From Thrill to Still... Two Ends of a Fractured Soul
On the hyper-anxious and hyper-distant as symptoms of the consumer society that will be exponentialized by post-capitalist tourism
There is something uncanny about the world we live in. On one end, I see men dangling from cliffs, running ultra-marathons across deserts, risking death on Everest for a sense of being.
On the other end, I see young people — hikikomori in Japan, NEETs across Europe — who no longer wish for anything. Not love, not success, not even sex.
These two extremes
the hyper-anxious and the hyper-detached
seem to oppose each other. But I believe they are twins. Mutations born of the same metabolic illness,
the slow death of the worker, and the rise of the consumer as the new existential model.
The Consumer as the New Subject of History
In the 20th century, the figure of the worker — the one who produces, sacrifices, resists — had a clear role in the political and metaphysical structure of society. Work gave meaning. Class gave solidarity. Even oppression gave identity.
But in late capitalism, this figure begins to erode.
In his place arises the consumer — a subject whose worth is measured by choice, not labour; by preference, not commitment.
This new figure is not asked to build anything. Only to desire and to never stop desiring.
The Hyper-Anxious
When one internalizes this endless call to desire, the result is anxiety. Craving becomes permanent. Identity becomes a project of endless self-improvement, exposure, validation.
Hence the rise of…
Productivity porn.
Self-optimization as religion.
The glorification of extreme goals (Everest, Ironman, digital nomadism).
The pathological fear of boredom, of being ordinary, of being offline.
The self becomes a start-up. And when existence becomes a performance, failure is no longer material — it is ontological.
The Hyper-Detached
But there is another, equally toxic response… refusal.
We see it in the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori, young men and women who withdraw from life, often for years, into total isolation.
We see it in satori syndrome, a term used to describe young people who claim to have transcended all desires, but what they actually express is a kind of numbness, a burnout of the will.
In truth, they are not enlightened. They are exhausted by choice.
When every path leads to consumption, then to choose is not liberation…
it is complicity.
So they choose nothing.
Two Sides of the Same Psychological Mutation
Both responses, the anxious overachiever and the peaceful drop-out , are forms of psychological adaptation to a world where production has lost meaning, and consumption has become total.
The anxious one tries to fill the void with noise.
The detached one tries to live inside the void in silence.
But neither can escape it.
The Death of the Worker, the Crisis of Being
Underneath all this is the death of the idea of work — not as labour-for-profit, but as commitment to the real.
When nothing is built — when all experience is curated, monetized, or gamified — then existence becomes thin, spectral.
Both the Everest climber and the Tokyo recluse are, in some sense, trying to survive this collapse of density. One by exaggeration. The other by withdrawal.
But the trauma is shared.
Towards a New Subject ?
What would it mean to go beyond both of these extremes? To neither perform for the system nor refuse it passively?
Maybe what’s needed is a new figure — not the worker, not the consumer, not the dropout — but someone who inhabits the world with lucidity, and acts without illusion, even in the ruins of meaning.
I don’t know what to call that figure yet. But I know it’s time to imagine them.
Post-Capitalist Tourism and the Exile of the Worker
On the hyper-anxious and the hyper-distant in a world without production
If the consumer replaced the worker, then the tourist is now replacing the consumer. We are witnessing the exponential phase of a transformation already underway: the transition from labor-based capitalism to a post-industrial economy of mobility, image, and experience.
The tourist — not the producer, not even the traditional consumer — becomes the central figure of the new world system.
And not just any tourist, but one in perpetual movement.
Tourism as Economic Infrastructure
Tourism is no longer a leisure activity. It is an industry, a logistics system, a global nervous system.
As AI and automation eliminate jobs and shrink the necessity of human labor, governments, cities and platforms are reprogramming themselves around flows of people, not production.
The economic machine must stay alive — not through factories, but through airports, festivals, boutique hotels, digital visas, and dopamine rewards.
Consumption is no longer about buying a product — it’s about buying a temporary self in a different climate, under a different flag, with a different filter.
Tourism is the new factory. But what it produces is not value — it is movement.
The Nomad-Tourist as Economic Actor
Enter the nomad-tourist … Always mobile, never rooted.
Consuming space instead of goods.
Renting reality in daily packages.
Working remotely, but living online.
Paying in data, attention, subscriptions, and biometric compliance.
This is not freedom. It is a liquid economy of displacement, where identity dissolves into booking codes and algorithmic feeds.
The nomad is not escaping capitalism — the nomad is capitalism's last carrier signal.
