Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.
Our generation has since been devoured by a constant sense of ungroundedness, poisoned by the most detrimental bane of the modern age: the romanticism of an image-world. The illusion that we each are destined to a form of perfection in the material world: that we are embarking on a romantic journey voyaging towards a morally better self.
The democratization of mass media is increasingly fueled by our own reaction to the necessarily staged images therein. We live in a realm wherein the reality is images: they only represent the glamorous, the exaggerated, the pretentious, and, above all, the unreal. The problem though is that we are all, unconsciously, conjugating such magic of dramatization. Regardless of how infinitesimally trivial the rewards of our fetish - likes, subs, and deep down, the rush of vanity - we eventually reach the point where what we see becomes what we materialize in our minds, mistaken as reality itself. We have grown in our heads, unreasonably lofty paradigms, by definition deformed by fantasy, to which we compare our otherwise unique and invaluable views and relationships, smashing them all into lesser ones.
We have fallen the edge of reality: our experience could only be validated by the awareness of others. The detachment almost becomes an existential crisis, whereby the otherwise angst and anxiety is now second nature. As we then evolve a fake skin to display our defensive side, our cherishment for what-have-yous completely vanishes.
To experience a thing as a beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly.
And we have never been this far to realize as so.