It amazes me how hearing something you already knew from an 'authoritative' source makes it seem so much more concrete. Are people so unsure of themselves that they only trust the people on TV and in the papers to state what is already obvious? I've known, for example, that the world is a fatally boring and lifeless place for several years, but it has taken Raoul Vaniegem's 'The revolution of everyday life' to actually confirm this knowledge. Vaniegem's thoughts confirm nothing, of course; after all he could be just as wrong as me. Getting a book published doesn't make you right.
But this is how we feel about everything, when we see a dilemma from our lives played out in a TV drama or by characters in a novel, we feel validated, as if the TV has told us that our problem is an acceptable one. Individual thoughts are hard to articulate retrospectively, but is the feeling you get not something along the lines of: "so I'm
not crazy after all"? The problem, of course, comes when the TV doesn't think like you. For example, no billboard is ever going to agree that modern life is stiflingly dull and that most people have little choice about how the spend their time on this earth. So the people who feel this way are cut off from the comforting words of society, or rather, the institutions created to
represent society.
But there are songs, paintings, books, TV shows that share the anguish of living in this grey urban world, and they do make me feel better somehow. And so I am drawn back in, and for a while it feels good. But I am back at the start, Vaniegem's book doesn't help me deal with my troubles, much less does it solve them, all it does is represent them. The fact that troubled youth have to search a little harder for their media methadone doesn't change the effect of the drug, the 'alternative culture' is the same culture packaged up differently especially for us. Not for us, for me. When the TV tells you that everything is going to be fine, the same TV that knows everything that's happening in the world and can tell you at the press of a button, the need for a person to tell you everything is going to be fine dissapears. Everyone knows TV is better than people, people don't bother to call you, or they borrow stuff and don't give it back; the TV on the other hand is always there for you and never asks anything in return. But the TV isn't there for you, it isn't listening and no matter how bad your life is the TV will do nothing to make it better.
In this way we are cut off from each other, so many people seem to have forgotten the arts of friendship and love because saccharin-sweetened, surgically enhanced versions of them are available anywhere you look. Look but don't touch, just like in an art gallery. This alienation may not have reached the mechanistic extremes Vaniegem describes (yet), but each generation is more rarefied than the one before. And each generation is bigger than the one before; the more we are packed together in cities the further our minds drift away from both other human minds and life itself. Consequences? Because of the selfish nature of mankind empathy and sympathy are close relatives, remove empathy from an individual and they will not care what happens to those around them, much less to people in far-flung warzones, or future generations for that matter. The evil men and women of this world now have their
sine qua non, that good people should do nothing to stop them*. But regardless of what is to come, if it is clear that here and now your situation is unnacceptable to you, you should do something to change it. The revolution is not on the horizon (or at least, if it is, that is where it will remain), so go and do what you want to for the first time in ages and remember what it feels like. If everyone thought of the happiest time from their youth and compared it to their adult life, and then acted on the dichotomy they discovered, it'd all be fine again.
Just personally, I see beauty everywhere and I know that the world can be so much better than it is, that mankind can be so much happier. But beauty is seldom found in things you pay for, things you work to gain throughout your life, it has been carelessly left lying around waiting for a curious passer-by to stumble across it. My first reaction upon coming across something beautiful is to show it to someone else, to allow them to enjoy it too and to explain how it affects me. And no, there isn't always someone nearby, much less someone nearby who cares, but beauty makes me feel connected to others nevertheless. Beauty is revolutionary. Just like you don't care about money when you fall in love, a single beautiful moment can strip away all the other junk that surrounds us and make us truly happy for a moment or too. The trick is to hang on to the feeling, remember it and seek it out again. And remember how irrelevant so many things are in the face of that feeeling of happiness. This is all getting a little soppy so I think I'll shut up for now, but remember that I'm on the internet, I'm not a real person, don't take me too seriously (I say this with the rather preposterous assumption that you intended to take me seriously).
Peace
KS
*At this point you may note that I am constructing a weak and inherently emotive argument, which I have cleverly hidden within a relatively sensible and objective piece of writing. The papers do this all the time, watch out for it.