You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.
These days, I have been thinking about the topic of religion. Modern people are addicted to short videos like TikTok; perhaps they are another form of religion.
Like religion, fiction, and movies, short videos all do the same thing: they feed people perceptions and emotions.
On the one hand, most people need this kind of “feeding.” Without short videos, they would turn to movies, TV shows, or religion instead. On the other hand, a few people will always break away from these “religions” and create a new one. Perhaps their happiness comes from other people’s reactions.
Maybe I can’t assert that happiness comes from other people. In that view, I consider humans to be different from objects. To some, other people are just objects—the same kind of material thing. I am not saying that we should treat people like objects. Rather, I want to emphasize that, for an individual, others exist only through perception.
Therefore, when people create or join a religion, they are objectifying others or themselves in order to feel emotion. Then we can see that emotion is not purely an individual product, but rather a collective product.
If we consider behavioral collapse to be a situation of low emotional stimulation, then the person experiencing this collapse has, in some sense, stopped stimulating their emotions.
We can consider the individual to be a function with input and output.
Human beings require input to generate emotion and meaning. Most people obtain this input from collectively constructed systems—religion, fiction, entertainment, social media, and other people. These systems continuously provide perceptions, interpretations, and emotional feedback. When existing inputs stop producing sufficient emotional responses, an individual may experience behavioral collapse and seek a new system of meaning. In this sense, creating a religion is not fundamentally different from consuming one: both are ways of rebuilding the individual’s input-output system.
Like a child, he doesn’t know how to respond to his environment, so he imitates the actions of others in order to integrate himself into it. But everyone is doing the same thing: imitating one another to figure out how to behave.