Fragmentation: the Root Cause Of Unhappiness
In past times, life has been pretty simple.
People had worked in a simple job, provided for their families, and believed (or had to believe) in God.
While this simple conception of the world may have its limitations, our ancestors had it easy from a perspective of life purpose.
In modern times, however, things have changed. Our daily life is perfectly structured and every aspect fulfills a specific purpose:
- We socialize to have fun
- We go on vacation to relax
- We do Yoga to find inner peace
- We watch entertainment to experience adventure
- We browse the internet to be informed
- We work out to get healthy
- We eat organic food to detox
But why on earth are we doing all of this?
While we may be better informed, have more fun, better health, and more comfort, our sense of meaning has been lost along the way.
One-Track Specialists
Once we have started to divide our life into manageable aspects, we have fragmented the meaning of life and, as a byproduct, have fueled the human rat race.
We have got lost in the details. We’re no longer able to derive substantial value from all of these isolated containers.
A great example is our modern medicine, which has been busy with researching human parts like the lungs, heart, or brain. There’s an expert for every tiny detail of the human body, but the soul-mind-body connection gets almost entirely ignored.
If you go to an orthopedist because of back pain, he will focus entirely on your back, but won’t pay attention to your overall physical and emotional situation. This kind of one-way thinking (container thinking) has formed the basis of modern medicine in recent history and has led to the treatment of symptoms instead of achieving holistic health.
But there are countless other container-examples in modern society:
- In school, we have subjects like maths, history, and sports.
- In business, there’s marketing, sales, and analytics.
- In your daily life, you have your career, your hobbies, and your finances.
Why We’re Becoming Aliens
Due to that fragmented meaning of life, we can no longer integrate our life aspects into a holistic framework that gives us a sense of direction and purpose. Attaining wisdom has become harder than ever.
In our rigid container lives, we have to play different roles to fulfill different expectations. Therefore, we have lost ourselves.
The philosopher Karl Marx described this phenomenon as „alienation“. Driven by industrialization and technological progress, we have become alienated from nature, people, work, and ultimately from ourselves.
In this hopeless quest for meaning, we have got distracted by the outside world. We are prone to external stimulation, be it in the form of buying products, consuming media, gaining status, or unhealthy comparison with other people.
We have fallen into a state of endless search, always looking for a solution to fix our lack of purpose. True to the motto „who stands for nothing falls for everything“.
Now is it any wonder that we have fallen victims to the rat race of life?
