Because what you see on your screen is new. I bet you if you did some new shit IRL, it would be more impressive than on a screen. Dude, go sky-diving, racing, diving, kayaking, snowboarding, surfing, rock climbing, or play an intense game that physically wears you out. Travel to some place with a great view in the morning to see the sunrise and nice place to see the sunset. Go see the northern lights and tell me that’s mundane.

I love screens too because they let us see different worlds and even the impossible - inside of a star, quantum realms, spaceships, life as ant, other worlds, species, and a bunch of other shit, but if you see it all the time, that’ll be mundane too. I fell asleep to Dune, bro. Blockbusters with special effects send me to sleep because I’ve seen that shit thousands of times. Just got used to it. Probably that’s what happened to you.

You know the film 300? If you ever play it with the saturation way waay down, it looks mundane as hell. Just a bunch of guys without shirts walking around.

I feel like it’s the perspective that matters? Yes, we go through life seeing “higher resolution” in real life, but recreating this through pixels on a screen is a different medium. Going even further, if we take the next step and look at VR, suddenly we have real life competing with something that was previously unable to be experienced (more than once, at least.). Like, you can get a lightweight experience of what it’s like to fall off of a tall building. We can do it in real life. We can do it in a 2D/3D game. And we can do it in VR. The “real” feelings we get of this happening in reality aren’t quite the same as they are in VR, although it comes close, and likewise aren’t the same in monitor gaming, but again can come close. Our brains are interesting that way. My stomach is able to drop when falling from tall heights in games, despite in real life not actually being falling, or even moving in the slightest.

So I think it comes down to it being the medium and what it’s presented with.

I have a pretty shitty life, but even I don’t consider my real life to be mundane.

The real world is full of so much glorious beauty and wonder, it constantly blows my mind.

I left to wonder, why don’t you see any of this?

Because realistic graphics cause neuron activation

Speak for yourself, I think reality is fucking gorgeous. That’s why people try so hard to evoke its appearance in the first place, not only on screen but on canvas and in sculpture and prose.

That’s why my favorite art isn’t realistic at all; if I wanted to see the most beautiful realism around, I could just walk to a lake.

In a game, movie, work of literature or theater, your feeling of awe and immersion is maintained by something called the “magic circle”. It is an area of experience that is separated from normal reality by the proverbial 4th wall.

Everything inside the magic circle is filled with artistic purpose, it works (in good works) to drive meaning and communicate themes and ideas of the art work.

Whenever this magic circle is broken, you suspension of disbelief becomes overtaken by cynicism, and the immersion is gone.

Mundane life is full of this cynicism, because we are not conditioned (anymore) to find mundane reality purposeful, outside of really outstanding and dire situations. We take reality with it’s amazing graphics and narrative for granted, not noticing the magic.

Light projection. Others have hit on the psychosocial aspects, but watch a dull projector of the same video as an OLED TV and see how much better the TV is, and how the dim projector is worse than the real world. The simulated brightness and contrast play a big role in the “magical” feeling because our eyes are typically interpreting light via lower-level reflection.

Another way to reproduce this is to look around a big city with lights everywhere at night vs daytime.

Habituation. We get used to seeing the same things all the time. When you do novelty or high adrenaline experiences your perception changes. Try jumping with a parachute out of a plane, or a high altitude zip lining, driving a race car around a track, etc. Aftewards you experience a sense of heightened perception and appreciation.

Have you ever looked at a flower? There’s colors that I just don’t see on screens.

Because it’s art.

There is a lot of skill and artistic talent needed to create a facsimile of real life. Anyone can draw a tree, but a realistic tree takes some amount of artistic knowledge. The more realistic the more talent that the artist shows. Similarly, when the artist deviates from recreating real life it shows an artistic vision beyond reality.

We like art because it shows a different perspective from the minds eye of the artist. And when the artist can render that vision as something that looks real, even if it couldn’t really exist, it is impressive.

I guess you’re not taking the time to appreciate the beauty of the real world?

Where I live, it’s all very beautiful. I’ve not had the experience you’re describing, where the detail of the world is mundane.

Because most of what you look at in real life is mundane. But go find a nice sunset or a green forest, and you can appreciate it. When you see a scene in HD or 3D on the screen, there is a heavy selection bias to show you pleasant scenes that most people seldom see in real life. If it was super 4k and 3D, but it was just your same living room you see every day, it would be uninteresting. But the same camera showing a living room in a 10 million dollar house would be interesting. (And the natural views outside even more so, most likely.)

The most impressive screens have super-saturated color and images that are shot by professional filmographers/photographers. It’s hard to compose a scene in real life but professionals do it every day and the TV is how many of them showcase their work. If you look hard enough and try hard enough then you too will find some really amazing and beautiful images with your eyes. -Polarizers help, too.

We see the world around us every day