They want to feel alive by always being near potential death. Because modern life is so unfulfilling, they want to create a world that basically cannot possibly be unfulfilling - managing to exist in it at all is a remarkable accomplishment.

They also accept death. Only in death do they have a name. Death is part of what they want, they want it to be always near, and when it actually strikes, this is an essentially holy event.

Thats not an aesthetic. An aesthetic is something you can take off, and put on a different one.

This is an ideology.

Utilitarianism is part of the ideology, but its ancillary, just a logical way of playing the game they want to play with death.

Taken at face value, the goal isn't to be mischievious reprobates... that is the means chosen to achieve the ends.

The end they are working toward actually is the destruction of civilization.

Remember how the movie ends?

They blow up a bunch of buildings with a bunch of computers that have a ton of important bank records... in the 90s, you didnt have 'the cloud', having extensive offsite backups and physically distinct fallback clusters wasn't unheard of, but it was much more rare than it is nowadays, less robust.

And, there are apparently Mayhem cells in many different cities around the country, possibly international.

If you interpret the story as... those buildings really did get blown up... that is a pretty credible step toward punching a hole in the finance system that underpins modern civilization.

What I'm trying to say is that I think they're actually serious, they're not cosplaying. Like, the Unabomber would be proud, maybe.

Its like if Aum Shinrikyo had happened in the US, in the 90s, with a different kind of cult ideology, but... these people are carrying out acts, toward a definable end goal, even if the means seem poorly thought out or unlikely to work.

They're not primarily trying to survive. The whole point is that... the world they're from, surviving is pointless, offers nothing real, the experiences are mundane and hollow.

The whole point is to change the world to make survival itself more challenging, more unforgiving, thus each moment of it is more rewarding, more stimulating, more satisfying. Doesn't matter that there might be overall less of those moments, what matters is the less numerous moments mean more, feel like more.

Its really a kind of hedonism, actually. A masochistic and also de facto sadistic hedonism, a great reverence for struggle and pain and loss, that they want to be able to drown in and not be able to escape from.

... You have to assume that basically most of the story is just fully hallucinated, for it to only be cosplaying. If half of the shit described and depicted actually does happen, and it very much seems to because it happens to other characters and affects the world... yeah, the people following Tyler/Jack are literally willing to kill him to continue the plan if he reneges on it himself.

Even if Tyler/Jack dies, those other guys don't, and they're true believers, fanatics.