called to transcend themselves, to make their lives into works of art, to take the place of God as self-creators and the inventors, not the discoverers, of meaning. Few people have read Nietzsche, but many intuitively think in Nietzschean ways about their relationship to the natural world precisely because the highly technological world in which we now live—a world in which virtual reality is a reality—makes it so easy to do so. Self-creation is a routine part of our modern social imaginary. And