Disconnecting from reality
All this and much more, I think, reflects our disconnect from what actually is, in favour of what we have created.
Recently I re-watched the excellent documentary ‘The Vietnam War’ by Ken Burns, and as I watched I was struck by how much the men in it looked like me. They were almost uniformly skinny, without much heavily defined muscle; they were lean, and dishevelled with wild hair.
Looking at them, how young they were, how they spoke and acted, I realised how little resemblance they bore to our common conception of what a soldier is. The more I thought about it, the more I realised just how hyperreal we demand everything to be, how exaggerated our categories have become.
Masculinity is now only thought of as its most extreme physical form. To be masculine you now have to be a collection of muscles the size of a mountain, and true femininity is something now only achievable by a starvation diet and copious plastic surgery. Whatever happened to the lean American man of war, whatever happened to our connection with reality?
All this and much more, I think, reflects our disconnect from what actually is, in favour of what we have created. This utopia is far more insidious than anything that could be created on this earth, because it is an illusion that is always visible and unaffected by reality. We lose ourselves in our pixelated utopia, and the more time we have to pretend it's real the more time there is for existence to punish us for our disconnection with it.
More than this though, constant navel-gazing is bad for the soul, especially when it is so superficial. Just look at the internet. The internet is becoming an increasingly boring and regimented place, a place increasingly controlled by money-grubbers and CEOs. It is overwhelming in its banality and its little evils, in its violations of privacy and its facilitation of stupidity. Our current predicament is best summed up by G.K Chesterton, who said that ‘The world will not starve for lack of wonders, but for a lack of wonder’.
