Liquid Society

Liquid Modernity

We're made of relationships. Generally to each other, but we can mould and morph to objects of appeal. Replacements for the lack we might suffer in regard to human relationships. Or augmentations. But life is nothing without these relations. Modernity has made relationships into a vast field of possibilities. Choice and our general alienation has forced decisions into what will profit us most. By profit, I mean primarily job, financial, security. Added to that, if the option of choice allows, is satisfaction and respect. The idea of self-respect as an island-unto-itself is untenable. It's only through connection with others efforts and cooperation that our sense of self has any chance of developing.

But society is now so liquid in nature that the usual means of life, living and connection are filtered through tenuous relationships of all kinds. The ground of our personalities are constantly shifting so that job security and any formal structuring becomes important to the degree of dictating our personalities. We become a formalized aspect of the system. Logging into life and relationships as automatons, we're obscured from each other as flesh and emotional beings. Relationships rely on time and empathy. In this age, our time is quantified and made precious by indusatries wishing to sell us the good use of time. For them, it involves the use of their particular product. They tend to win us over, at least temporarily, and our real relationships are put on the back burner, or take a complete nose-dive. Our times tend to demand a chamelleonic personality. The kind that might work for business and surface gatherings, but that you wouldn't trust to a long, lasting, relationship.

We're potentially car salemen in the making. Perusing each other as if we're all each others customers. Looking for points of weakness or some usable aspect of a personality-trait to our advantage. Psychotics in the making. Our use of each other becomes the de regueur trait that disunites us, except in transactions of finance and sometimes related favours. The liquid that helps these liquid approaches of living is money. of course. The advantages of liquidity, for those prepared to surf the wave, or embrace the modern, are the constant changes that technology creates. At this point it might seem that we've all reached the threshold and capacity for absorbing and working with these changes. That a technological Singularity might be the only way in which we might benefit the structuring and organization capacities of technology, whilst maintaining our sanity and returning to a securing way of living, as the social beings that we fundamentally are. Liquidity of being is not a sustainable approach to our humanity. It too much relies on disconnections in a world no longer proped up by an overarching meaning, ie. religion, myth, etc.