An Appetite for Experience

A personal essay on what I love, how I keep it, and what I want next

Personal essay · one appetite, traced through what I take in, what I make, and what I wish for

Andraž Đurič

Version 1 · June 2026

I consume a lot, and widely. Films, series, animation, anime, manga, comics, and books that run from science fiction to philosophy. There are few genres and few forms I have no appetite for, and if you asked me to the opera I would come. The two I love most are video games and anime. For a long time I described myself as an entertainment enthusiast and left it there, but that is only the surface. Under the breadth there is a single appetite, and naming it is the point of this essay. I want the widest and deepest range of experience I can get, both taking it in and making it. Almost everything below is one face of that.

A note on what this is, so it is not mistaken for something else. This is a personal essay. I am describing what I love and what I want, not arguing that anyone else should want the same, and not claiming any of it is correct. Whether chasing more and more vivid experience is the right thing to aim at is a real question, and it is out of scope here. I am drawing a map of an appetite, not defending it.

What I take in

The breadth is not indecision. It is the appetite showing its range. I would rather have the whole spread than a narrow shelf, and I resent almost nothing in it. Sport is the one place the appetite goes quiet, watching or playing, and I have made my peace with that. Within the spread, games and anime are where it runs deepest, and the reason is immersion. I do not play or watch at arm's length. I let myself be fully inside it, because the more completely I am in an experience the more it gives back. Intensity is not a side effect for me. It is the point.

Why I protect play

Play is not a break from my life. I treat it as one of the load-bearing parts. Other animals play, and I think play belongs in the same category of need as rest and food and water, not a notch below them. So I protect it, and I protect it without guilt.

The way I protect it is deliberate. The work in my life, the job inside this system and the obligations outside it that I would not choose, are real strains, and some of them simply leave my mind empty. So I watch myself. I keep an eye on my own patterns and my tiredness, I try to be as honest with myself as I can about how close to burnout I am, and when the signs start to show I inject more play. I will admit the method is rough. It runs on something close to vibes and it is open to every bias I have, and that is the most I can claim for it. But it has worked. I have not burned out, and I have produced more, and better, than at any point in my life.

Here is the part I want to be exact about, because it is easy to get wrong. The balance does make my work better, and that is true, but it is not why I do it, and it is not what play is for. If play were only fuel for work it would not be guilt-free. It would be one more task in a costume. Play is a good in its own right that I happen to also be able to spend, and the self-monitoring is not a productivity trick. It is how I keep an engine I love from burning out, so that I get to keep loving it.

What I make

I do not only take experience in. I make it, and the making is the same appetite from the other side. I know a fair number of the tools. I can model in 3D, do graphic design and the interface and experience side of websites, and I can draw, paint, and sculpt. None of them holds me the way building worlds in Minecraft does.

I know how that can sound, so I will say it plainly: it is the best canvas we have right now. A drawing or a model is a picture of an experience. A Minecraft world is one you can walk inside and see from any angle. I can build the structures, the schematics, the stories, the texture packs, the mods, and then fold them into a single thing a person can step into and move through. The whole world is a sandbox, and what I value is exactly that you are not looking at the thing I made, you are standing in it.

What I want next

My wishes are the same appetite thrown forward, and there are two.

The first is that the world move faster toward post-scarcity, so that the hours people now spend staying alive could go to thinking and making instead. I see artificial intelligence as the most likely key to that, the thing that could meet everyone's basic needs and then raise the floor from there. For me it would mean, plainly, the freedom to give as much time as I wanted to the intellectual and creative work I care about.

The second is the one people will file under science fiction, and we will see about that. I want brain-computer interfaces and simulated reality fully matured, and I want to live through thousands of fully realized, high-fidelity stories, indistinguishable from the real thing, with the freedom to step inside them and shape where they go. I would want to enter worlds like Attack on Titan or Frieren and act within them, not only watch. And I would want the medium mature in the full sense, able to hold the whole range of adult life rather than a sanitized slice of it, with each story open to be remade in countless directions, since the intelligence behind it could author them. That is the ceiling on experience coming off entirely, which is the thing the whole appetite has been reaching toward the whole time.

So that is the shape of it. One appetite, for as much experience as I can take in and as much as I can make, running through what I consume, how I play, what I build, and what I hope is coming. The balance I keep now, work and immersion held in proportion, is a small working prototype of the life I would want if the ceiling came off. Until the technology catches up to the wider wish, I will keep the balance, keep building worlds block by block, and keep letting myself be all the way inside the ones I step into. That is enough to be going on with.

Author: Andraž Đurič, Slovenia. Written in collaboration with Claude (Anthropic). Personal essay, offered as description rather than argument. Licensed CC BY 4.0.