People feel more and more insignificant, cut-off and powerless than ever before. We are buried in a mountain of information, technology, gadgets, goods, and manufactured complexities. We are lost and rendered nearly invisible in a digital snowstorm of super-connectivity. It is a form of anonymity through mass-connection. True community has been nearly eviscerated, and a tactile-less mockery of community, in the form of social media, has been put in its place.
Houses and apartments have become cubical prison-tombs, where millions of screen-irradiated mummies hide from the sunlight, nature, and genuine social interaction. People have social anxiety because of their lack of experience relating to humans in person. At airports and restaurants, people eat alone, and strangers seldom talk. Everyone is texting, emailing, rushing, surfing and being connection-entertained with social media, and yet somehow, we are tragically ALONE.
Absent the vital lessons attained through simple face-to-face community interactions people soon become observers of life rather than participants. They begin seeing the "good life" as something to attain through goods, services, and external providers, and forget that Happiness is within. Through consumer-life, a sort of consumer based identity crisis envelopes us. Consumer life is an alternate reality. People addicted to consumerism have no meaningful relationships — except with need providers.
Absent the vital lessons attained through simple face-to-face community interactions people soon become observers of life rather than participants. They begin seeing the "good life" as something to attain through goods, services, and external providers, and forget that Happiness is within. Through consumer-life, a sort of consumer based identity crisis envelopes us. Consumer life is an alternate reality. People addicted to consumerism have no meaningful relationships — except with need providers.
Through consumer-life, even our life partners can become just another external need provider. Modern consumer life is like a mass dissociative disorder that prevents people from experiencing essential truth, real-life community, universal rites of passage and even an acceptable and reasonable death.
Consumer life is essentially a social psychology framework, which seeks to keep your consciousness plugged into a head-end of created needs for profit. The result of this created dependence is a growing culture of empty, addicted, needy, fear-subdued, disconnected, isolated and mass-distracted people who feel powerless.
In reality, We are so much more than what our culture has asked of us to be. We must become reacquainted with our true human selves, and not the modern avatar of a "person": a commoditized, corporatized, homogenized, zombified, denatured, worker-consumer drone.
We have lost our purpose, and many people see no way to escape the endless manipulation and coercion of modern life, which controls us through the fear of "losing everything"; most of which are all created and fabricated false needs. The total commoditization of the natural world has placed a veritable lien against the spirit of nature.
Author and Credits: Bryant McGill