societal disconnection Quotes

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

In our hearts... there must abide some pity for those people who have always felt themselves to be separate from even their most familiar surroundings, those people who either are foreigners or who suffer a singular point of view that makes them feel as if they’re foreigners - even in their native lands. In our hearts... there also abides a certain suspicion that such people need to feel set apart from their society. But people who initiate loneliness are no less lonely than those who are suddenly surprised by loneliness, nor are they undeserving of our pity.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Crucially we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness, with the Earth & every other living thing; we have just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other, billions of each other, only we're not living with each other our crazy selves are living with each other, and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection.

Something has gone badly wrong with our culture. We've created a culture where really large numbers of the people around us can't bear to be present in their daily lives. They need to medicate themselves to get through their day.

I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?' because we don't feel fulfilled.

When we look as a society, we've really lost the connection between our actions and the future.

It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.

Materialism has cast man into such depths that a mighty concentration of forces is necessary to raise him again. He is subject to illnesses of the nervous system which are veritable epidemics of the life of the soul.

A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

We have lost contact with reality, the simplicity of life.

I think that there is generally less of a community and that the fragmentation of the left is a symptom. I think that it is less and less possible to take for granted certain cultural references.

I've started to kind of hate people, and it's not because I have anything against them. It's just, I enjoy it. It's recreation.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

All these poses of classical torture ruined my mind like a snake in the orchard. I did go from wanting to be someone, now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue.

I think we're really hungry for family in America, especially when I feel like people are really pulled apart from their families. So, we were interested in the idea of what the extreme version of that would be.

The average American has separated his private life from his existence as a member of his society, and leaves that to the specialists in the government to take care of.