WTH is going on?
Autumn is here. You can feel it in the air. There is no need for the pumpkin AI generated image in your feed to realize that.
It is a weird period for me and I felt it was important to write a few words about it. I know that other people are feeling it too and despite the numbness of our spirits lately, maybe we forgot to express how we actually feel and not how we would want to feel.
The weather changed rapidly here in the UK. One day it was summer, the next was like 2° C in the morning. This is making me feel tired and bewildered. The amount of energy to do anything is so low that I have to plan everything I am doing in the first part of the day, until the energy bar runs out.
I was thinking the other day of how grateful I am that I had some time to put my thoughts in order, sit with myself doing nothing, or just run errands in my home. I had some wonderful walks in nature, watching trees changing colors while thinking about how rare I did this in the past, when I was working full time in the big cities.This is the deal that I made with myself 2 years ago, that I would sacrifice my money in exchange for my time. I couldn’t find a nice balance between these two, so I took the drastic approach. Not saying that one is better and the other is wrong, and for sure my choice doesn’t feel so glamorous all the time, but somehow the days that I spend in nature make up for it.
Some days all I did was cook and sleep. Other days I’ve made jam and planted herbs, cleaned the space, and read. Sleep some more. Some weeks run by just like this. And I am proud to say that I felt no shame in doing nothing important. This cleared a great fog in my brain and gave me focus.
With this big mental clean up and the smell of burned wood in the air, I had some interesting thoughts to internalize in these past few days and I want to share them here.
First, the environment around me is changing rapidly and when I am saying this, I don’t mean just the foliage changing colors. I mean everything. Next to where I live, there are 6 brand new blocks of flats that were built in the past couple years and they are building some more right now. I feel that everytime I’m leaving my house, a new floor is already finished. They all look the same, with very small apartments and the distance between the blocks could fit just one car. No green spaces left either. Of course this would mean more poop in the drainage and more cars left on the side of the roads. Everytime I step outside, I try to force my eyes not to look in that direction and to take the road that leads me to the river where some pieces of nature still remain.
Even with the situation of permanent construction sites, there is still a housing crisis and they cost a fortune. I am looking at these buildings and yet I can not hide the fact that in some years, these blocks will be the next ghettos. Not necessarily being pessimistic here, but honestly they all look like prison cells and you have to pay all your life to afford to buy them. Again, it is very difficult to deny this and turn this scenario into a forced optimistic view point.
Derby’s urbanization in 20 years
Sometimes I like to explore abandoned places. Usually I try to find some places online (forums/websites) and before I go there, I always check them on Maps to figure out safe ways to reach them. 60% of these places have already disappeared in the last few years. Their replacement usually consists of a Residential neighborhood (that looks and feels exactly the same, built with the same cheap materials) or a Tesco/ Sainsbury’s.
Recently I visited a Victorian cemetery next to Sheffield and there were new blocks of flats built right next to it, with the balconies facing the 200 years tombstones. The image of contrast was very difficult to miss, unless you were completely spaced out.
I am not against housing here, but let me tell you that these new houses are not made for people. This is just vertical building and making profit here. Let’s not confuse the two. You need to have some space for your desk, to stretch your arms without kicking your elbow in your neighbor’s window.
Some days were spent working on my short film and other projects that I had and while I was doing this, I consumed a lot of internet. It gave me this false sense that I am in touch with the latest news or with what’s going on in the world. I could not feel that I live in a dystopian world but I tried to understand exactly why. Soon, a new perception started to flourish inside my mind.
We might call this postmodernism or some like to call it metamodernism, but in the end, I think it’s just fancy words for every small particle in the world. And we like to do this, to label, categorize and define as it gives a better sense of understanding. If we would like to define postmodernism with one symbolic image, it would be the banana stuck on the gallery wall.
It is pretty blurry to define exactly what postmodernism is. Could be the fact that we feel collectively that previous culture models don’t work anymore in our societies, and this is making us feel numb and disconnected from the world around us. Like nothing makes sense anymore and that there is no purpose other than the one to make money. What else is out there? like the X-files series used to say. Everything turned out to be a product. Every idea eventually gets condensed, packaged, marketed and sold. Guy Debord was talking 60 years ago about the separation between reality and images in “The Society of the Spectacle”. Appearances and consumption are more predominant in our society than simply “being” and “experiencing”. The camera in our pockets gets more attention than actually experiencing the much desired and expected holiday. Social media plays a major factor in this, as it dictates behavior and the intention is transformed into consumption.
