Has existential angst reached critical mass? Yet.


Another gem amidst the spectrum that includes inarticulate mewlings:
(Hi! ... DRL)
re. "can't live on $150,000 to $180,000"

A society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones. By surrounding the consumer with images of the good life, and by associating them with glamour of celebrity and success, mass culture encourages the ordinary man to cultivate extraordinary tastes, to identify himself with the privileged minority against the rest, and to join them, in his fantasies, in a life of exquisite comfort and sensual refinement. Yet the propaganda of commodities simultaneously makes him acutely unhappy with his lot. By fostering grandiose aspirations, it also fosters self-denigration and self-contempt...
In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Its 'educates' the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively to the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void...
The best hope of emotional maturity, then, appears to lie in...an acceptance of our limits. The world does not exist merely to satisfy our own desires; it is a world in which we can find pleasure and meaning, once we understand that others too have a right to these goods. Psychoanalysis confirms the ancient religious insight that the only way to achieve happiness is to accept limitations in a spirit of gratitude and contrition instead of attempting to annul those limitations or bitterly resenting them.
--Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

-- Scorpio69er
[Read Scorpio69er's other letters]
Saturday, March 7, 2009 01:03 PM PST
http://letters.salon...f247e02e2090.html

And Then: ..he said Entropy!

The A-word is loaded

for sure, but it got your attention, didn't it?

Some sort of major crash is coming, that's a mathematical certainty. (Read on to find out why.) When is a sheer guess since amid the cacophony of conflicting information it's very hard to get reliable info, but I feel that 30-40 years it will be full-blown.

Why? Simple enough...If you must, ignore the trends in population growth, esp. in underdeveloped places, the coming day of peak oil (which may already have passed), the looming problem of clean water (which is largely ignored but is most important --- people can live with little or no petroleum if they have to but nothing can live without water). The point is that while capitalism bestrides the world, its motive engine is GROWTH (as Club For...). More raw materials to churn out more product (and waste), more use of high quality energy (check out what entropy means) etc. for an ever-growing market of buyers and consumers. All the while totally in denial about the inescapable fact that the world is FINITE, which means that at some point, there will be no more growth at all.(This is all besides global warming, which can only accelerate the process, particularly in regards to water. Look at California today.)

What happens to the system then?

Obviously it can't continue as it has. The alternatives will be a re-ordering of how we conduct our business in some sort of rational, agreed-upon fashion, which might mitigate the worst consequences of the change; or a rupture, a human earthquake, unplanned and catastrophic and certainly violent, with death on a scale to rival the Plagues of the Middle Ages . Given the way we are so far dealing with the present crisis, against every hope and wish I have I think the latter is more likely. Sorry about that.

-- jprfrog

[Read jprfrog's other letters]
Saturday, March 7, 2009 09:03 AM PST
http://letters.salon...f656c2333676.html