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Observing reactions against our materialistic culture, with its perceived absence of values and overemphasis on self-centeredness, prompts a yearning for spirituality and transcendence.
Ironically, the idealist aspirations often underpin myths that fuel conflict, powered by the machines and wealth of the materialists.
It seems that excess must burn itself: too much idealism or materialism provokes its use, which tends towards its own destruction.
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We often dislike the creators of cultural artifacts we enjoy, such as disdaining hippies or baristas while appreciating the Beatles or a well-made espresso.
This contradiction can provoke an openness that can change biases.
The gap between the distasteful interactions and tasteful consumption, harbors compelling evidence that we are socially conservative and desiringly decadent.
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One similarity between the techno-libertarian manifest destiny of futurism and the populist backlash of Trump or Brexit is a bluntness about the bottom line of “utility.”
Art and its complex, tangled, and soft messaging -its layered density, subtlety, and non-productive pursuits- is a threat. The effort to unpack or ascertain its message is inverse to its bottom-line value: the more baffling, the less quickly capitalized or commodified.
Good art looks to reject easy commodification, or quick absorption, containing its incompatible antinomies within itself. Its greatness can only be realized over broad swaths of time.
The knee-jerk reaction points to the high sales value of good art: good art has been successfully commodified, and the price inflated through investment portfolios. However, that is the art of economics glomming onto something alien to it’s nature.
Art commodified is a malformed conflation: a disfigurement warping art into a shape recognized as the discourse of dollars. It is not that the art does not still carry its message, but cloaked and hunchbacked with economic weight, it has been Quasimodo-ed and requires a genuine heart to see past its ugly silhouette.
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For the novelty seeker who will always keep up with new media and releases yet is compelled to consume all old media, everything is instant on-demand until gluttonously stuffed.
Your overfullness is in direct proportion to the emptiness of your life.
Our capacity to reside in the present, detached from media, has vanished. Yet our overconsumptive addiction thrusts us into the past, as our apathy for keeping up is overrun.
Nostalgia is the lazy desert of the overindulged.
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Therapy is talking to someone about your experience. This is why all forms of it work, up to a point.
With psychoanalysis examining internal trauma or CBT reconsidering external stimuli, we pay for a personal relationship (trusted guide) or a training framework (tools) to review our plight.
In many cases, this offloading and reflection alleviates us by reframing. But of course, we enter back into the world encountering more challenges.
Humans used to get guidance from friends, family, and elders. Today, we have a professional class with pedigrees to handle our chaos.
Is this commodification of our mental health and relationships, or is the world and life more complicated, requiring more advanced solutions?
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The pressures surrounding us (work, economics, social, commerce) attempt to “decode” and disintegrate us under the pretense of giving ourselves back to us.
That is to say: you can’t find yourself by following the system’s logic (as it dissolves you).
More clearly, you are already “you” without capitulating to pernicious pressures and duplicitous promises.
More importantly, you already know what you are here to do (your purpose); you are looking to the system because you have not allowed yourself to embrace it.
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When looking for productive boringness, shopping nicely fills the time.
When disgruntled or overwhelmed, consumerism offers an escapist world of infinite (mostly meaningless) choices into which we can sink, feeling at once active and comforted to employ a well-honed skill.
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Stress thwarts open awareness through intense focus, utilizing the Left side of the brain. Peace allows the non-verbal Right side of your brain (subconscious?) to drift insights and pattern recognition to the surface.
Conditioned to insecurity (precarity) we are experiencing asymmetry.
This produces a constant need for effort as if your shopping cart is pulling to the Left and producing a hideous racket drowning out subtle appreciation.
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We are admonished to “Find yourself, find your purpose, and be authentic.”
In a consumer society, ready-made identities are easy to adopt but come at a higher overall cost.
While it seems harmful, if not impossible, to deprogram yourself completely from societal norms and identity, any attempt to desist consumptive gluttony is laudable because it provides a space to allow your natural desires to displace mimetic striving.
related idea: perhaps the “authentic you” is an impossible dream and an excellent marketing ploy?
