When we are fully satiated, what was once eminently desirable tends to lose its luster (the king with a harem in the hundreds, the rich glutton who banquets every night).
Montaigne writes about this idea in his essay “Of the Inequality That Is Between Us,” the examples he gives being actual lived experiences, but in our world today virtual indulgence is even more common, without any actual experience needed at all.
Example: one who stares down the path ahead imagining the result of taking each and every turnoff, then, exhausted from the excess of imagining, declines to depart at all. Another: doomscrolling your life into stasis.
We are living in the age of the mass production of experience and, like anything mass-produced, it feels cheap.
Oh world, now offering constant ingestion! We’re less hungry and always eating… imagined excess, excess of imagination, potentialities we can live through without seeing them through, and just getting straight to the indigestion of it all.