Losing Experiences
Series on Arnold Gehlen
In a technologically advanced world, my actions do not match the consequences I’m experiencing, while the consequences I’m experiencing do not match my actions. After all, in our detached world, I could just lose my job for something that happens on the other side of the world.
However, we can only learn through consequences. But the possibility of putting our experience into a context that gives us a sense of reality becomes increasingly non-existent. In other words, we live constantly incomprehensible situations.
A Lack of Reality
That already described the entire issue I’m trying to explain here. We mentally and morally adapt to inaccessible events. This makes us lose any sense of reality. As a reaction, we start to live in silent consumption or adhere to some utopian ideology.
This detachment from everyday life and attachment to such inaccessible events provides us with the skill to live in the imaginary instead of the real. It’s like we are returning to primitive cultures that are based on a magical and ritualistic unworldliness. But our myths are the articles we read in journals: inaccessible information on the horizon of what we can perceive.
A Lack of Experience
If we learn from our experience through success and failure, qualitative values arise from a quantity of impressions. Just then, we achieve certainty. But what happens when humans live in an environment with diluted experiences that do not allow for such a necessary quantity?
- Excessive phantasms while living in the imaginary instead of the real
- A lack of social experience reduces our social instincts necessary for our togetherness
- The feeling of uselessness and replaceability when consequences of actions are not perceivable anymore
All this results in a lack of responsibility and increasing helplessness in modern society.
A Lack of Independence
Another related phenomenon is the reliance on pre-existing products that allow us to not do anything ourselves. We can buy ready-made meals, listen to opinions online, and adopt children. This gives us a worldview that exceeds our intellectual and affective sphere of existence.
Even the knowledge we acquire seems to rely mostly on information that other people worked for. Hence, consequences can’t be classified beforehand. Given all this, how can we not just react with primitive associative behaviour or rely on the quest to find the guilty?
