There is a particular kind of daydream that belongs to adolescence: the one where you are powerful, unbothered, and permanently entertained. Where the rules are for other people, the girls look like video game characters, and every problem yields to a bigger gun, a faster car, or a cleverer hack. It is a harmless enough fantasy at thirteen. The trouble is what happens when the people holding real power never leave it behind.
Look around at the objects and obsessions that dominate public life right now. Rockets. Robots. Superhero franchises stretching into their third decade. Cryptocurrencies named after dogs. Billionaires who talk about colonizing Mars with the earnestness of a kid narrating a diorama. Militarized language applied to everything from business strategy to online arguments. Enormous trucks designed to look like they were sketched in the margin of a math worksheet. The aesthetic of contemporary power is not the boardroom or the cathedral. It is the bedroom poster.
This is not simply a complaint about taste. Fantasies organize attention, and attention organizes money. When the imaginative center of a culture is the adolescent male id, resources flow toward the things that thrill it: spectacle, speed, dominance, escape. Meanwhile the unglamorous work of adulthood u2014 maintenance, care, compromise, the slow repair of institutions u2014 gets coded as boring, feminine, or beneath notice. Nobody makes a hype video about fixing a water main.
The internet accelerated all of this. Platforms were built, largely, by young men, and optimized for the behaviors young men enjoy: competition, scorekeeping, ranking, trolling, the endless pleasure of being right in public. The result is a communications infrastructure that rewards the emotional register of a middle school lunch table. Insults travel farther than arguments. Confidence outperforms accuracy. Shame is the primary tool of enforcement, and the worst thing a person can be is cringe.
Artificial intelligence has arrived to supercharge the dream. The promise on offer is not merely useful software but a companion who never disagrees, an assistant who never tires, a girlfriend who never leaves, a machine mind that will one day solve everything so that no one has to negotiate with anyone. That is a thirteen-year-old’s utopia almost exactly: total capability, zero friction, no other people to accommodate. The trillion-dollar question is being answered with a wish that predates the technology by generations.
It would be easy to blame boys, which would be both unfair and imprecise. Thirteen-year-olds did not build any of this. Adults did u2014 adults who found that the fantasy sells, and that a great many grown people of every gender are happy to buy it. The market for feeling invincible is not niche. Nor is every part of the daydream worthless: curiosity about space, delight in machines, and the conviction that the impossible is negotiable have produced genuinely great things. Wonder is not the problem. Wonder untethered from responsibility is.
What the fantasy leaves out is everything that makes a society function. Other people with their own interior lives. Consequences that arrive years later. Limits that cannot be engineered away. The knowledge, learned painfully somewhere in one’s twenties, that being the main character is not an achievement but a delusion.
Growing up is not the abandonment of imagination. It is the discovery that imagination has to answer to something. Our culture has the imagination part covered. The answering is what remains. Read More
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