Why Nothing Feels Exciting Anymore

Life feels less exciting today because technology and globalization have steadily erased the “not knowing” that once made places, people, and experiences feel mysterious—and replaced it with standardized, pre-viewed, pre-packaged consumption. The result is a world that looks familiar almost everywhere, where discovery is less about encountering the unknown and more about selecting from what’s already been displayed.

In earlier decades, limited information made the world feel big. As a child, Stefan describes being awestruck by the universe and then by Earth’s geography—studying encyclopedias, obsessing over city maps, and imagining what faraway places like Madrid or New York might actually feel like. That scarcity of detail mattered. A place’s name, location, and a few cultural facts were enough to create yearning, because the unknown kept the world distant, magical, and open-ended. The “not knowing” itself was part of the thrill.

Over the last twenty years, that dynamic has flipped. Tools like Google Street View let people inspect coastlines and towns in detail from home, while YouTube and influencers provide walkthroughs, reviews, and even live-streamed impressions before anyone travels. The dream of an expedition—arriving somewhere strange and learning it firsthand—gets replaced by the sense that everything is already “out there,” visible and searchable like products behind glass. Traveling still has value in-person, but the overall experience is reduced to something more commercial and less soul-deep.

A key mechanism is convenience stripping away “spiritual labor,” a concept associated with Norwegian pessimist philosopher Peter Zapffe. When life becomes easier and safer, fewer experiences require the uncertainty, risk, and effort that once gave them depth. Zapffe’s idea of “spiritual unemployment” points to technology removing the mental and emotional work people used to do to survive an unpredictable world. The contrast is illustrated through travel: a trip to Tokyo today can be booked and flown in under twenty hours, while an 18th-century journey from Amsterdam to Edo (then Japan’s foreign-restricted Edo period) would have meant months at sea on a VOC ship, with storms, disease, pirates, and the real possibility of never returning. The modern trip may be comfortable, but it also becomes a “meaningless inconvenience” rather than a life-defining ordeal.

The same pattern appears in dating. Where earlier social life relied on local venues and limited options—MSN Messenger and email existed, but Tinder did not—meeting someone involved chance, timing, and the risk of rejection. Today’s dating apps turn people into selectable products and create a “paradox of choice,” because the global pool is always expanding and a “better” match may be one swipe away.

Finally, standardization makes the world feel interchangeable. Stefan notes walking Tokyo’s shopping streets and seeing the same brands found at home—Zara, H&M, McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, Apple, Nike—along with similar clothes, coffee, and fast food. Earlier travel felt different because currencies and local businesses forced friction and difference. Now globalization favors uniformity and predictability, producing what Byung-Chul Han calls the “terror of the same,” where society destroys the “Other” and ends up narrowing itself. Algorithms reinforce this sameness by feeding people content and products that match their preferences, limiting genuine encounters. The outcome is a shrinking of experience—less wonder, less strangeness, and more consumption of the same existential “fast food” as everyone else.