2020-09-18

Last updated Aug 15, 2023

Sources/SocSci 12 - Class

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIdflecvQG8&feature=emb_title

• why modernity is a tragedy:
  • whenever people fail, they can only blame themselves, and not the god or other outside phenomena
  • suicide rates are up. more in love with success; more likely to kill themselves when they fail
  • Myth: we are all equal. the world is simply a meritocracy
  • Reality: outbreak of comparison, and ENVY
  • Why do we remain mediocre?
  • The psychological burden of a simple ordinary life has become hugely harder
  • modernity has also left us emotionally bereft
    • the belief of one special person has made our surrounding relationships difficult
  • What we do defines us first
  • Stripped of our right to feel despair
  • Modernity is a kind of dissonance, and understanding it will be the cure.

Souvenirs? More than if I had lived a thousand years! ==No chest of drawers== crammed with documents, love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills, a lock of someone’s hair rolled up in a deed, ==hides so many secrets as my brain.== This branching catacombs, this pyramid contains more corpses than the potter’s field: I am a graveyard that the moon abhors, where long worms like ==regrets== come out to feed most ravenously on my dearest dead. I am an old boudoir where a rack of gowns, perfumed by withered roses, rots to dust; where only faint pastels and pale Bouchers inhale the scent of long-unstoppered flasks. Nothing is ==slower== than the limping days when under the heavy weather of the years ==Boredom==, the fruit of glum indifference, gains the dimension of eternity . . . Hereafter, mortal clay, ==you are no more than a rock encircled by a nameless dread, an ancient sphinx omitted from the map, forgotten by the world,== and whose fierce moods sing only to the rays of setting suns.