You and I worked together on 9/11, and it's the last time I can remember when the clock TRULY stopped at work. Even in 2016, when I took the bus to work in downtown San Francisco the morning it was clear Trump had won the election and everyone looked totally dazed, I booted up and got going like all was the same in the world.
Somehow I've fully avoided the anomie and depression that comes from the spot-on everyday dissonance you mention but it just means something about my own physiology or brain chemistry or coping skills. It doesn't mean it's not totally real - and even logical - for so many others. The key, and I'm not sure of this, is whether it's truly unique to our age and times or part of a continuum, and we're just too self-centered and/or frankly UNABLE to know if this is the way it's always been.
Thanks for the comment, old friend. I think this brand of cognitive dissonance is a dimension of modernity, meaning it has not *always* been with us, but it has been for a couple centuries or so. You can see it in clashes between the Enlightenment philosophers and the Romantics and then in the political discourse around successive wars all the way to the present.
And now I think we're living in a time where factors that produce cognitive dissonance in us are more pervasive than ever. And the extreme opposites we encounter and try to reconcile in our minds are more extreme than ever.
You and I worked together on 9/11, and it's the last time I can remember when the clock TRULY stopped at work. Even in 2016, when I took the bus to work in downtown San Francisco the morning it was clear Trump had won the election and everyone looked totally dazed, I booted up and got going like all was the same in the world.
Somehow I've fully avoided the anomie and depression that comes from the spot-on everyday dissonance you mention but it just means something about my own physiology or brain chemistry or coping skills. It doesn't mean it's not totally real - and even logical - for so many others. The key, and I'm not sure of this, is whether it's truly unique to our age and times or part of a continuum, and we're just too self-centered and/or frankly UNABLE to know if this is the way it's always been.
Thanks for the comment, old friend. I think this brand of cognitive dissonance is a dimension of modernity, meaning it has not *always* been with us, but it has been for a couple centuries or so. You can see it in clashes between the Enlightenment philosophers and the Romantics and then in the political discourse around successive wars all the way to the present.
And now I think we're living in a time where factors that produce cognitive dissonance in us are more pervasive than ever. And the extreme opposites we encounter and try to reconcile in our minds are more extreme than ever.