Postmodern Society: Impacts on Individual Well-being
Disregard for Saturation
The reason is that there is everything in excess, causing saturation. Values are devalued; the important thing is to have fun while saying nothing, without contributing anything.
Features:
- The overwhelming frivolity. A kind of socialization of banality and mediocrity.
- The promotion of human selfishness, lack of solidarity, lack of high ideals, and a drop in values.
This causes some to consider suicide, looking for a quick exit to this accumulation of facts.
A Society Turned Away from Death
Man becomes too vulnerable, tired of living. Then there is indifference. Death is a taboo because the issue is avoided, although suicides have increased.
To prevent this, we must regain the love of truth and a genuine passion for freedom, fighting hard because it is worthwhile.
An Indifferent Society
The “light” individual is lonely but lacks deep dimensions. It is an indifferent solitude since internal communication does not exist in the “light” individual within society.
The “light” individual’s ethics are derived from:
- Narcissism: Centered on oneself, devoid of moral and social values.
- Subjectivism: Living without ideals and without goals.
“Light” Literature
The individual who reads “light” literature prefers quick and easy, popular reading, especially those that serve to get to know oneself (pocket books). Readings to combat boredom.
People read what most others read to talk about it.
The reader looks for the soft and light. They have no time and no concern. On the contrary, intellectual education in Spain has been noticeably lost.
A New Ideal: Comfort
The “light” individual seeks maximum comfort with minimal effort. What is surprising is fashionable to others with a refined and uncompromising life, with the best personal security possible, provided by the abundance of which tends to be safe.
The individual turns to “light” due to personal weakness, and this is one explanation for marital breakdowns, the loss of values and purposes, and a tendency to overcrowding in its various forms:
- Accumulation of individuals where only singular people are capable of being.
- Depersonalization alienated by the media.
- Egalitarianism in decline.
- Lack of a plan for life: what matters is to have.
The “light” individual wants to appear to be “light.” That is what matters: to have to appear, to resemble the pseudo-pink, to foster relationships in which the sound level and the logical-rational criteria are excluded. Everything is aesthetic, everything is political, everything is sexual. Anti-art is born.
Reviews of the Heart
Interest in People’s Broken Lives
Humans have two basic segments in their lives: the public and private sectors. It is this latter aspect that interests the “light” individual in others, to compare with their own.
It is usually the personal life that the media distorts to gain “customers.” People identify with them, adopting one behavior and condemning another to finish establishing a system of preferences for this or that story.
Journals of the Heart: Escape and Passing Time
The “light” individual uses them as entertainment, and this is due to a vacuum of interest. Sometimes it is simply the morbidity of the misery of others, especially celebrities, and the feeling that one rubs shoulders with those characters.
For people with a very intense life, we would say that these magazines are to pass the time, and this means:
- Not having big concerns.
- Not having high ideals.
“Light” Romanticism
Under these magazines is a return to romanticism. There is an interest in all things emotional and sentimental but from the point of view of fashion because most of the content is photos.
The heart is pulling the strings of life, but from another point of view. These magazines are used as a compensation mechanism, a console for watching the misfortunes that happen to others, with a sensationalist ingredient that causes a sense of frivolity.
The Weariness of Life
Psychological Fatigue: A Phenomenon of Our Time
Fatigue is a feeling of exhaustion after an effort, and the causes may be several.
But there is another kind of fatigue: being tired of life. It does not refer to anything in particular but to life as a whole. An analysis should be performed:
- Find its cause. (Etiology)
- Find out what the subject experiences within. (Experience)
- Design a formula to overcome it. (Therapeutic Conduct)
First, you have to analyze what life is, but especially “my life,” as the most primary thing I have to do is what I am, what I do, the situation in which I am, and the human and cultural perimeter around me.
Life has two key vectors: personality and the project, whose base is biological, physical reality.
The Internal Unity of Life
Throughout life, I form my personality and create a specific project, “to make my life.”
When we are tired of life, it is because of the difficulties we encounter. When they are too big, we collapse. This individual has unpleasant feelings inside, a feeling of doing everything with too much effort. So there is laziness, disappointment, discouragement, melancholy, and a feeling of powerlessness with regard to life, a sense of internal disappointment.
This is a psychological crisis that leads to a loss of enthusiasm for personal desires due to difficulties, having a lifestyle with excessive and constant tension, which requires a greater effort than one’s own forces and borders on exhaustion.
One does not know what to do with life and feels faint.
We can build a therapy against this:
- Rethink life; see life from the sidelines.
- Establish order; learn to say “no”:
- Renew lost illusions.
- Learn to enjoy life.
The Anxiety of Modern Man
Lights and Shadows of Postmodern Society
The positive aspects of our day are the important progress made in recent years in science, expanding technology, the information revolution in communication, human rights, democracy, concern for social justice, high levels of comfort and welfare, equal opportunities, more accessible culture, and environmental awareness.