HUMAN beings are hylomorphic creatures, possessing an intricately evolved body and a quintessential soul. It is the latter part that makes us different—whether superior or not, I don’t know—but definitely eccentric and dearly interesting. Being conscious beings, we are aware of ourselves and the realization that other consciousnesses are also aware of themselves. This is the theatre within which we do what we do throughout the theatrics of our whole life until the ultimate waning.
“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows,” said Rocky Balboa. The time we do live encompasses moments—moments of dynamism: euphoria, edification, animation, gloom, and so on. It is like a heteromorphic kaleidoscope: changing forms with every errand. To name one hue out of the continuum of oxymoronic bearings is like sampling a patch from a lush rainbow. Contrarily, life is multi-faceted with rather no persistent countenance at all, like “Mystique” from X-men: ever-changing form yet one existence. Or like Van Gogh’s Starry Night, life is everything merging in and emerging out of everything.
The curse of the post-modernism, post-truth currents of the 21st century and its stalwarts have formidably demonized raw incompleteness in the public consciousness. Self-help gurus have departmentalized ever-changing human emotional subtleties into “good” and “bad” bearings. This is utterly counterintuitive: like naming “red” as lesser to “blue.”
Nowadays, especially post-social media, everything is littered with farcical positivity so much so that our once singular experiences have been commodified into opportunities for “learning”. “Learning from failures” is what they say. Whatever one does, he/she has this notion of success/failure and whatnot in it. There are no neutral strolls anymore. No one can now even genuinely enjoy failure—without the baggage of some visionary futuristic outlook.
The epitome of this erratic behavior is generally the posters on LinkedIn, where everyone is selling themselves as the ultimate object to be influenced by, and striving to be the juggernaut of positivity, extracting valuable (read: superficial) insights from everyday humdrum experiences. They dictate how to be “successful” by exploiting terms like “Leadership,” “Resilience,” “Sustainability,” “Inclusion,” and others.I am mostly oblivious to what is actually being meant, and I suspect that those who exploit these terms as buzzwords are often aloof and uninspired individuals who themselves lack a clear understanding of what these terms truly mean. Prima facie, the only motivation to include these is to remain in vogue.
“Success” as a conception is projected as some high-level, esoteric revelation. And concurrently, the allegedly “successful” person is pretty ardent to teach how they became successful in a month or so by unleashing an artificially pseudo-intellectual, yet wordy, mantra for a hefty fee. It doesn’t make any sense. Why would I charge if I want to disseminate what I know, as an intellectual luminary? Or is the pedagogical role itself another revenue stream? Hegel, fittingly, in the preface of Phenomenology, critiqued this kind of limited discourse: “For instead of getting involved in the real issue, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and losing itself in it, this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it.”
Unfortunately, the distinction between “subject” and “object” is being decimated. The once incompleteness of the subject is being turned into a stark object; the immediacy of the object is seen as the enviable disposition: instead of the unfolding of the multitudinousness fossilized in the subject. Probably, Iqbal also tried to embody this sentiment when he eloquently wrote: Yeh kainaat abhi na-tamam hai shaayad, Ke aa rahi hai damadam sada-e kun fa-yakoon(The Life perhaps is still raw and incomplete: Be and it becomes e’er doth a voice repeat).
Lastly, in all this insanity, the diversity of emotions is projected as an asymmetry. Melancholia, in particular, is viewed as the most obnoxious and hated emotion. Being apparently sad or alone is seen as a taboo —there is always an abhorrence towards it. However, it is an infallible fact that musings or blues in general, are the most creative moments we have as quasi-creators: fomenting things/ideas/thoughts ex nihilo. In short, in terms of human sensibilities and subtleties, modernity seems to be making everything increasingly monochromatic. It’s quite sad.
—The writer is from Peshawar. He is the co-founder of the Policy Club, a researcher and works in the financial sector.
