"am i studying within a fabricated environment to be able to, professionally, create fabricated environments for the rest of my years on earth? and what does that mean for my experience? has it been entirely artificial? and compared to what?"

All human buildings are pretty fabricated environments, so I wouldn't worry too much about being in one, although making it a point to go spend a weekend in the wilderness once a month is enormously beneficial to human sanity.

The real worry is that you'll just spend your whole life creating fake confections and not leave anything worthwhile behind. But good art can be so much more than that. Think of Justine, or Candide, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, or The Jungle, or To Kill A Mockingbird, or The Color Purple, or Dr. Strangelove, or A Clockwork Orange, or on the dark side Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will and Rambo and Atlas Shrugged. Heck, Braveheart kicked off an entire Scottish self-rule movement, and no one intended that or even predicted it! Fiction is one of the very most powerful tools we have for transforming the world.

I've always thought the men's movement was asking the wrong questions. Myth and family relationships are a bit interesting, but if you really want to transform yourself, ask what you've done to help other people lately. There's no shortage of poverty, corruption, injustice, racism, pollution, and other worthy battles, or of worthy groups of volunteers out fighting them every day, should you ever get the nagging fear that you're not strong enough, or decisive enough, or engaged with your community enough.