A Social Malaise

During a recent dinner with friends and acquaintances, some old and some new, the topics of talks turned, as it often does these days, to the problems of social anxieties; how it is consuming everyone; how the very technologies that we have developed to save time and thereby lessen anxiety have only degraded the quality of the former and exacerbated the latter; how we all need to “give ourselves a break”, before we implode. Everyone has some means of relief--yoga, writing a blog, soccer, a visit to your fashionable psychiatrist every Wednesday- but the very manner in which those activities are framed as separate from normal or regular life suggests the extent to which that so called relief is temporary,(if even that: some will admit that those "personal recreational” activities partake of the very same simmering, near-obsessive panic as the rest of their lives).
There is something circular and static to our conversations, which doesn’t end so much as fizzle indeterminately out…
Imagine that the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not the biodiversity, it is not the impending collapse of the ozone layer, it is not the rapid growth of world-wide ghettos, the daily loss of jobs everywhere, the dry mouth and tongue, or the diseases stalking everywhere as insatiable consumerism devours anything without any concern. Imagine the problem is not some latest syndrome of the global society that can be solved by commissions or laws or redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes much deeper, right to the core of what we term our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our so called civilization, our respective governments are sick and that most of the global population is mentally ill and spiritually dead-- that all our issues and crises are but symptoms of this deeper sickness.
The problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more...