The First Critics of Modern Life
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- Опубликовано: 27 сен 2024
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Script & sources at: www.thenandnow.co/2023/07/01/the-first-critics-of-modern-life/
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Then & Now Insighting, thank you I learn from all your videos.
Bro I hate modern life so much, I’m from the Caribbean and every time I go back it’s such a contrast from my job as an analyst in London, so much of it is simply intentional obfuscation and information overload and you pay to be unconfused and that’s called our service industry. It’s a normative statement taken for granted that the advancement of technology has made us better off. This is just ridiculous at this point.
I never watch a 'Then & Now' video as soon as I see the upload and that's a compliment because I need to pick a quiet moment where I can watch it with full attention.
I found your channel only recently, but I'm awed by your videos. Both in content and production. With great thoughtfulness, you clearly put into words ideas which have been loosely swimming around my mind forever. How lucky are we to have access to this quality education resource.
also, your writing is like poetry.
I to have been thinking of these ideas as well. His videos are amazing. Good comment btw.
It's always a great day when there's a new Then & Now upload.
I can see that finally I have found a channel with commonality. A echo chamber I’m happy to be stood within . Great videos and the thoughtful content is right up my street .
That's a good way of wording it.
Really well put together aren't they.👍
Precisely.
@Alex Lawson ???
I hate modern life. I am a government employee. I wanted to help make society better, but now I just long for a simple life, without the hectic information barrage of email, internet and all other mediaforms. Not simple stupid, but simple slow. I don't mind a busy environment, but modern life isn't busy it's continuous information overload.
One aspect that's weighing ALL of us down, which this Professor also covers in another of his fascinating videos, is the phenomenon of Bureaucracy.
If you were born a thousand years ago would the contempt go away or simply transform to another aspect?
@@wmgodfrey1770 yes, but there is no easy alternative. Society has become so complex, there are so many mechanisms needed to keep it glued together, it"s more a symptom than a cause.
@@DogmaticAtheist I don't know. I know every period has its issues to be bothered by, I can only comment on my experiences.
I resemble this remark.
"Art is the goal. Craft is how to get there." (Robert Fripp)
This is brilliant. After walking through Paisley and East Kilbride town centres today at wondered about the parallels between early stage capitalism and those who commented on it with what lies ahead for the traditional town centres
Phenomenal video as always. There is something about this video, that echoes the one the author did on Baudrillard, which suggests that as society advances, it's population feels increasing removed from a life that feels connected and real: to the earth, to each other, to one's work etc. i.e. As we scale population, production etc., we individually feel more atomized, and alien to the whole. I'm a corporate worker bee in my early 40s, and I find myself increasingly fantasizing about moving to smaller city than LA, where I can buy some land, have a craft and build a shop, know the people in my community, and my neighbors, adventure with my dog, walk and bike to places instead of driving a car, and reflect, write, teach and help others, whose identity and persons are physically known and meaningful to me. The hyperreality that is my world now, digital, distant, and yet omnipresent, feels wholeheartedly unsatiating, like consuming mounds of sugar for the dopamine rush, only to find myself feeling increasingly nauseous, and then crashing soon after.
If nature and culture shouldn't be antithetical, but one and the same, then these feelings - which I suspect are not limited to me alone - suggest we have not figured it out at scale. And if the author argues that "play" is central to this harmony, then I don't know where & how that does/can exist, within the current dominant utilitarian paradigm that we call 'free market capitalism'; corporate PR propaganda such as 'Google's 20% time,' notwithstanding.
Curious if anyone knows a city/town wherein I could pursue this dream, and/or, if anyone has ideas on how this problem could be solved more globally? Curious what's inspiring Lewis to move from London, and if he'd care to comment?
The smaller cities have followed the same pattern of atomization and dehumanization, its wherein the mindless system to let that happen, also if you have saved up, its your choice how to dispose of it, better places for advice than this
@@averayugen7802 There are resemblances, sure. But I'm not sure what you are proposing instead, and why? My question is about where to live and work, grow, develop, and contribute; not where to go shopping.
You know, that it is an idealized escapist fantasy. The reality is never like that. Especially now.
"If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person."
- Seneca
If modern life is atomizing, then we ourselves should strive to connect. If we don't have free time from work to be creative we must fight for better working conditions. Basically, it's fight or flight situation, except it's nowhere to flight.
The problem is not in the vague "modern life", the problem is in the current dominant exploitative soicio-economic system, that increasingly leaves no room for deep human needs - offering surface level consumerism instead as the point of life.
