“On one hand the layman who enjoyed art should educate himself to become an expert. On the other hand, he should also behave as a competent consumer who uses art and relates aesthetic experiences to his own life problems.” (Habermas, 12)
I decided to use this quote from Habermas’s “Modernity—An Incomplete Project” because I feel as though we can relate to it the most. Nowadays we see so many people dedicating their lives to something they don’t truly understand. They might do it for the money or they might do it because everyone else says that they should do it, but they lack that connection to whatever ‘it’ is. They fail to relate whatever ‘it’ is to their own experiences in life, their shortcomings, or their accomplishments. I feel like this is one of the reasons why so many people in the world have extreme eternal dread, that wonder asking why am I actually doing this. Why am I here? We are constantly asking that because we haven’t found that thing that we love, that thing that makes the time fly by without us realizing it. One of the main characteristics of our culture is the mask we all wear to present to society. People do things without truly connecting with them, usually because someone else said it was cool, that emotionless consumerist mindset. We don’t act in this fashion because we want to, we do it because it's the way we were programmed to think growing up in a cut-throat capitalistic society. We are merely products of our environment, no pun intended. I don’t know if there is a way to fix this flaw that is now attributed to a major portion of society, but we might be able to save ourselves. Instead of acting impulsively when it comes to anything, do or say what you truly want to. It might take a second or two to figure out if you connect to whatever ‘it’ is on a personal level, so don’t use this tactic in line at Chipotle or the deli.
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