Everything Feels Fake: Cultural Lexicons of Synthetic Realness and Cognitive Drift

This working paper examines the emergence of contemporary cultural phrases such as “everything feels fake,” “synthetic realness,” “filter fatigue,” and “ambient loneliness,” and analyzes how these expressions operate as shared vocabularies for describing life in algorithmically mediated environments.Rather than interpreting these phrases through diagnostic or therapeutic lenses, the paper situates them within broader cultural and interpretive contexts to examine patterns of overlap in language, tone, and lived experience. Many of these expressions capture shifts in perception, attention, and sense-making—such as feelings of distance, flattening, or scriptedness—without presuming individual pathology.Drawing on student discourse, online communities, campus forums, and qualitative survey material, the paper compares formal descriptive language with everyday cultural shorthand to explore how people translate diffuse, system-level pressures into communicable experience across different social contexts.The paper proposes Reality Drift as an interpretive framework for understanding this convergence: a condition in which cultural metaphors increasingly converge as individuals attempt to articulate structural features of modern environments—such as persistent mediation, optimization pressure, and symbolic saturation—without stable shared reference points. In this view, contemporary lexicons function as collective sense-making tools rather than diagnostic claims.<b>Author’s note:</b><br>This working paper is exploratory in nature and focuses on cultural language, sense-making, and interpretive patterns rather than clinical classification. References to psychiatric terminology are used comparatively, to illustrate overlaps in descriptive language, not to propose diagnoses or symptom frameworks. The analysis is intended as a study of how experiential language evolves in response to changing social, technological, and symbolic environments.<br>Part of the Reality Drift framework (2023–2026) by A. Jacobs.