I may be doxxing myself as this is a pretty unique and well-known behavior at my university specifically, but at my university there is a custom of sorts where people often get drunk and dance on the campus fountains. This act is symbolic of a young, drunken, and naïve state of mind and simulates an authentic, spontaneous, act of recklessness. I hypothesize that part of why this is so common at my university is not because of students organically being of that state of mind and naturally deciding to drink and dance on the fountains, but instead because students develop a social understanding of what it means to go to university and be a wild and reckless adolescent and want to experience that psychological state of mind. They want to experience being a wild adolescent both so that they can have the "college experience" they feel entitled to, and so that they can have it as part of the narrative of their life and of their adolescence that they can look back on later as part of a deliberate curation of memories they can analyze and contextualize as part of the overarching narrative of their life.

When students dance and drink on the campus fountains it is not a product of an authentic youthful naïveté but a desire to experince authentic youthful naïveté by performing a symbolic ritual of adolescent hedonism. The symbolic meaning of dancing on the fountains has superseded the actual act so thoroughly that people perform the act out of a desire to replicate the wild adolescent state of mind they symbolically associate with the ritual of dancing on the fountain, rather than the act being a consequence of authentically occupying the reckless psychology of an adolescent college student. The act has gone from being the effect of a particular state of being to being a means through which to replicate a socially manufactured conception of what being a college student is.

What is important to note about hyperreality is that the "core reality" becomes an irrelevant referent. It is possible, likely even, that the first people to get drunk and dance on the university fountain were acting out of a genuine, organic, recklessness but that reality has become an irrelevant referent, the basis for the reality that me and my classmates engage in is not that intangible core event, it is the reproduced symbolic simulation of it. By drunkenly dancing on university fountains one experiences reckless naïveté by conforming to a hyperreal symbolic performance of being a naïve adolescent college student. Students at my university embody the emotional state of immature hedonism vicariously by replicating the hyperreal symbolic performance of it.