We include ourselves among the great many who mourn the ever-increasing societal trend toward personal insularity. In our view, such insalubrious change is the predictably empirical root and branch of ubiquitous discontent, and conceivably, the requisite element for the recent, unprecedented election of an amoral and repugnant personality to the office of the traditionally august American Presidency
Our thematically worrisome anti-societal trend is plainly evidenced by the observable decline in communal interactive functions such as picnics, barbeques, get-togethers, and community outings; and, notably, the rare, if at all still existent, practice of meaningful social and political conversation.
In contradistinction to the history of societal participation in communally oriented tasks for mutual benefit, individuals have observably withdrawn into a reductive, personalized, private world of their own. This latter development is empirically productive of feelings of loneliness and insecurity and ultimately, of personal discontent. It sadly appears that traditionally communal pleasures such as picnics, barbeques, square dances, and multiple other areas of beneficial, interactive participations have ubiquitously surrendered to preferento insular, personally reductive aspirations, designed exclusively for material success and occasional, ephemeral entertainment.
Regular readers of this blogspace are doubtlessly aware that we emphatically attribute the toxic etiology of such negative trends to the inadequate (and unsatisfying) mode of interactive communication, attributable to the notably impersonal “smart phone,” and the consequent diminution of emotionally required, recognizable, and self-affirming interaction.
Among the myriad of distressing sequelae of such degradation of interactive relations was the universal accommodation to such personally less satisfying, facile “advance” social exchange, and its resultant hobbling of the pathway for the humanistic need to effectively share thoughts and experiences. The existential element in enduring societal relationships is the empirical sharing of feelings and experiences, now significantly minimized by the inadequately cold digital exchange transmitted to small, lighted, handheld devices, often received without temporal relevance.
The ensuing trend of societally injurious isolation is empirically evidenced by, among other things, the costly emotional loss of a vital, healthy, self-affirming interaction with others and the myriad of personal benefits, social and psychological, derived from shared communal living; the diminution of the latter empirically resulting to feelings of personal isolation and insularity.
To be fair, the pandemic played its concommitantly injurious part in the necessitating of the prophylactic isolation of members of the community aggravated by the disease- preventative masking of individual identity; however, we are of the view that the insalubrious trend to anti-social insularity is notably, the consequence of the foolhardy human inclination to favor perceived facile mechanical devices, thoughtlessly, to the societally harmful and unthinking exclusion of emotionally required, expressive modes of personal interaction.
The Pinocchio-like, thoughtless seduction of computer facility, metastasized into a pernicious virus, amounting to a universal desire for further impersonal facility by way of robotization, exemplified by devices such as, “Alexa” remote actuators, robot-assisted driving, robotic vacuum cleaning, and auto-directional devices, as well as dating services, encyclopedic telephones (as opposed to the enriching and affirming activity of personal research), to the development of drones, personalized digital health watches, computerized books (in ignorant contrast to the tactual pleasure of holding a book and arbitrarily turning the page), the mechanization of the concept of”friend” and perhaps, morfe extremde, the scholastic cheating utility of A.I.,
The exclusive quest for individualized convenience and facility is demonstrated in the desire to attend an institution of higher education for the singular purpose of the future acquisition of a job, rather than, concomitantly, for a more mature perspective and personal growth. It sadly appears that no universal principles of sophisticated insight are of recognizable utility to the analogous, insular island located among a perceived geographic archipelago of similar, unrelated islands.
Such a thematic, disparate, insular, and perceptively individualized existence of the modern individual extends perforce to family matters. Family gatherings before the television or formerly, before the family radio, even at mealtime, have become empirically rare and anachronistic. The infrequent attendance at family dinner, often punctuated by a young member of the assembled family, engaged in consulting his or her smartphone surreptitiously under the table, is not an exotic occurrence.
We are greatly troubled by the evident lack of a mature, healthy, and empathic World perspective, analogous to the “geological phenomena” of separate and remote human islands in the unattached archipelago of human society
-p.
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