Novelty vs Depth

I live a rather stolid, uninteresting and arguably unhealthy lifestyle mentally speaking. I don't care much to leave my house, I have very few friends, and I have a niche of interests that even fewer care to know about. I wouldn't recommend the way I choose to live to anyone. I also concede that my lifestyle is the culmination of some emotionally immature perspectives reinforced by isolation, asocial behavior and overly understanding caretakers throughout my life. I know I'm not alone per se in the way that I feel about the world. However, the people who feel similarly prefer to stay to themselves as I do.

I know that I don't have the full picture due to a lack of real world experience. By most accounts, I'm merely an under-socialized, overly sensitive, privileged white boy who needs to accept and integrate into the world presented to him. I am a "Peter Pan" of the most stereotypical and disappointing variety. Despite this, I think I and people like me have a uniquely detached perspective that is scoffed at for being ignorant, infantile or just ridiculous. I'm not saying that it is better, or special, or anything of the sort. However, I think those who have had to contend with and compartmentalize the harsh truths of reality without a safety net, with no help, struggling every step of the way have tragically lost sight of what gives life it's luster and beauty.

Luster and Beauty are purely subjective aesthetic terms that don't form the basis of an objective argument though. However unqualified I may be to comment on society and culture, due to my privileged ignorance, I believe that modern life has made people sick. This sickness that I speak of, boils down to the imbalance of Novelty and Depth in our lives. Why does this even matter though?

Modern technologies such as social media, television, internet have, by design, turned us into chronic seekers of the new and "interesting". The dopamine centers of our brain, our attention, and lives have been hijacked by corporations, foreign and domestic. We are now addicted to exactly what increases their bottom line. It's not even a physical product we can get intrinsic value and use of anymore. Instead, it is an exploitation of our evolutionary mechanisms of survival. In particular, but not exclusively, our psychological dependency on Novelty.

This human desire for novelty stems from the fact that, in the past, we needed to know as much as possible. If we didn't there was a good chance that we wouldn't survive or our quality of life would be severely diminished. This helped people diversify their knowledge, bring more value to society and increase quality of life. While this is actually a good thing, what we fail to realize is that the scope of people's lives was considerably narrower than it is now. Their access to information was limited. Now? We have all the accumulated information of nearly every human to ever live in our pockets.

Whether we believe it or not, human beings have complex emotional needs. When these needs are not met, we become frustrated, despondent and ultimately nihilistic. We all have different needs and thresholds for those needs being met. On average though, most of us want meaning, connection, a feeling of continuity that is not being supplied by our everyday habits of consumerism and addiction. Instead of trying to fulfill those needs, the majority tries to fill that void with even more novelty of experience. Casual friendships, casual sex, passive intake of irrelevant information etc. "If I experience and jade myself enough, maybe I won't care that I feel empty inside?". The result is the reinforcement of a superficial, shallow, and externally oriented view of the world that leads to an absurdist philosophy and often, subsequently, insanity. Essentially, we know too much, we crave more, and it's killing us.

To find depth and meaning again I think asking ourselves 'why?' instead of 'what or how much?' is an important step toward understanding our often neglected and atrophied emotional selves. Less is more. A philosophy of "less is more" is unfortunately only reserved to our views on toilet paper now. Ironically though, it is exactly what is needed to balance a world that has striven so hard to get more in order to survive. But what is the point of survival and accumulation if you forfeit your internal identity in the process? How will you ever realize your own value and the value of everyone by being terminally motivated by externals? We are unknowingly being exploited out of our birth right to be emotionally and intellectually dynamic creatures. For what? A proverbial bowl of lentils called novelty? Rarely do you see any type of reflective, introspective, aspiring lifestyle being lauded that isn't directly associated with just another passing fad or trend to capitalize and profit off your attention.

Most likely I'm just projecting my own personal issues onto a world I know little to nothing about. But why do I and an increasing number of other young people feel next to no desire to participate in society? A society that emphasizes and encourages surface level interaction and living as the norm. A place where it's always about finding the next new thing instead of developing a relationship with that which already exists? Overly sensitive? Maybe. Immature? Perhaps. Ignorant? Probably. But I'd rather live a life of reflective appreciation than being enslaved to the ephemeral and transitory superficiality of a culture that never finds enough in anything.