A Recommendation for Returning to Reality
What we must face squarely right now is a somewhat cruel fact: how the 'play inside our heads' called intelligence has stripped away our 'physical reality'.
In the modern age, consuming culture is, ultimately, nothing more than an 'experience through a screen'.
With a single fingertip, we feel as though we have a bird's-eye view of all history, and we feel as though we have digested philosophy through a few minutes of video or summary sites.
But in exchange for that convenience, we have dulled the sensors cultivated by experience—the nameless discomforts and inexplicable feelings of unease that our own bodies feel, which are the most precious things to a human being.
Just think about it.
No matter how wonderful the knowledge you encounter on a smartphone screen may be, it is nothing more than 'retort food for information' that someone else has organized, seasoned, and processed to be easy to consume.
If we only eat such things, will true intelligence ever grow?
Transcending intelligence as a symbol is not about efficiently learning sophisticated theories. Rather, it should be about reclaiming, with your own hands, the raw and sometimes grumpy touch of 'reality' before it becomes words.
Immersing yourself in a flood of information and laboring under the illusion that 'I know everything in the world' is beyond ridiculous; it is even pathetic.
The knowledge that algorithms have optimized to match your preferences may stimulate your brain comfortably.
However, it will never provide the kind of shock that shakes your life to its core or stirs your soul.
True culture is activated only in the 'places where information ceases'.
When you search and find no answers, when the words of influencers are useless, and you are left to grapple with the unreasonable events before you, relying only on your own body and senses...
At that moment, what is squeezed out not from your brain, but from the depths of your gut, becomes genuine intelligence.
Isn't what we need now a kind of intellectual 'fasting'?
For a moment, try disconnecting yourself from the SNS timeline, from the discourse of clever critics, and even from these arrogant words of mine.
Then, try to look at the world your body directly touches without classifying it into existing categories.
It might be the coldness of a pebble rolling on the side of the road.
Or it might be a lonely anger that no one understands, or an inexplicable anxiety.
Intelligence is not a technique for seeing the world as if it were borrowed through glasses prepared by others. It is a kind of 'obsession'—a determination to keep looking at the world squarely, even with your own clouded eyes, in a gritty way.
Intelligence is not a wing that will help you escape reality and take you to some distant utopia.
Descend from the flashy 'aerial combat' colored by symbols, and with a naked body, accept the grumpy reality. Only those who have that resolve will be able to pierce through the uniform, brightly colored hallucinations called information and walk through this fictional era of Reiwa with steady steps.
Now, after you close this screen, what will you try to reclaim your reality from first?
It might be drinking a glass of cold water, or simply listening to the sound of the wind outside the window.
Even the smallest thing is fine.
Feel the reality.
Because only from there can your 'true life' begin.