Back in the day, I think "life purpose" was easier to find, it was just about survival - making it through to the next day and developing resources to invest into the future. Building a home, a family, a legacy of some kind. Whatever it was, there was an overarching storyline that directed activities and at least roughly aligned them together. It was far harder to have unrecognized conflicts in behavior, because they stood out and, because of more eyes on, were likely called out.
Today however, life seems to be lived more like a series of independent events without an umbrella theme. It is lived across content platforms, identity groups, and all kinds of consumer activities, without the same social checks and balances. This means that people can live compartmentalized event-filled lives, with conflicting activities, but still maintain their sense of self. It is like a group of terrorist cells, splintered and working independently, but all claiming to be part of the whole. A distributed network is good on many levels for security and diversity, but what does it mean when we are living our lives as distributed individuals?
I believe that it has an impact on our quality of experience, which is why so many of us are "looking for purpose" in our lives. A lot of people think that this is because we have somehow attained some level of security and are looking for more, but I think it might be the opposite, where we have lost security, lost that sense of having an overarching meaning to our lives, so we seek out certainty again.
In the past, life was simple, but now with so many options, so many distractions, so many expectations, and soo many influences pushing us to guess and second guess, we have become lost, and largely decision blind. So, we compartmentalize our lives as if separating it into pieces means the pieces are no longer connected. It is a cutting off one's nose, to spite the face situations, in the sense that in the process of looking for stability, we are actually making ourselves less stable, less whole, more fractured.
I wonder if we were to look at the collection of our lives from the perspective of individual stories, would there be a difference in the way we lived in the past, and today? Would we see a clear thread running through the lives in the past, where there was a sense of direction, and would we see the life lived now through a series of independent events.
If we look at it through the perspective of social platforms, that is more of an event-based lifestyle, where people update on what they are doing, even if there is no clear thread that ties all of those events together. Looked at as independent events, each might be a highlight, something exciting, but as a whole, there is nothing to say that this is my life, that there is a commonality, a purpose, an identity.
If we were to view the average life of a person a hundred or more years ago through the context of a film, it might be considered a boring life, but at the end we would likely see character development and have a sense of who they are. If we did the same today, it would be far more random, like a script that has had all the pages shuffled, with nothing really connecting to anything else, no theme, no personality, nothing to pull the story together.
I think that this kind of disjointed life impacts on how we not only experience our world, but also how we feel about ourselves throughout our life. We are not only disconnecting from each other, it sets up a feedback loop that means we are also disconnecting from ourselves. It is increasingly hard to find that common thread that gives us purpose, which in the past was mostly connected to our family and community, and the actions performed toward those ends. People used to need someone to look after them in old age, so they had to have a family, and provide for that family in ways that enabled it. Now, people just pay to be cared for, which gives freedoms, but also disconnects a large part of that story arch.
Replaced with what?
At least in my opinion, I feel that people are noticing the lack of direction and purpose in their lives more now and as they do, they are becoming increasingly disillusioned. Without purpose, without meaning, without having people to share our experience with, the flavors of life are lessened. We can fill up the time with independent events, but we never create that character thread, and no one knows who we are. So much of people's activities now are to be seen, to be heard, to be acknowledged and valued, yet the way we are doing it is through a series of unrelated moments, meaning that it is impossible to build value long-term.
As I have said before, we are making each other disposable, and making ourselves irrelevant in the process. The more irrelevant we become, the less value we are able to add, the lest reasons there are to act. We just keep trying to add random events to our lives in the hope that they will mean something, amount to something, but, just like a collection of independent numbers, without a formula and framework that ties them together, they are just numbers.
The question is no longer "What's his story?" - It is Where's his story?
And there is nothing to tell, just a bunch of random events.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]