Does modern life create lonliness/depression?

I am speaking of modern, Western life. Society has been atomized, there is no communal structure anymore, except for some enclaves of society perhaps. It is every man or family for themselves, with no goal other than obtaining profit. That is “modern man” a desperate, lonely, shell that is chasing the almighty dollar. Our anti-depressants are our societies most prescribed drugs.

Is modern man miserable? Are people now more miserable then they have ever been in spite of our material goods?

In spite of? How about because of?

Actually, that’s not quite true, I think that many people are miserable because of what they don’t have as opposed to what they do have.

Of course, for those that are well-do-to in terms of material goods, they are no less susceptible to depression than most other people.

Material goods are just another measure of how, “good,” or, “strong,” a person is, much like knowledge, or power. I suppose that people may have moved away from striving for knowledge and now more often strive for wealth and material goods and inadvertently pick up some knowledge along the way.

In most cases, I think what people are really striving for is superiority over others. Material goods are simply a more identifiable measure of that superiority than knowledge is. Power and wealth are equally identifiable, which is why there are so many politicians in the world. Of course, if you are successful in striving for power you will almost inevitably acquire wealth, if you are successful in striving for wealth you will often acquire power.

Why do you think there are people who drive $60,000 automobiles but live in modest homes? You have to compare how many people there are available to gawk at your car in any given day as opposed to those who see your home. It also explains why people feel you can measure a man’s wealth by looking at his shoes and his watch. There are many people that hover right around the poverty line, but they save up to buy one suit that costs a thousand or more dollars, when they put it on, they are looked at as someone with wealth.

Of course, people often end up getting what it is they thought they wanted and realizing it is not what they wanted at all. I am going to paraphrase from a novel here, and I do not remember which novel it is, so I can’t cite it but the analogy fits:

It is like growing up and training your whole life to be an Olympic pole-jumper. You wake up every morning and exercise until dusk until you can leap over a higher pole than any of the competition. Then, you get to the Olympics and win, and as you are standing at that podium looking at your gold medal which is worth only a few bucks, you say to yourself, “Now, what the hell did I ever want to jump over that goddamn pole for?”

The same thing is the case with material goods. Material goods are relative, they are given value because we assign value to them. We assign value to diamonds, do we not? Of course we do, diamonds are also a measure of wealth, but do you realize that if the diamond cartel released all of the diamonds they have stored onto the market they would be worth no more than a couple of dollars per karot?

The key is to find value within yourself, that is the hardest measure of worth to strive for, but also the most rewarding. You have to look within and determine once and for all that you do not need things to measure who you are and that you do not need to prove yourself better than anyone.

It creates loinliness.

It’s a string of indignities. Slow motion suicide. Cioran may be right.

I find it ironic that someone who didn’t want to exist/live chose to live to the ripe old age of 84. :unamused:

"Our Great War’s a spiritual war…

our Great Depression is our lives.

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact.
And we’re very, very pissed off." - Tyler Durden

and who told you that Emile didn’t want to live? =;

his books invite us to live a lucid, honest life. It takes courage to face a meaningless world, it takes strenght to lead a disillusioned life…

Here’s an article I was reading that seems to suggest loneliness is a much greater factor than it used to be due to a lack of community feeling in neighborhoods.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7755641.stm
If modernity is that people don’t stay in the house their grandfather built as a legacy anymore, and are constantly moving around for the sake of jobs and better opportunities and are therefore less likely to develop a sense of belonging, then it seems that modern life does increase a sense of loneliness.

Which modern man? The suburban white collar American? The Indian woman who does roadwork? The Christian missionary? The Nigerian villager? The college student?

I tend to think that loneliness and alienation are fairly universal and only change in terms of style of manifestation. Some people are more affected and some people less affected. Of the different types of people I listed above, and the list is theoretically endless, can we say that one type of person is more likely to be depressed than another type? Perhaps (I do tend to think of college students as particularly depressed), but I’m at least a little bit skeptical of that notion.

I do think the society I find myself in is very problematic - I’m not refuting the OP so much as just stating something that seems to be missing from it.

Enter the monkeysphere then use that knowledge to realize the seven reasons the 21st century is making you miserable.

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What?! You gotta be kidding me! It doesn’t take courage to whine with eloquence, anyone can do it.

And, no, his books invite us into a world of a feeble, psychotic mind that is scared shitless of the existence around him (like a child who’s afraid of his own reflection in the mirror).

How did he manage to escape the psychiatric ward and become a renowned writer, anyway?

Oh, wow! Does the idea of existence terrify you, too?

Pandora, how did Cioran manage to escape the psychiatric ward? :unamused:

Btw, you’re arguing with yourself when you imply that he was insane. You yourself were the one who remembered that Cioran lived to the age of 84. Doesn’t that fact say too much about the true nature of his pessimism?

Cioran was an enlightener. It is very strange when we come to a philosophy board and see people refering to great men as insane people. It’s like you never really read his books, because he reflects upon the insanity of the world, he never advocates it.

Oh, wow! Does the idea of existence terrify you, too?

sometimes. But authors like Camus, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Cioran help me to understand and to overcome this terror.

:laughing: Excellent, thanks for that…

Plato slept with a copy of Aristophanes under his pillow. Can’t we sleep with a copy of Cioran under ours?

Ditto! :slight_smile:

I have many acquaintances but no friends, well, unless family counts…

That it’s like a pernicious disease?

Oh, is that what they call mentally unstable these days?

And what’s that supposed to mean? Why, do I have to be neurotic just like him to R-E-A-L-L-Y read him? How many times again does he speak to fate and God in his writings? Or should I mention his perverse adulation of masochism and delusion of “saints” (especially female)?
“The voluptuousness of suffering and humiliation” and “delicious madness of sainthood”, as he admiringly calls it. :unamused:

Let’s look at what else he says:

Well, there is one book of his, Précis de Decomposition (Breviário de Decomposição in Portuguese, A Short Story of Decay in English) that accompanies me wherever I go. This book pleases me so much, that I even know many passages by heart…

Here is an excellent passage from this book:

From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. “I shall never meet myself again,” he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate–in his forgiveness–all beings, all things.

Pandora,

the Cioran who wrote Tears and Saints was the young, disturbed Cioran. He repented having written this book in his later years, he refered to it as the product of a mistaken religious experience in his last interview. In 1949, in the same book I cited above, he already declared that his enthusiasm for the lives of saints was just a youthful obsession, that he had already grown tired of them…

For the record, Tears and Saints is a magnificente masterpiece when read as a literary work. You don’t need to take it all that seriously. Maybe when you hear about a Catholic priest who has been caught abusing a child you can understand why it’s necessary to disclose and to reveal the real motives and the real feelings behind the “disattachment” and the hatred towards the “world” these Christian people talk about. That’s why I admire Cioran and recognize him as an enlightener: he is one of those few thinkers who is courageous enough to search for the truth even if it hurts some sensitive people, even if it hurts themselves. That’s what a great thinker is supposed to be.

btw, thanks for posting these passages…it’s great to see Cioran quoted here. :sunglasses: Now you just need to read other books from him. You’ll be able then to be ashamed of insinuating that such a man was insane…

It’s a shame that philosophers aren’t allowed to be wrong from time to time - if they were, we might find philosophical debate so much more enlightening…

I might get around to reading Wittgenstein’s poker one of these days.

I did, but I’ve forgotten most of it…