On "modernity" and human relationships

"Modernity," despite its inherent chaos, has a very positive side: amidst so much "performance," the weight of the masks eventually became too heavy to bear. Today, it is difficult to keep them on for long or to do so convincingly. The world—and the people in it—have become easier to understand, and also easier to despise or hate. Yet, psychologically, things have also become heavier. The untouchable mystery of a culture that preached uniformity in behavior and thought has given way to a plurality of behaviors—even as the pressure for uniformity in *thinking* has intensified. We are more exposed, more truly ourselves (?). Yet, knowing who we are to others—and who they are to us, even if through the caricature of a judgment—causes us more pain and unease than avoiding this fluid aridity of impressions and relationships altogether. This partly explains the ever-growing polarization and disappointment we feel toward one another. We have become so focused on the objective that we end up forgetting the subjective—the complex inner world of each individual. While we delve into the core of each person, we lose sight of the whole—a whole that can only be truly recognized and tolerated through intimacy, and which seemed easier to manage when a barrier of "normality" united us, however superficially. Perhaps the superficiality of the past was better than the "deep yet shallow" nature of today. We look inside others and quickly arrive at what or who they are—at their very entrails—yet we see no more than what we hear. Depth is useless without illumination. Mere touch was never enough to grasp the entirety of a person. Group stereotypes have migrated into individual ones. Today, there is a constant call to understand the complexities and contradictions of others—and of ourselves. Yet, moving from rhetoric to reality has become a Herculean task...