.
I can take my senses seriously.
I can take other people’s experiences seriously.
I can recognize that a familiar smell may contain a person’s entire childhood.
I can recognize that a simple conversation may become somebody’s most meaningful memory.
And I can try, in whatever small way is realistically possible, to make everyday life more deeply felt.
I don’t know whether this becomes a successful company.
I don’t know whether the particular consumer technology I’m currently exploring will prove feasible or commercially worthwhile.
And I don’t know whether the most meaningful contribution will ultimately come from a product, a research program, a philanthropic initiative, or something I haven’t yet considered.
I’m willing to let those questions remain unresolved.
But the mission itself feels clear.
The objective is not to accumulate more experiences as though life were another collection to optimize.
It is to become more receptive to the experiences already available to us.
To be a human being rather than perpetually a human doing.
To participate in the world rather than simply pass through it.
In my writing about consciousness, I returned to a variation of Descartes’ famous proposition:
Sentio ergo sum.
I feel, therefore I am.
I think there’s something profoundly important in that formulation.
Not because feeling answers every philosophical question about consciousness.
But because it reminds me what those questions are ultimately about.
We are not merely information-processing systems going about a sequence of tasks.
We are living beings for whom the world is experienced.
And for this brief interval in the history of the universe, we have the opportunity to experience it.
I don’t want to reach the end of my life having merely gotten through it.
I want to have been here.
I want to have felt it.
And I want other people to have that opportunity, too.
Make everyday life more deeply felt.
