I wake up and reach for my phone. I check my feed before I go to bed like a ritual. I use social media to feel connected to something bigger than myself. I ask the internet questions I don’t want to sit with. I don’t consider myself a particularly religious person, but this is starting to look eerily similar.
I’m part of a generation that is increasingly identifying as atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated with organized religion. But the desire for meaning, guidance, and something larger than ourselves hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s been displaced and redirected into systems that feel more accessible and personalized.
We look to the internet to tell us what to eat, how to dress, how to heal. We follow routines, habits, productivity doctrines, and belief systems delivered through algorithms. We didn’t stop believing. We just changed where we look.
We used to turn to religion to make sense of the hardest parts of being human: that we will die, that we don’t have control, that we can’t know everything. Religion didn’t eliminate those realities but it gave people a way to live with them. Rituals, stories, and systems of meaning that helped us face the fact that we are finite. Technology offers something different. It doesn’t just give us a way to find meaning but actually suggests we might be able to entirely overcome the very things we fear about our humanity.
We are building machines that can mimic voices, recreate personalities, even simulate conversations with people who are gone. There are already platforms that let you “chat” with AI versions of loved ones, trained on their texts, their writing, their digital traces. Tools like Replika or emerging grief tech startups promise connections that don’t have to end. Entire industries are forming around the idea that maybe death isn’t as final as it once seemed, that maybe, in some form, we can continue.
The language is different, but the structure is familiar to that of faith, to that of religion. There are promises of transcendence, of becoming more than our bodies, of escaping time. Silicon Valley doesn’t talk about heaven, but it talks about forever.
For example, tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is attempting to dramatically slow or potentially stop aging through an extreme, data-driven lifestyle. Johnson has essentially outsourced control of his body to algorithms and a team of doctors. He argues that aligning our bodies with AI systems is necessary for the future. And Peter Thiel, a highly influential Silicon Valley billionaire, has consistently expressed that he is “against death” across various interviews.
On a smaller scale than billionaire tech startups, we use everyday technology to defy time. I am able to use my camera like a time capsule, collecting moments I’m not ready to lose. I scroll through old photos to feel close to a version of life that’s already gone. I save things I might not even look at again (text messages, notes, screenshots), as if keeping them means they’re not really over.
Psychologists have begun to call this, in its more extreme forms, “digital hoarding”—the accumulation of digital files driven by a fear of losing something important, often linked to anxiety and a reluctance to delete. Research by Darshana Sedera (2022) suggests this creates a cycle: the more we save to feel secure, the more overwhelmed we become by what we’ve kept.
The systems we’ve built to hold those memories start to take on a life of their own.The cloud feels almost metaphysical. It’s invisible, placeless, disembodied. Our photos, our messages, our thoughts, they exist somewhere we can’t quite locate. It feels infinite, like a kind of digital afterlife where nothing has to be lost. But that feeling is an illusion. The cloud runs on servers. On land. On energy. On resources that are just as finite as we are. What feels transcendent is entirely physical.
The illusion is powerful precisely because we don’t see that infrastructure. We experience the internet as something omniscient, always available, always knowing. But like a Ouija board that feels guided by something external while actually being shaped by the people touching it, the internet reflects us more than it transcends us. It feels like a higher intelligence. But it is deeply, inescapably human.
This shows up in the ways we’re already using technology to reshape reality. In 2012, a hologram of Tupac Shakur performed on stage at Coachella, years after his death. It was striking, uncanny, almost moving. But the more we try to erase finitude, the more we risk losing what gives things meaning in the first place.
We often think of reality as something tied to the physical, what we can touch, what we can prove. But that definition has always been incomplete. Relationships formed online can be real. Grief felt through a screen can be real. The impact something has on our lives matters, even if it isn’t tangible.
Maybe reality isn’t just about material existence. Maybe it’s about consequence, about feeling, about what changes us. But if that’s true, then something else might be true too. Maybe what makes something real is not that it lasts forever, but that it doesn’t. That it ends.
The internet promises permanence. That nothing is ever fully gone, that everything can be saved, stored, retrieved. But even that isn’t entirely true. Data can be deleted. Servers can fail. The world and everything in it still operates within limits. We haven’t escaped finitude. We’ve just built systems that make it easier to ignore.
We are still, in some sense, grappling with the same questions religion has always tried to answer. And maybe the question isn’t whether technology can save us. But whether we actually want to be saved from the very thing that makes us human. Because it might be that the most real thing about our lives—is that they won’t last forever.