@@alexxx4434 I'm not playing the same games as Seneca or the majority of historical figures we've learned about growing up - nobles & generals. Maybe other people want surface level consumerism or don't care enough to change it, and my job is not to change them. And I don't believe we can achieve a higher order of humanity if its orientation is born out of fight or flight. I'm just looking for others with whom I can "inquire & create". IFF that exists nowhere now, then I'll be willing to more seriously consider your cynical proposal.
@@farzadfazeliani3958 If you're fortunate enough to work from home and financially capable, you could seriously look into purchasing countryside property provided there is reliable internet access?
I know many people who work in university, and are fortunate enough to own countryside cottages. It'd not a fix for society and obviously very privileged, it's more of a coping mechanism to keep oneself from losing your mind. Many go to the countyside like it's an escape.
I totally understand how you feel, I feel the same way. I have friends in the city, but they are totally caught up in it and don't see it, and I feel disconnected from them. I'd rather live in a small community...
Love everything about your videos, fantastic style, commentary and content. Sound quality is superb now compared to your older videos. Can't wait for more!
This is an informative video that can enlighten us about other things that do matter in this lifetime. We appreciate all your hard work and effort into producing these types of videos. Keep up the good work. May this channel be blessed.
sussy
Oh, that last "like and subscribe" sure hit different this time.
As beautiful ,poetic and thought provoking as usual, this channel always reminds my favourite things in life are a synthesis of feeling and thought, genuinely my favourite channel on RUclips , Ty for the amazing content!
Discovered this channel today... Top tier content! Really hits where it matters. Thank you!
This is a great tone piece and a reflection on modern life. Keep it up!
fascinating arguments on modernity whether it be in acceptance or objection. keep your objective outlook because there are so few sources and thinkers to trust to do just this.
Lovely. Thanks again. This one really touches me. Best
I' m floating while listening to this. Thank you .
By far my fav yt channel
We need like 3 or 4 hours of this haha
Thanks!
The Amish were right all along. They are more intelligent than us all combined.
Hello Lewis! Please make a video essay about Emmanuel Levinas' ethics and encountering another person. That would be great!
Enjoyable video! Although the closed captions differ quite a bit from your spoken script.
I wash myself with a rag on a stick
Good lad
Please start listing the music in the description. I know most of it is royalty free muzak but some of it is so beautiful.
Even if its just a list without timestamps or anything i can do the work, pls man. love the content.
insane production value
Thank you for your incredible work.
This was just what I needed, Love it!!!
Your storytelling is so captivating! Thx for your work.
Pretty good at 1.25 speed. That's the problem with life, too.
The Separation of Town and Country is one of the fundamental contradictions along with the same process for natural systems, the Metabolic Rift. Our cities only exist as products of pillaging the countryside, and the uneven development of the countryside only intensifies as the cities demand more. There's no hope of solving that without some sort of reintegration of the two.
Real shit
What we all are running for? Is it only because someone is moving in front of us? Alas, that's not life, nor even worth these fuss!
We live in a time in which words mean more than actions. This results in corrupt leaders and dysfunctional governance unaccountable to a manufacturing consent press.
43 years ago, I saw the cities with people stacked on people, streets after streets of people packed together. I imagined billions of chimps in the same circumstance. we wouldn't allow other primates to live in such a crowded and exploited state. we are apes also.
I have lived in the Sierra Nevada since I left the city 34 years ago.
For me surveillance and protests became a start point to notice changes in reality. And I started to think that even minimalistic design we have is so close to the design of asylum
21:24 This bridge is beautiful!
I live in UK, work in London, also finding something missing. Love the video. I'm hoping 4 day work week, and removal of cars from cities and town centres will help slow this mad pace of modern life. Thoughts?
I kind of agree with you. I have never gave removal of cars much attention and I could see how much enjoyment I would get from a group bike ride. Though I really think computers such as smartphones have a negative effect on people. I like the access smartphones bring to the world but I feel like we are becoming more disconnected. We are being over entertained by content about life rather than life itself. Idk just my two cents.
Remove cars, bring more migrants for cheap labor and plant more trees
Excellent big picture ideas and review of historical commentaries which are still relevant today. Industrial society is all about maximum efficiency and utility- today the algorithm rules for this utility and a kind of 'sinister surveillance.It is all about the spreadsheet, the buying & selling and the ever watchful lens everywhere. Interesting to see some people going off grid, raising thief own food...but unless we want no contact with others at all, we still might. want to communicate with someone somewhere sometime. Our technology is a boon but also a burden.Enjoyed a poetry slam. Some of the readers where computer specialists...people like to have a creative outlet.Among others, Russell explored such ideas...Recently saw a short book about 'unplugging' going to read it, but the topic is very telling..well, gotta finish this spreadsheet...interesting. how we can create our own apps. without extensive traong..the question is - to what ends
Great job you nailed on this one. I love it!!!
