Unless technology itself is drastically repressed, the idea of the dystopian monoculture like Orwell's 1984 gets harder to believe. But the danger of a solipsistic society will grow, of a disconnected society of mirror-watchers and navel-gazers.
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
There's no "brothers" when it comes to white people. We are just complete individuals. We don't care about each other. He's not my brother; my brother lives in Ohio - I don't know that guy.
Sometimes I'm having conversations with my friends, and I feel like they can't relate to me anymore. I'm like, 'Oh, my God, let me tell you about my experience on 'Fallon'!' And they'll be like, 'Oh, my God, let me tell you about my trip to the mall!' It sometimes feels lonely.
Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.
We tell girls to be themselves, but then they have role models - sometimes too many role models - in popular culture who incarnate that kind of disconnectedness from oneself. We are taught to self-hate; we are taught to doubt. Our culture doesn't help us recognize ourselves as amazing beings without changing ourselves.
You can meet lots of actors who are in their own world and do their own thing, and they have no idea what's going on and they don't know anyone's name around them.
So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement.
Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.
Most of us live in artificial environments and then we go to work in artificial environments and the world becomes something that you see through a window.
One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.
We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.
If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.
Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless fragments.
I read somewhere once that in the 1960s, fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem - more profound, I think - is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact.
We have a million ways to get ahold of people, and we're the loneliest we've ever been.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
When you're on a submarine you're usually underwater for months at a time, and you don't get to Skype or make phone calls. When you get messages, they're maybe two sentences. They're very short.
When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind.
There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.
We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.
There's a lot wrong [with American universities]. I'd remove 3/4 of the faculty - everything but the hard sciences. But nobody's going to do that, so we'll have to live with the defects. It's amazing how wrongheaded [the teaching is]. There is fatal disconnectedness. You have these squirrelly people in each department who don't see the big picture.
I don't have social media so I'm kind of in a bubble, but I hear there's a lot going on.
LA isn’t a walking city, or a subway city, so if someone isn’t in my house or my car we’ll never be together, not even for a moment. And just to be absolutely sure of that, when I leave my car my iPhone escorts me, letting everyone else in the post office know that I’m not really with them, I’m with my own people, who are so hilarious that I can’t help smiling to myself as I text them back.
