On Modern Culture & Unhappiness
In the usual narratives people read in books, watch on TV and subsequently rehearse over and over in their heads, life happens to an external figure that they subsequently identify with.
- The protagonist exists.
- The world happens to them.
- They choose to react.
It’s a cause-and-effect relationship. This is how storytelling works, since it’s something “out there”. It’s something people usually absorb rather than produce. Once they start projecting themselves onto such narratives, a weird transference occurs. The projection becomes the person. People view themselves as characters acting on a stage. It’s why they dress up in different costumes, call themselves by different labels, and associate with different people. It’s why the selfie has exploded. You can move to a city and pretend to be anyone if you get the image down properly. And you likely won’t ever be questioned for it. Everything is permitted, and yes, such a gigantic revolution in the realm of “identity politics” has not left us immune to huge psychological and spiritual consequences.
The more prevalent this obsession with archetypes and images has become, the more people project themselves onto the images. It’s why fashion is so popular and the turnover rate for trends is so high. It’s why celebrities can’t just be people who do their jobs well — they have to be that plus post-human sex icons, like ancient gods. Sometimes they can get really far by just being post-human sex icons. They are required by audiences and cultural engineers alike to represent archetypes of human extremity at their most primal. This heightens the narrative’s emotional power and makes it more sensational.
Crowds respond well to sensation. It’s why billions watch superhero movies and only a comparative few watch boring 3-hour long existential French new wave movies. It’s why most radio stations play top-40 and not weird hip noise music. People prefer the simple and reliable to the complex and dynamic. Why? The simple and reliable are better, as far as our general instincts are concerned. Doritos taste better than celery because, unlike celery, Doritos are scientifically engineered to appeal to humans. Nature doesn’t care about our preferences; culture does, and thus profits from them.
The narratives we form in our heads about ourselves and others follow the same simplicity— they become unnaturally engineered in favor of gratifying base human instinct. The actor of the self becomes a character. The more this character rehearses its carefully-crafted subconscious script, the further away a person moves from their actual self. This is often determined simply by circumstance. It’s not something most people reflect on much. If they did, the modern world would look and feel a lot different.
For this reason, reflection has become tantamount to retaining a connection to the natural self and the natural world, also commonly referred to as “reality”. As reality blends further into virtuality, the real is becoming more difficult to discern. Spiritual crises abound. People have been telling themselves false narratives about themselves for so long that they cannot discern between “the matrix” and real life. It is no coincidence that a cultural aversion to real confrontation and honesty has emerged alongside modern humanity’s insanely complicated web of imagined personalities.
This is where meditation inevitably enters the picture. For a person who spends thousands of hours looking at screens, projections, and images, both in real life and in the mind’s eye, closing the eyes and sitting down in a quiet place for any length of time is antithetical to their animal instinct. Why not subject oneself to more sensation 24/7? The reason is pretty simple: overexposure to the instant gratification of image culture leads people to hold themselves to standards that, because they appeal so heavily to animal instincts, are entirely unsustainable to us as human animals. As a result, the ego projections made by most people leave them deeply unhappy and thirsting for something else. That something else is usually sold to them in the form of a potentially remedial product, which obviously don’t work for long, since trying to cover up identity crises with consumer goods is like chopping a twig off of an oak tree.
What appeals to us in fantasy appeals to us precisely because it cannot be achieved in reality. Those who do achieve their fantasies find them to be drastically less amazing than their mind had predicted in a time of scarcity. The human mind adjusts to whatever it’s exposed to and sets new standards. This spurs people to action, but many of these actions are, of course, in vain.
Meditative practice helps all this mental dust settle. Over time, it helps us discern mindfully between the fantasy and the real, self and other, ego and non-ego, projection and reality, etc. Most people are buried under layers and layers of false projections, either consciously performed or just stuck there as a result of never being noticed. Once they get noticed, they move around. Real honest truths, which are often very subtle, personal, and difficult to translate verbally, emerge. Actions subsequently shift in a similarly subtle (but still transformational) way. The cycle gets going, thought and action informing one another cyclically until a person’s entire life begins to change. This is why the people who are into meditation often end up getting really into it. Especially today.