I wonder what they would have thought of the invention of plastics?
Damn. Really great video. Sincerely.
You have communicated some Beautiful Truths in your video. I thank you for that.
Great video
2:53 I never knew Lou Reed once worked as a welder.
@17:20... Notice... If the individual is an interchangeable unit of the 'we', then mystery and play, that which is ONLY available to the individual, is deprioritized.
Fantastic video as always!
Great Video !! Albert Camus !! that is what I want, a full video
Modern life isn't better it's worse time to reverse the curse
How is that what you got from this video
Great work, though I think Ruskin would have been a great addition to the writers discussed in this video; perhaps he is slightly later than you were aiming for.
I adore all your posts, watch them again and again, love you always try to find the humanistic side .
Very well done, thank you 🙂
I worked on ambualnces for most of my twenties. If you want to see the downsides of modernity, be an ambulance crew member. There, you will have a front row seat to the overdoses, car crashes, homelessness, suicides and social diseases.
Hoping for a mention of Jacques Ellul and Neil Postman :)
Great video.
*Victorian England teacher:* "FaCtS dOnT'CaRe AbOuT YoUr FeElInGs!"
- Dickens
You should never, ever, idealize "the past". It might give us some advice, but never the solution to things we perceive as wrong or unjust. Peoples all over the world embraced modernism, the only alternatives are "reservations" or "protected areas" which are kind of curated out of the modernized world and heavily dependant on its good will.
I wish I had more people in my life that thought like this too. I suppose i should take some responsibility and seek them out, I know they're out there
Could have been twice as short.
If ironic, this is a genius comment considering the video’s musings on utility. If not, well…
The older mode of living before modernity suits the human nature better. I don't know if you can even call the modern lifestyle as "living", in the true sense. "Modern", to me, is synonymous with "fake" and "plastic". It's become a filthy word for me now.
The more we have capitalism instead of social democracy, the more we gonna suffer from modernity.
Throw me into the amazon. I'm done with this concrete nightmare of exploitation
Does anyone know the title of the Ernst Hoffman book mentioned at 13:00?
top 5 things i've watched. thanks.
Excellent video. However, I thought the sound of you breathing in is a little too distracting. This was probably done to make it feel more human and not robotic but still found it odd.
If this video resonates with you, it might be worth checking out Julius Evola’s “Revolt Against the Modern World”. The book does a lot to explain the emptiness of progress
Evola was a fascist
@@davidh7779 have you read the book?
@@davidh7779 he wasn't
The fin-Market have underperformed the U.S. economy as fear of inflation hammers the prices of stock;s and bonds. My portfoliio of $250k is down to $192k any recommendation;s to scale up my return;s during this crash will be highly appreciated.
The stock markett rally is still in force, but the major indexes, sectors and especially leading stocks are prone to reversals. I recommend you seek the guidance a broker or financiaI advsor.
I agree, having a brokerage advisor for inveesting is genius! Not long ago amidst the pandemic crash in March 2020, I was really having inveesting nightmare prior touching base with a advisor. In a nutshell, i've accrued over $550k with the help of my advisor from an initial $120k investment thus far
that's impressive!, I could really use the expertise of this advsors , my portfoIio has been down bad....who’s the person guiding you.
I just looked up the broker you suggested on Google and I'm incredibly impressed with his credentials, so thank you for sharing. I'm going to send him an email right away.
And what about love?
Beautifully spoken and researched
Even if I respect the critics of modernity, I enjoy it, especially my internet and the access to information and knowledge that I get starting with my education that I would probably never had got two centuries ago. Nostalgia shouldn't blind people on how many people devoted their lifes to for what they can enjoy now.
Robert Burns "Ode to a mouse"
People… just open your damn eyes, very wide open. Open your heart, think with your heart and MAKE USE of your own mind. Beside of all that endless stress and stream of bullsh*t captivating us every day everywhere.
Fantastic.
I can’t stand modern life that we have become money making machine to survive…. It’s killing me inside slowly….
I really love these type of philosophical videos.
Walking around looking like he's on BBC amazing production
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
We are God they say.
We are the centre of
the universe.
thank you for those beautiful videos, not too complicated, but full of wisdom and always relevant ❤️
William Blake was
I'm really curious what you think about the new AI art generators.
