What the individual wants in modernity is so meaningless. No one wants to work together to create something big and meaningful.
Obsessive neurosis in things that don’t matter. The NASA engineer obsessed with Spyro 3 speedruns. Pausing each frame in the video he took of his run to analyse it, because he can’t shake the feeling of the strange nostalgic dopamine that has made a serration in his habit centre because he has been stripped of his identity.
Leveling up in a video game, absolutely artificial development. Most people are a small step up from this, thinking they are building something. Very few people are actually building something real. You need to jump through the hoop to get to the place where you can build for real. This is where real growth can take place.