Perhaps some things are meant to be shared, and maybe peak experiences are some of those things, but many peak experiences are experienced in the solitary halls and passageways of the mind. What we have in common are the mundane, humdrum experience of the daily grind–alarm clocks, traffic, grocery stores, ringing cellphones, deadlines at work, crabby clients, upset co-workers, television, the weather, eating fast food, delayed flights, lost baggage, coughing, whatever. You know what kinds of experience crowd your daily calendar, making life a grinding experience where you sweat and worry and do the same thing day in and day out, and you have no peak experiences, you don’t make it to the mountain much less climb it. I am not a literal mountain climber, but I find both the actual experience of mountain climbing and the metaphor of climbing a mountain, leading to peak experiences to be both intriguing and inexplicable. The “peak” experience occurs when you make it to the top, and you are filled with that pleasure of having accomplished something difficult and the pleasure of the sublime view from the top. The literal and the metaphoric mix indiscriminately and endorphins are released into the brain and the pleasure center explodes with joy. We are in a constant fight against the mundane that invades our lives at every turn, turning us into dystopic apocalyptic zombies who have no hope for a better, brighter future than that which is offered by the big box retailers who constantly tempt us by “rolling back prices” or exponentially larger sales via Black Friday frenzy and similarly conjured false experiences which are meant to enhance our consumer experience. What is lacking here is the personal, the individual, the unique which makes each person a person and not just another statistic to be manipulated by cooperate giants who despise the individual and love the mass of sheep who flock to the stores to take advantage of those new lower prices. Peak experiences in life have nothing to do with buying anything. Every person, every individual has the ability to have their own peak experience whenever they want, but going to the store is the antithesis of the peak experience. Only by searching out that which makes us all unique can we explore the passions that will bring about a peak experience. Passion, emotion, creativity, vision, imagination, all of which exist only in the mind have nothing to do with physical objects. It is our objects, frequently, which enslave us in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Money, gold, silver, trophies, electronics, automobiles, buildings, entrap us, snare us, throw us into prisons of our makings, dragging us further and further from even the possibility of a peak experience. Only by shedding the desire for material possessions can we begin to explore a life which might take us to a higher level of the human experience ruled more by beauty, art, creativity than the mundane daily grind of deadening routine. I think the current with dystopic and apocalyptic literature is a direct reaction to the extremely unsatisfying consumer society which has replaced real experiences (peak experiences) with simulacra such as shopping or digitally mediated communication or perhaps the most horrific simulacrum–shopping for digitally mediated communication, which completely cuts us all off from each other, rendering us helpless to create with another person on any level, cutting us off from all peak experiences of any kind. Shopping is not a peak experience, but for those whose lives have been reduced to buying things off of the shopping channels, life is shopping, shopping is life, and no peak experiences are allowed because nothing experienced through simulacra can be a peak experience. Just ask Mildred Montag.