Most importantly, I think you identify what the real treasure is: not the shiny thing, but wonder itself. Our subjective human experience.
I do think rare events have lost their luster, simply because they aren't rare. The northern lights were everywhere, and you they are still online and available whenever one wants to see them.
But we can wonder and marvel at anything. We can wonder at the seemingly collective urge to be performative. We can marvel that so many of us do want to get out and see the lights.
As Whitman wrote, we can "go to bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked" and become "mad for it to be in contact with me".
Certain things have shifted and become available and commonplace, but our capacity for wonder and joy and the thrill of our human experience is undiminished. If we choose it and nurture it.
Maybe what this time in history can teach us, help us recognize, is that the treasure is inside us. The thing that cannot be replicated by AI or reproduced by a million images is our subjective experience of contact with the world.
And I think Whitman, way back in 1850 when he wrote "Leaves of Grass", was pointing out that it is a choice to be mad for our experience. Certainly not everyone was getting naked and rolling on the riverbank.
It has always been a choice to invite one's soul to observe a spear of summer grass. And we still have that choice.
Yes! It's almost like choosing joy. You have to be open to it, if not a little vulnerable.
I think COVID highlighted that. So many people were seeing nature as if for the first time, if not the first time. It IS the cool thing about people flocking to the corpse flower - we are recognizing the wonder of nature, as if children again.