The challenges of modernity

If it were not already so difficult, we are asked – on top of it all – to smile continually, to hope against hope, to have a nice day, to have a lot of fun, to cheer on holiday and to be exuberant that we are alive. Modernity has stripped us of our primordial right to feel melancholy, unproductive, surly, in despair, and confused. It has done us the central injustice of insisting that happiness should be the norm. Though modernity may have made us materially abundant, it has imposed a heavy emotional toll: it has alienated us, bred envy, increased shame, separated us from one another, bewildered us, forced us to grin inauthentically and left us restless and enraged.

Fortunately, we do not need to suffer alone. Our condition – though it presents itself to each one of us as a personal affliction – is at heart the work of an age, not of our own minds. By learning to diagnose our condition, we can come to accept that we are not so much individually demented as living in times of unusually intense and societally-generated perturbance. We can accept that modernity is a disease – and that understanding it will be the cure.