Posted by A quarter-life crisis to be followed by a mid-life crisis to be followed by a late-life crisis to be followed by death
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk and the subsequent movie starring Ed Norton, Jr and Brad Pitt, I think, serves as one of the great stories about modern man’s dissatisfaction with his lot in life. No longer are we the struggling conquerors of our environment. Even though we have largely conquered the environment and at least in the western world don’t necessarily have to worry about day-to-day survival, our lives, our miniscule, unimportant lives have conquered us.
“And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.”
Our modern lives, consumerist, chasing the almighty dollar through the wastelands of the free markets leave much too much to be desired.
In concerning myself with the Third Culture, the Vagabond Class, the Consluting Life (no, it’s not a typo!) and the lack of community and roots in a nuclearized society, I’m trying to explore why we so often feel alone even though we’re surrounded by other people.
“We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.”
How do you beat the great spiritual depression? I know that in this economic climate, a lot of folks are battling to keep their lives together economically but the question is, should they?
Given that we may also be engaged in a spiritual depression, what is the solution. Surely, I’m not trying to harken back to some long forgotten (and possibly never existent) standard of living. I’m quite pleased that Jonas Salk discovered the Polio vaccine and my life expectancy is/should be in the low-to-mid 80’s.
We must continue to design new physical environments that encourage commerce and discourse while simultaneously embracing the importance of techmology. In Pittsburgh, we have some new developments such as the Southside Works, which attempts to blend, residential, commercial and retail spaces so that people have a reason to ‘stay and play’.
On the other side of the coin, sites like Friendster or Facebook may come and go but social networking through the nets will never die. Nor should they. My friendships with some people have been extended and deepened because interactions through the nets have helped to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle that might have kept us apart in a different time.
The upshot of all this is to continue to use techmology and building methodologies to create new forms of community which balance the go-go, sanitized, detached atmosphere of modern corporate and business governance. As long as we operate in a free market society (which by no means am I advocating we dismantle), we will need to balance the human need to congregate and find meaning in life with the free markets need to grow, grow, grow.
