You have put very well in words what i have been feeling for a long time.
“Theory of Baseless Forms” is a phrase i must remember. “I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…”
Yes, exactly, the world used to be a magical place, guided by magical principles, but nowadays everything is rationalized, superficial, and driven by the law of mass action (also called “economies of scale”).
There is no myth in the modern world, no story told except that of capitalism and endless greed, and the soul of people seems to be silent.
Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.
Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.
They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.
As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.
THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!
The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.
i see your point. i consider ideas to be like stars - they only shine in the darkness. our current world is so full of stress that we have no time to consider silent things anymore.
i think of “progress” and capitalism and the current system as an intense sunlight that burns us, but some are made for the night.
Capitalism pretty much takes survival out of living. And I don’t think we should go back to “if you want to eat, you’ll have to wrestle and kill that boar” levels, but we need a bit more space to develop our relationship with life. As it is, it’s like one of those helicopter parents who doesn’t let anything external touch you, then you turn into goop once the helicopter stops patrolling.
We don’t treat ourselves like humans anymore, we treat ourselves like the chickens grown at scale in industrial warehouses. And we don’t even treat those chickens like chickens, it’s Product all the way down.
You have put very well in words what i have been feeling for a long time.
“Theory of Baseless Forms” is a phrase i must remember. “I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…”
Yes, exactly, the world used to be a magical place, guided by magical principles, but nowadays everything is rationalized, superficial, and driven by the law of mass action (also called “economies of scale”).
There is no myth in the modern world, no story told except that of capitalism and endless greed, and the soul of people seems to be silent.
Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.
Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.
They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.
As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.
THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!
The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.
i see your point. i consider ideas to be like stars - they only shine in the darkness. our current world is so full of stress that we have no time to consider silent things anymore.
i think of “progress” and capitalism and the current system as an intense sunlight that burns us, but some are made for the night.
Capitalism pretty much takes survival out of living. And I don’t think we should go back to “if you want to eat, you’ll have to wrestle and kill that boar” levels, but we need a bit more space to develop our relationship with life. As it is, it’s like one of those helicopter parents who doesn’t let anything external touch you, then you turn into goop once the helicopter stops patrolling.
We don’t treat ourselves like humans anymore, we treat ourselves like the chickens grown at scale in industrial warehouses. And we don’t even treat those chickens like chickens, it’s Product all the way down.