Category: Mind

Having started this writing project with only a relatively loose sense of where it was headed, it’s an interesting question to revisit.

Modern life is challenging in many ways: full of divergent opinions, careless realities, and struggles for meaning or worth (see Notes One). And it seems to me that the way we think about that and engage with it might really make a difference (Notes Two).

In a way, life is thought: everything around us and everything we do carries meaning and generally arose out of thinking. Especially now, as modern society lifts us above the rawer realities of living, offering a more abstract experience of our dependence on environment, community and commonly held ideas. So much seems hidden and remote, whether we talk of economics, culture or technology.

What I mean by that is that meanings seem concealed below the surface. All we do still has an impact on the planet, social environment, and the collective realities we sustain. We can uncover the consequences of our attitudes and actions if we wish to, and those that do often attempt to raise awareness around their particular cause.

Within that picture, do individuals and their actions matter? Is human life of absolute value or is that relative to where we live, what we own, how we look? Is there common ground to our existence or are we destined to disagree?

Our interconnected systems surely rely upon a system of thought and depend upon our collective involvement. Those systems contain within them a sense of human worth and of what’s important, essential or justifiable. To look at culture, do we agree with the messages it sends and the pictures it places within our imaginations? And what options are open to us if we don’t like where things are headed?

Some might labour under the realities they’re placed within; some may throw themselves into trying to make things better (for themselves, others, or the system as a whole); and some could feel the whole thing is mistaken and opt out through resignation, escapism, or more extreme alternatives.

And what ideas are we being offered? On one side there’s this picture of efficiency, profit and human redundancy; yet others cry out for human values, social cohesion and environmental wisdom (Notes Three). Is there a common vision there and, if not, could we find one and can it be built?

Getting back to the original question, surely we are intelligent creatures capable of understanding the systems we exist within, how they arose, and where they’re likely to lead. We can know in thought the realities we’re living. That thinking might tie us in knots at times or lead us into difficult places, but it’s also what makes us human.

While we might despair at the lack of humanity or meaning evident in our times, that itself seems an important message concerning the need to build our systems around the right values and create a collective conversation that better sustains what’s truly essential in life.

Notes and References:

Note 1: Reality as a sense check
Note 1: Mental health relative to modern times
Note 2: Education’s place within society
Note 2: Morality and modern thought
Note 3: Anger as a voice
Note 3: Need to stand alone & think for ourselves
Note 3: People wanting change

Hope is this beautiful idea – hope can lead us forward, believing in what is possible, but it also leaves us open to disappointment if it’s wrongly placed. Without it, we’d be left thinking this is the only possible reality, that little or nothing can change.

We look at the world, we look at the individual, and both are almost undeniably flawed. We struggle to be all that we sense we can be, both on a personal level and more broadly as a society. Life seems a series of compromises as one by one our childhood ideals are broken or contorted. Our society doesn’t greet us and take us by the hand to work together for a better world, but seems to set us fighting one another for every rung of the ladder. Much of what ‘we’ do doesn’t really need to be done; it just creates profit or advantage on some level. Culture and advertising bombard us with unrealistic images, creating a market for these things and encouraging us to make personal comparisons (see Relating to cultural benchmarks). And with technology much is never forgotten, so that freedom to change seems harder.

At this point, the future of society – some say the world at large – is in the hands of humanity. So it seems we need to find some kind of hope there, in our ability to overcome what seems to be the inherent selfishness of “human nature” and create a better way forward.

This has headed in quite a bleak direction given the title of this post, but this is my point. Where can we place our hope? Can we believe in the potential of the human being? That to me is the essential question and many of the threads here I will be picking up again later this year. My earlier post Mental health relative to modern times also connects with this.

For me, despite all of the challenges and the darkness, I have deep faith in the human being, in our capacity to change and to connect with one another on the basis of the human condition we have in common.

I think the human being is the answer. We are undoubtedly the problem, but also the solution. Within ourselves it seems we must find the empathy, understanding, courage to cooperate and build a more human system that works for us rather than against, and respects rather than exploits the environment we depend upon.

And, for me, this is something we can start building on a smaller personal or community scale which also seems very hopeful.

This is an interesting issue and one I want to do justice, so bear with me if you will.

It’s probably clear from topics I’ve chosen to write about and the way I do so that I don’t look at life “normally”. It’s been suggested I could write more punchily, give some slick solutions, engage more with the world of social media to grab people’s attention. But there are reasons I don’t, and essentially those reasons revolve around how I see life and human existence.

Posts about the Value of each human being, Happiness in modern life and Age, Image & Self Worth probably demonstrate that I look at life quite deeply, quite philosophically. Things I’ve written about Values and the economic and Trying to understand our times hint at how I see Western society as struggling and essentially needing change.

With this post, I want to look more at the mind as the part of us that seeks to make sense of reality and our position within it.

As I wrote in Spirituality since the 80s modern society essentially strips meaning out of life, yet we still exist within that as intelligent beings. We must look at the short-sightedness of economic activity and its environmental impacts; we must witness the dismissive attitudes towards so many human beings who are essentially no different from us; we must adopt a way of life – or resist one – that reduces our existence to financial transactions, self-branding, calculated and false human relationships, the unchecked amorality of technological progress.

That’s clearly a negative assessment of life, although it’s also pretty accurate, and I’m well aware of the wonderful opportunities modern realities offer us as well. As I’ve said in Media immediacy, I do see cause for hope through greater engagement with the challenges we face. As may be clear within Communication and the process of change, “Towards a New World View” and “Essays” by Emerson I have deep faith and interest in the value of each human life and our capacity to understand, to love, to overcome.

To me, we live in strange times where a kind of fatalistic and antagonistic materialism sets us against ourselves and others in a struggle to “win” at life. We have tools at our disposal now whereby we can connect with others as never before and master the material world in ever-new and ingenious ways. But we also struggle to stay human, to relate to others authentically, to listen and care, to take the time to fully understand in all our rush for progress. I’m sure we can. I’m sure we can pull back from the inertia of that and bring our humanity to bear more clearly. I’m sure we can find a way to manage things better and create more beautiful realities.

Maybe this is realism, maybe it’s idealism, or we could label it as depression but it seems a “sign of the times” and I believe there are deeply real, important messages nestled within it all – within how the human being responds to modern society and how, for some people, what they see and what it means can seem pretty unbearable.

The reason I’m linking here to most of what’s come before is that this view of life is at the core of what I’m trying to do here. I’m not giving you my answers, because they don’t really matter. I’m giving my questions, my thoughts on what I see, and also my belief that everyone can think for themselves and should.

We aren’t really encouraged to question what’s going on, and it’s getting pretty difficult to understand with all the distractions and pressures of today, but I suspect it may be worth our while.