There are so many people in need, who are quietly hovering near the abysmal edges of emotional bankruptcy. Life is dynamic, and it can be ugly. Thomas Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that life was, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." And Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden that, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Too many people are living those lives of quiet desperation. This is one of the reasons so many people anesthetize themselves with a never-ending, gluttonous consumption of mass entertainment, television, technology and fruitless consumerism. The rise of technology, corporatism and consumerism has slowly smothered out a way of relating to the world that seems to be almost lost forever—analogue and in-person. Along with the rise of technology has come a very strange arrogance. There are so many disillusioned and disconnected people out there prancing around because of the powerful technology they use, but what do they really use it for? We have all these shiny, almost magical things, but are we really happier, or wiser? While much of the technology we are senselessly addicted to promises us greater connectedness, people are more isolated, disconnected and lonely, than ever before in history.
People feel more and more insignificant, cut-off and powerless. We are buried in a mountain of information, technology, gadgets, goods and manufactured complexities. We are lost and rendered nearly invisible in a digital snowstorm of super-connectivity. It is a form of anonymity through mass-connection. True community has been nearly eviscerated, and a tactile-less mockery of community has been put in its place. Houses and apartments have become cubical prison-tombs, where millions of screen-irradiated mummies hide from the sunlight, nature, and genuine social interaction. People have social anxiety because of their lack of experience relating to humans in person. At airports and restaurants people eat alone, and strangers seldom talk. Everyone is texting, emailing, rushing, surfing and being connection-entertained with social media, and yet somehow, we are tragically ALONE.
Absent the vital lessons attained through simple face-to-face community interactions, and tainted by the identity propaganda being mass-ejected out of the media weapons for the highest bidders, people soon become observers of life rather than participants. They begin seeing the "good life" as something to attain through goods, services, and external providers, and forget that the so-called Kingdom of Heaven is within. It is almost as though people are suffering from dissociative personality disorder, where the constructed consumer-self has no close relationships, except with need providers. Even our life partners can become just another external need provider. Modern consumer life is like a mass dissociative disorder which prevents people from experiencing essential truth, real-life community, universal rites of passage and even an acceptable and reasonable death. Consumer life is essentially a social psychology framework, which seeks to keep your consciousness plugged into their head-end of ideals and created needs, for profit. The result of this assault is a growing culture of fear-subdued, disconnected, isolated and mass-distracted people who feel powerless.
— Bryant McGill