Lived experience has degraded into mere representation

Debord's opening move is a claim about historical decline: what was once directly lived — labor, leisure, relationships, community rituals — has been progressively replaced by representations of those things. He frames this as a three-stage slide from being to having to appearing: first people valued who they were, then what they owned, and finally, under the spectacle, merely how their lives look from the outside. Modern existence, in his account, increasingly consists of performing a life for an implied audience rather than inhabiting one directly. This isn't a claim that images are bad in themselves, but that when representation displaces direct experience as the primary register of value, something essential is lost — the capacity to author your own existence rather than consume a packaged version of it. Takeaway: notice how often you experience an event through the lens of how it will be described or shown, rather than experiencing it directly.