Illustration by Martin Rowson
And yes, it feels like decaying or falling down culturally. Art no longer represents the times we are living in and it no longer disputes problems in our society. What it does is to study overall desires, trends, and numbers in order to make profit and fit the algorithm. Everything is content. Even the word content. When I hear content, my brain thinks of a shape that has an inside made of particles. It doesn’t matter what the purpose of this inside is, but the particles count. And no matter your intentions, you have to produce this content. This is the final objective. The object of desire is focused on producing it and consuming it, without any other interpretations or meaning. It’s the reinterpretation of something, readaptation, the reaction of a reaction, the image of an image of an image and on and on until the image gets very distorted and cut in millions of pieces to then be overanalyzed. The base idea gets lost and new symbolic perceptions arise. When someone says the word “princess”, the visual representation of it is not one of a medieval female from an aristocratic family, but one that appears in Disney. These concepts continue on evolving and changing form, based on the culture era we live in. The novelty ideal that all nature starves for, gets calmed down with regurgitated material in the hope of avoiding pain.
It might seem bleak, but is it?
I think one good aspect of this (if I approach the dualistic perspective) is that postmodernism teaches us something about ourselves. That we are not perfect and we have some dark hidden parts in our society that in the past we tried to ignore and wipe, either through religion and the image of the saint, through science in explaining every small particle that constitutes us humans and the world around us, through culture by creating the perfect humans or through politics. And now the cards are on the table and we don’t like what we see. And yes, it can seem very dark if you close your eyes. But maybe it is a necessary process.
When I open social media, I see people emulating a perfect lifestyle or expressing only the good moments in their life. And in order to fit the “content” element I described earlier, they need to craft this in a certain manner so it fits the algorithm. Even though someone might know that this is not what they would like to do, they renounce the authenticity in order to fit a formula. A formula that has been well constructed and created with an army of CBT therapists and analysts that can identify your most vulnerable spots to get your attention. And this way is regarded as being the normal and the natural way to go by everyone who watches this digital material. It’s what Lacan was calling “jouissance”. It’s not good for you but you are doing it anyway to serve the purpose of desire. The desire in this case depends on the person. In the past we were used to refrain from the desire (religion/communism), now we over feed the desire until it gets saturated. It seems like the middle way between these two is very difficult to maintain. Even if one were to fight this, it’s almost impossible when the whole environment around you is built on your neuronal processes and well studied by an army of specialists.
Back in the days, to be on TV meant that you were “someone”, a realized individual who made some efforts to appear on the glass. Oftentimes, the TV programs were staged and presented as the perfect life, from ads to entertainment programs and usually audiences really believed that it was “real”. In comparison, social media claims that it shows the real identity of the individual. The backstage is not perfect. The backstage has some cranky walls. The cracked wall was produced by scratching it with the fork, grabbing the phone and pushing the recording button. Maybe the idea of authenticity is not sold directly but indirectly through different symbolism. “I woke up like this” trend, hair on the armpit movement, the avalanche of ads and influencers presenting different products through their lifestyle.
The algorithm pushed the format of reels forward in their battle for attention span getting shorter and now, regular folks are portraying their life in a certain format with edited content that can catch the eye of the user #perfectholiday #timespentwithfamily.
But in comparison with TV in the earlier stages, everyone knows that social media is a game and it is not true, but at the same time we are the audience and also the protagonist. And we enjoy being the protagonist, thus the ignorance.
What about politics? Everyone knows that anyone who is in politics is not to be trusted, while in the past many of us may have put our faith in someone or something. It was easy to believe that by entrusting someone with this task, then those people would do anything to protect their community and the rights of people, leaving us without the heavy load of doing something subjectively. After the vote, the duty is on the other. And we’ve seen where this can lead. Political debates nowadays are more absurd than a David Lynch movie, but we still have the yearning for them to fix things, even though we know it’s not real. It’s a show. And postmodernism shows us that it is a show, leaving us with the heavy burden of realizing that there is no big Other there creating rules, that we are not as perfect as we want to be, that everything around us is a creation of our own. And it hurts. Yes, it does. At least we know it now.
So why are we still playing this game? Why not revolutionize everything culturally, politically? A brand new start, a new era? Maybe it’s because these things require a longer process that might be bigger than our life span and we just want to enjoy the little things while we can. Maybe it’s because we don’t believe in this ideal anymore. Or maybe these times are also a process that we have to go through. No one can make the volcano erupt when one wants to. It’s a natural way of things and maybe these challenging times that we are going through are part of our world too. It’s an acceleration of moving things that is normal to cause us extreme nausea. But no matter our sensations, each and every one of us play an essential role and we are here together to experience this.
I think we visualize change as something measurable and of a great impact, that can alter our brain patterns and invoke great resonance inside our soul. What if this “ideal image” and our expectations have nothing to do with how nature really works? What if this is just a limited perception that us humans have developed through culture and the big era movements that we have experienced (illuminism, renaissance)?
“The change comes from within” has turned into a superficial idiom that we try to integrate mentally and we think that by doing so, we’ve done our part. Real change is something that happens naturally, without noticing while it happens and without measuring it. It involves effort, yes, but the effort is not all a mental invoked action but rather one that rises effortlessly. Art, compassion and humility are 3 powerful tools at our disposal everyday that can break the patterns. They will not change everything and get millions of views, but it is enough to create a wave of vibration around you and perpetuate further change.
Closing the phone in 1,2,3…