Psychological Consequences…
From Anxiety to Indifference
What kind of inner world is created in this landscape?
We return again to our twin syndromes:
The hyper-anxious, whose nervous system is overloaded by choices, time zones, and self-optimization rituals.
The hyper-distant, whose only defense is apathy, withdrawal, or ironic detachment — a refusal to want in a world that demands constant desire.
In both, we find the symptoms of a disembodied subject:
Always moving, never arriving.
Always connected, never touched.
Always performing, never resting.
The Death of Work, The Automation of Desire
The tragedy beneath it all is simple
Work — in the meaningful sense — is dead.
AI will do the planning. Automation will do the production. Bureaucracies will do the governance.
What remains is simulation: the tourist as a user in a gamified planet, whose only role is to keep the system circulating by experiencing, posting, rating, and reacting.
Tourism, in this context, becomes the final substitute for meaning in an automated society:
A choreography of motion to conceal the collapse of orientation.
Toward a Post-Tourist Consciousness
The world cannot survive in endless transit.
If the 20th century was the age of the factory, and the early 21st the age of the screen, then the coming decades risk becoming the age of the passport — where identity, purpose, and even consciousness dissolve in an ocean of movement.
We need a different figure.
Not the worker.
Not the consumer.
Not the global tourist.
But someone who stays, who plants themselves in the ruins, and begins again.
Not to optimize. Not to escape.
But to build density in a hollow world.
That is the real rebellion.
Final Movement… The Servitude of the Nomad and the Avatar
Toward a new colonization of the body, space and interiority
What we are witnessing today is a return to nomadism — but not the ancient, ecological nomadism of adaptation and survival.
This is a neo-nomadism of consumption, where the body no longer migrates to seek sustenance, but to perform its own desirability within the logic of digital capital.
It is no longer objects that are consumed. It is the self, in motion.
But there is a second, parallel movement unfolding at the same time.
If some are thrown outward — into planes, resorts, remote work, infinite tourism — others are thrown inward: into screens, headsets, infinite scrolls.
They live in permanent connection with digital peripherals, locked away from biological, analog reality. A kind of psychotechnical cloistering.
One moves without stopping. The other never leaves.
But both are being fed into the same engine.
Paid to Serve, Paid to Stay
In both the external nomadism and the internal digital retreat, the logic is identical:
People are no longer paid to work. They are paid to stay connected.
We are witnessing the rise of the Post-Worker Economy, where the real commodity is presence — not physical, but informational. The new income comes from participating in platforms, ranking experiences, uploading emotions, reacting in real time, or passively feeding surveillance engines.
Whether you are …
A tourist being served by a precarious class of global hospitality workers,
or
A digital user feeding data into the Cloud with your every click, blink, and pause...
You are either the servant or the served, but never truly sovereign.
The tourist is served cocktails.
The avatar is served content.
But both are, in truth, servants of the system, perpetuating the circulation of data, money, and desire.
The Old Pattern
From Land to Cities, From Cities to Cloud.
We’ve seen this before.
The Agricultural Revolution forced bodies off the land into the first structures of settlement and ownership.
The Industrial Revolution displaced them again — from land to factory, from nature to urban machines.
This was the internal movement… migration into cities.
And the external movement
colonial expansion
conquest, trade, extraction.
Today we are living a third wave of displacement
Internally, the body is displaced into digital landscapes, dissociated from its environment, sedated by interfaces.
Externally, it is displaced into tourist flows, moving across borders not to build anything, but to consume affect and visibility.
Both movements
inward and outward
serve the same logic.
To maintain the metabolic rhythm of a system that no longer needs us to build, only to circulate.
The New Empire… The Cloud
This is the true territory now. The Cloud is not just infrastructure — it is the new sovereign.
It owns the flows. It orchestrates the logistics.
And it does not need citizens — only users.
In this system… You will be fed, housed, distracted, and perhaps even paid — as long as you circulate.
As long as you leave traces.
As long as your body or your avatar remains economically legible.
That is the price of belonging…
To move, or to scroll. To be seen, or to perform.
The factory is gone.
The plantation is gone.
Now, the Cloud harvests what remains.
your time, your image, your soul.
We have become colonists of ourselves.
Tourists of our own alienation.
Servants in a palace that needs no master.
There may be no going back to the “worker” as we once knew.
But the next resistance will not come from escape — nor from connection.
It will come from those who stay still,
who cut the interface,
who refuse the circulation.
It will come from those who plant themselves in the ruins — and begin again.