Its a scam
It's an inevitable progression. Hate it or love it, just like how cars replaced horse carts and machines replace human labor and digital replaces analogue, it is already here and it's only gonna get better at its task.
@@f1r3hunt3rz5 And yet a lot of technology we thought was harmless at the beginning, has proven to be very destructive in the long term. We're so blinded by the positive aspects that we don't even consider the downsides. Like for instance, it worries me that it's pretty much impossible to make anti-AI art, because AI can just eat it up, metabolize it and make infinite iterations out of it. We can't do what impressionists did when photography came out, so we're really not dealing with the same kind of technological progress. It's something else.
Only the fool will scorn the wonders which Science has given man, though we do well to pause and remember Diseraeli's perceptive remark that; The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few Scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization. " ______ Paul burton, "The Secret Path".
those old geezers in black and white may be right, but to me, first thought went to some talented londonian musicians who made a whole album around that topic: modern life is rubbish. And that was waay back in the 90s.
BRAVO! Let's make art, nature, and play mandatory directions. Add more pre-modern to our modern world. If the wheel is the symbol of modernity, then postmodernism and poststructuralism is that wheel run off of its axle. Off the tracks. Our Mind is in abstract play in its natural state of the divine art of life. Postmodernity is just modernity out of control, let's put it back.
a man receives a letter in the mail stating : "this is a message from a foreign government requesting your response on the matter of your environment...we have reason to believe other countries desire your land & we are not able to confirm our ability to defend it...if you have questions, send it to - blah blah obscure p.o. box"
::cue the strange camera stress & ultra future macgyver music::
I don't know, I kind of like modern life, things like electricity or antibiotics.
You are confusing technology with lifestyle. The modern delusion that progress is technology, when in fact technology is always evolving, because usually it is discovered by chance.
The very proof in this is the modern persons need to take a break to get out in nature. How ridiculous to think that you are seperate from nature.
It’s like a child that sits in a sandbox and builds a sandcastle and then calls themself king. The reality is that they are a child in a sand box.
One day someone might laugh at your electricity and antibiotics. The same way you might laugh at a caveman’s fire and moss.
It doesn’t make the person in the future better than you, or you better than the caveman. Each of you have or had their own challenges to come and should appreciate that there could not of been one without the other.
And that I believe is what is lacking in the present, instead the modern person has a disdain for the past and a contempt for the future.
Never can the modern person imagine that it could have been better or could be better.
Maybe that actually makes the modern person the worst?
I am against heartless capitalism, guided age principles,; but I am even more against heartless socialism, and that economic heresy, communism. All ways to divide up the loot. What do you expect In materialistic and "scientific" civilization, that idolized meaninglessness ignorance in its intellectual pursuits. Reminds me of Pollock tossing paint on his canvasses and dying of alcoholism. Well, there is meaning for our lives , and may God give people the grace to find it in Christ.
First class! Bittersweet.
It’s a cliche to say your goal in life is to make the world a better life. Why is that what young people aspire to? Where does that come from? What would people have said in other centuries. I find it weird that everyone feels that responsibility - as if they could even if they wanted to.
Song at 1:20?
"We. Can. Look. At. The. Past. But, I. Dont. Know." This guy
One of the many things I hate most about modern life is widespread sexual promiscuity. People sleeping around and cheating on their partners in the name of "individual liberty" and "choice".
The consequences of overshoot are far more eminent and dire than ever. Unfortunately we are still seeking political "solutions", but government is what enabled the very destruction we are witnessing today. The concept of money itself is a plague on this planet, and even further upstream is the concept of ownership. Possession is a universal reality which is easily proven with empirical evidence. The concept of ownership on the other hand requires a legal system and is therefore a legal fallacy. And to go back upstream even further is to discover the original "sin", which we need only to observe our own anatomy, physiology and biology to prove. By far the longest period of human existence was as tropical and subtropical frugivorous primates. Just as we can observe that all life on this planet has a species specific environment and diet, so too do humans. When an invasive species is introduced to a symbiotic environment chaos ensues. Yet we are too smart for our own good. Wisdom has been chasing us, but we've always been a little faster.
I would subscribe to patreon if you paid for a narrator
Got video but evry thing originated in woods or forest but now it's concrete jungle book. Sky
But I try
No mention of Thomas Carlyle? Disappointing.
That was poor grammar replete with typos.The second to last item in my spiel. is about being able to create something without extensive expertise- another tangential effect...
I too like "Jerusalem’s naked beauty!" 😍
Economics, materialism and Scientism the false idols we worship today...great video
WOW!