Perhaps the world that is now filled with cued laugh tracks and artificial emotion invokers – movies, television – perhaps this world is slowly freezing, numbing us as it cools. Are the big bangs of feeling deeply – the romantic period, the renaissance, Beethoven’s revolution – now losing momentum? Is decay taking its toll, now, on love, happiness, embarrassment, sympathy? Are we living in a dark age where smalltalk has taken its place above deep relationships and warm smiles?
And in this slowing world, becoming more populated and less personal, in this slowing world do we cry to feel something, anything at all? Is the great mass of humanity sinking into a norm of un-affect?
Or is it just the first world society that is being plagued with stereotypical associations to action? Have we left our proverbial hearts behind in a speeding race to the technological high-ground? Are increasing numbers of failed marriages indicative of this sacrifice?
And depression, ever growing in its spread over our peers and kin, is it possible that our cry to feel has driven the individual down the slide of hopes and dreams, to a place where feeling succeeds, but is manifested in self-pity, worthlessness, meaninglessness, and isolation?
Yes. The search for irrational, illogical reactions has ended triumphantly in the negative spectrum of emotion. Why? Simply because it is easier. Our nature implores it, for without true meaning, without a set of guidelines to follow in life, without aspirations, our fight for love and empathy has no motivation. The hate, the lust, the slander, these dis-virtues are simply brought to us through our own idleness, almost as if gravity is pulling each of us – an unending force – towards self-destruction, and the destruction of community.
So, then, the numb world grows cold and remains motionless, and with it, we become drunk on consistency, on hollow laughter and surface sex. We numb-en, and our cry to cry is answered with stale tears of loneliness, of detachment. And we weep, if for no reason that to feel something stir in our empty selves, to remind ourselves that there is a realm still within us all that semi-defines our classification or organism, of our being human.
The world advances forward, sacrificing feeling, or the time to feel, we realize the void, we sink into depression to fill it.
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