The Great Reversion
In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari explains how liberal humanism has become the dominant philosophy of the west. We place the subjective experience of every human being at the pinnacle of existence. He explains that phrases like “The customer is always right” “Voter knows best” and “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” help exemplify this philosophy.
Similarly, we’re experiencing a collective unrest in our society nowadays, exemplified by movements like “Quiet quitting” or “The great reset.” To be clear, quiet quitting refers to a trend among disillusioned millennials who quietly abdicate work responsibilities while still appearing to be online.
The reason so many people are quietly quitting is because they believe their lived experience is not matching up to what their potential could be. They’re under the belief that there is a life out there that relinquishes them from their mundane responsibilities of a 9–5 job. Essentially, the modern millennial is going through an existential crisis, and I think technology is to blame.
The decline started in 2011 with the advent of the “like” button introduced on Facebook. Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at NYU and author of The Coddling of the American Mind, argues that it was the introduction of the like button that began political polarization online.
At once, individual opinion and experience became so tantamount that it needed to be shared with the entire world online. Social media brought liberal humanism to the forefront, and it continues to distort our perception of ourselves and reality around us.
But it wasn’t only the like button that created a seismic shift within our collective consciousness. The ability to intimately project our experiences online, whether through live feed recording or creating an OnlyFans account, has been an attempt to displace the need for human connection.
In an ever connected online world, we have never before been so physically isolated from each other. We believe that speaking to each other over Zoom, matching with people on Tinder, and getting new followers on Twitter are artificial methods to supplant our psychological needs, however, each of these methods (I believe) create an evolutionary mismatch between ancient hardware we’re endowed with in an increasingly removed technological world.
There is a growing response to this mismatch that I am seeing online. I call it “The Great Reversion,” although the term reversion shouldn’t denote a negative connotation. I see it as a reversion to tradition.
We are seeing many people embracing religion again, since realizing that killing God (quoting Nietschze, not me) might’ve not been the best idea for a species that is biologically predisposed to belief structures.
We are seeing a move away from cities, not just due to the growing financial burdens of living in a metropolitan area, but to the fact that living surrounded by millions of strangers actually makes people feel lonelier.
We act like we’re some highly developed species that has evolved at the same pace of technology, but this is failing to miss the obvious signs in our culture that this statement is completely false. The rising levels of depression, existential angst and worry about the future cannot be sedated away.
The great reversion could be blamed on moral decay and the consequences of living in a society that praises liberal humanism. It could be blamed on wealth inequality. But there is no denying that this irreversible shift is happening now.