The Name of the Disease

Image Courtesy: Ellen Madson

It used to be that the forces controlling the world limited people in order to control them. Individuals had to be repressed and their roles in society clearly defined. Limitations controlled their behavior.

Nowadays you can be anything. You have no limitations. You just have to decide what you want to be. As long as you work hard enough, the only person who stands in the way of your success is you. Right?

All you have to do to control people nowadays is tell them all the things they can do, if only they make themselves valuable enough. In the pursuit of optimization, we’ve made ourselves crazy about never being good enough.

So you optimize yourself. You work hard and in your mind have a picture of who you want to be. You strive for that, constantly seeking to maximize yourself and burning out in the process in a cycle that's become a special kind of torture. You become the master and the slave in your own mind whipping yourself. 

Encouraging someone to define themselves independently, relying solely on their own understanding, is often seen as a path to authenticity. But in a society where everyone is their own personal project, investing in themselves and holding market value that introspection can be an overcorrection. When you're constantly looking inward the only direction to go is narcissism. When so many people are focused on themselves, there’s an increase in anxiety and depression. Being anxious is good for production, which is good for the economy. 

The pace of the world is speeding up and you can bring a shallow level of understanding to every interaction. What has been removed from modern life that makes this more common is the presence of the other, the imperfect. 

We isolate, and that isolation enabled by technology becomes an addiction. Our attention spans have been hacked to the point where nothing you don’t like has to matter. Because of technology, the algorithms keep us in a state of self-absorption. 

We may be trapped, but we can make space and develop a sense to listen to things as they are. Empty yourself and become a resonance chamber for the other person to speak freely for themselves. Really sit with something you don’t believe in and try to understand it. Put your ego aside, listen more, and slow down. 

Strike Out, 

RJ Price-Richardson

Editor: Caroline Kostuch

Athens