Numbness

Go to the scene of any calamity in our modern USA-influenced commercial society and ask people, callously, "How do you feel?" Most commonly they will answer with some variant of numbness. You can then laugh at them and note confidently that they have uncovered a paradox: to overcome numbness involves feeling a confrontation with value and loss that will leave one in pain at first. Someone who is numb feels nothing; someone who is in pain is busy feeling pain and numb to everything else. These "numb" people exhibit the paradoxical sensations of overcoming numbness.

Our society leaves us a numb as a whole. First, we are overwhelmed: there are too many people and specialties. Not wanting to continually defend our egos against the challenges of others, we specialize in some area and focus on one path and don't contemplate much around us. There are too many people suddenly getting absurd amounts of money and too many others dropping from grace for seemingly no reason for most people to desire sticking their heads out much. Second, we are encouraged to think on an "individual" level of our success as a matter of our convenience. Do we have money? Nice place to live? Lots of plastic electronic toys? Then we are succeeding in social status and monetary wealth, which is what our society lets us have for "power," now known as "convenience."

Convenience brings a certain numbness. There is no daily struggle except to interact with other people at jobs and organizations. There is no danger or room for radical change, so things stay the same or are altered by bureaucracy. Slowly any impulses we have toward fixing things, radical change, or emotional values in an impulse to doing what we see as "right" are buried under waves of don't-rock-the-boat type social behavior. And there's always the DVD player and TV. Cocaine on the end-table. There is no adventure, so pull up a chair and play a few video games, watch some discs, witness some fantasies that are essentially metaphors for what we all want: success. And success means greater convenience, which means more movies and plastic gadgets and neurotic habits and predictable functions.

While all of this is going on, the primary condition of human existence that society seeks to muffle - mortality, or the Binding Assurance That The Clock Is Ticking Down To Your Death - is exerting a gradually increasing pressure to find something significant in life to make it all worthwhile as the final moments trickle down the pipe before total not being. Aging people look at a life that is corrupted on one side and stunted on the other. What society values are people doing things which have no adventure or bravery in them, only mechanical shrewdness. Yet what most people do outside of social interaction is as useless and broken. The solution for most people is to avoid any kind of middle path and find the one thing that can deliver them from feeling: numbness.

While this solves their problem, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and soon a society of convenience is publically happy and privately miserable, locked into a world of no variation by its own desire to conquer mortality, threat, danger, and inconvenience. Thus only tragedies bring us sudden realization of how alive we are, and our days pass unnoticed in a slurry of insignificant actions.