On Love and Loneliness in the Age of Digital Identity
On Love and Loneliness in the Age of Digital Identity
There is a fragility to human connection today that did not exist in ages past. The tenuousness of relationships is obvious to all who have come of age in the digital era. Relationships have become the stuff of profiles, handles, pages, updates, like, loves, laughs, lols, snaps, stories, and screenshots.
The ease of use in storytelling technology has driven a digital instinct of creation of the self. Identity is not grounded in an internal world of the mind, but of an external one. The superego has been let out to make itself anew each day, and it makes itself known in the constructs of validation that comes with the technology. Social media has become an Identity Medium. The creation of the Identity supersedes the individual behind it. Your digital avatar is more real than you.
Relationships are established through this medium, and through these avatars, and hierarchies are made, with status rising and falling according to the social currency and influence of the day.
Everything is preserved, everything is forever. Everything is to be judged for all time, and the stage is the both the actors and the audience.
The individual is awash in the sand and fog of this world. It has no borders, no boundaries, it cannot be tasted or felt or touched, it can only be looked upon, but it is REAL. We exist within it, driven by the attention seeking, in an endless search for MEANING from others by way of confirmation of presence. We are tribes of ghosts looking for acknowledgement.
We feel this lonely, it pervades the soul, yet all the whole, a false sense of ABUNDANCE is clung to, for attention exists out there, and if only one could capitalize on it, meaning would be delivered. We are forever 10,000 likes and so many retweets away from a digital nirvana that has never and will never exist.
In the midst of this, we have men and women, who are driven by the ever present, eternal instincts of attraction to each other,
But they are all too too preoccupied with their own drama to approach anything resembling genuine love for each other, for love requires commitment to SOMETHING. A totality of vulnerability and openness that is utterly beyond the conveyances of posts, photos, and updates. Such a thing is an ideal we have outgrown,
So instead, we have a vast market of men and women, all endlessly deciding upon options, all non committed that another swipe, message, chat, search, scroll contains something or someone BETTER. All options open, all apps on home screen, always waiting for the comforting ping or vibration that leads us on to the next one.
The one that is more suitable to our list of expectations, who is more thrilling by some measure of hedonism & our own dopamine addicted desire, and who is more available somehow, some way,
yet we are often so so so far away from each other. Separated by inevitable geography.
People are utterly driven mad by this, for it cripples the internal Eros and leaves it stunted in permanent immaturity. We don’t have sex, because it’s too confusing. Or we have all the sex we want, and assign it mechanical value whilst lamenting when someone better may come along.
Sex is an exchange of commodity, because why would it not be?
Relationships have been reduced to the acquiescence of imposed limitations and conditions upon our FREEDOM of options, or so we believe.
Whether anyone is free is questionable, but the departure from the attention market to commitment is a reluctant one, a divorcing from the false abundance of “something better” to a distasteful questioning of “settling”.
Within this, we have the equalization of, the sexes. Women have nothing special to offer, nor do men. We are equal, we are not different, we are the same, yet so vastly apart.
Denial of biology has created increased suicide, decreased happiness, increased misery, prescription drug abuse, a decline of the nuclear family, and a lost generation of men and women.
But pussy is abundant say the Men, dick is abundant say the Women.
Women have turned into bitches say the men. Where have all the real men gone cry the women.
Removed from the historical moorings of biological identity and form, broken from the supposedly oppressive values of chastity, temperance, and fidelity, and unleashed into an egalitarian market where “equality” is the modus operandi, neither sex has anything to hallow than the other than a wet box and stiff cock, followed by netflix, followed by coffee, followed by I’ll call you. Followed by nothing.
Both sexes are free to operate their worth in a marketplace predicated on what is most easy to catch and release. Applause to everyone, truly we have outdone ourselves and wretched ideals that once constrained us. Truly we are noble and enlightened beings, truly we are FREE.
We have options, let us never forget that.
This whole state of affairs leads many to avoid relationships entirely, viewing them as authoritarian contracts that are self-limiting by their very nature. As such, it is that people do not “date” they talk. People are not together, but rather “seeing each other”. People are not exclusive, but rather “keeping their options open”
We cannot love another, for its demands an authenticity that no one has. We have reduced love to a Disney-esque list of quasi romance and the “right one”. Our love is a petty idealization.
The marketplace is then filled with people looking to fulfill their dramas of rescuing knights, and disney princess, immature archetypal schemes that ironically contradict their own behaviors while deluding them into relationships in which neither person has any understanding of the other beyond a checking off boxes and an assurance that they are the “one”.
Because despite the modern disgust of god and religion and values and virtua, it is entirely rational to believe in the “ONE”.
Everyone struggles then, and most of all in the communication of what they think they want.
“Authenticity” is the desired tonic for this, yet this authenticity is entirely farcical. A generation that debates over the wording of message and filters every single picture posted to display a perfected life, and then cries out for “realness” and “good vibes” and demands honesty from potential partners.
What honesty? What authenticity? What vulnerability?
What filter is that?
All the while, people are so self-involved within themselves that the identification of common ground is rendered a barrier to one’s personal ambitions.
Career takes precedence, hobbies take priority, one’s desire for platitudinal success to reach”happiness”,
This is the other person expected to fit into this personal trajectory, with no interference or dissuasion. One must have it all is the mantra, and it is upon the other to accommodate to this.
Otherwise surely someone better can be found, someone that we shall have more in common with.
So we seek comfort in empty analogies and refrains that reassure us that a ONE is coming. The ONE that complements us with such ease that it feels “natural” to be in a relationship.
But this does not work. Human attachment requires deliberate CHOICE, it is not an accident of random forces, it is not the universe delivering your happines.
Yet the suggestion of this deliberate defies secular but hypocritical belief of what is love, connection, and fidelity.
To think deeply on these is heretical, and they are reduced to analogy and halcyon mechanisms that maintain the digital illusion that has overtaken the collective psyche of society.
Whether anyone realizes this, and questions it, it is immediately availed by a half truth and thinking returns to the flood of self deception.
But deception is a closed circle, and the stage does not have an end. Nothing is sacred, and everything has been profaned in the search for attention. All of us are addicts and whores to the attentions and operations of the narrative order that keeps us at odds while eternally chasing.
We’d look in the mirror, but that is what the camera is for.
We’d look each other in the eyes, but that makes us uncomfortable.
We’d speak, but then what if we said the wrong thing? Better to text.
And so to Love, to create Love, genuinely within this world,
It is an ideal with all the substance of wind.
It is no accident people are lonely.
It is no accident at all.
