1. The Loneliness of the Hyperconnected Human & 2. Art Is Dead, Long Live Aesthetics

Merely thoughts I wished to set loose.

In an age where the very air seems to flow with digital signals and the omnipresence of others dominates, one finds oneself plagued not by solitude, but by a more insidious ailment: the inability to be alone while perpetually feeling alone. There was a time (yes, out-of-date though it now sounds) when isolation meant physical distance, the absence of sound, of others. Today, one can sit in the very eye of the social hurricane, receive a dozen notifications in the space of a breath, and yet feel no more seen than a statue in a forgotten cloister.

We are the most connected generation in recorded history, and this is hardly a novel observation; we are also the most psychologically fragmented. But what interests me is not the complaint itself, tiresomely duplicated by every essayist with a Twitter account and a bottle of mid-tier bourbon. What concerns me is the quality of our disconnection. Why it wounds in the unconventional way it does, why it seems so uniquely pure.

Let me be forthright. The condition we speak of is not loneliness, properly understood. It is the corrosion of the self through endless proximity to others who never truly arrive. One is not abandoned, only unfinished. What was once a pain sharpened by absence is now dulled by an unstoppable trickle of pseudo-presence. A friend does not fail to write back; rather, he leaves your message “on seen.” You do not hear silence, but a static of low-effort affirmations: a “like,” a fire emoji, a brief reaction to your story, as though the soul could be held by gesture alone.

Søren Kierkegaard, whom I trust truly on this matter, feared that modern life—by which he meant his modern life—would erase the self in the bland egalitarianism of the crowd. What would he have made of Instagram? Of the nauseating tyranny of materiality? Of the knowledge that one's identity is no longer a slow accumulation of character but a performance for an invisible audience, ceaselessly refined and algorithmically evaluated?

We imagine ourselves as known. In truth, we are consumed. One does not develop a self here; one markets it. And the terrifying consequence of this marketing is that even our genuine longing for others (our soft, unarmored humanity) is subsumed into the spectacle. To reach out, to confess, to love, these no longer constitute acts of intimacy, but are repurposed as “content.” Vulnerability becomes currency. Heartbreak becomes a caption. Loneliness becomes an aesthetic.

And here lies the paradox: we are lonelier not in spite of our connectivity, but because of it. The shape of our relationships has become so weakened, so airless, that it is no longer possible to feel wholly seen. We are always visible, never beheld. Our friendships have the texture of glass: transparent, symmetrical, and cold to the touch.

I do not romanticize the past. The past, as anyone with a functioning memory or a proper education knows, was brutal, limited, and often cruel. But what it did permit, on occasion, was the silence necessary to become a person. A library. A walk. A long letter. An unread book beside a dying fire. These, too, are forms of connection, but they presume first the existence of a self with substance enough to offer something in return.

That self is dying now, not violently, but maybe like the slow, painless numbness of frostbite. It dies from the illusion that solitude is outdated. And this, perhaps, is the great sadness of the hyperconnected human: not that we are cut off from others, but that we have never truly known them at all.

And if this sounds bleak, then perhaps you are still under the impression that a full inbox is the same as a full life.

It is not.

Nowhere is this dissolution more visible, more quietly catastrophic, than in the contemporary visual sphere. Art, that once-sacred ritual of transfiguration, has been lowered to an algorithmic event. A look, a vibe, a grid. One no longer asks, “What does it mean?” but rather, “How does it perform?”

And it performs well. Dreadfully well. The image is lit. The composition is symmetrical. The colours stimulate just enough melancholy to fake depth, just enough irony to escape sincerity. It is content, not expression. It is style, not statement.

We live in a world where aesthetics have triumphed at the expense of meaning. Not because they are evil, not at all. But because they are easier. Meaning demands interiority, time, contradiction. Aesthetic, by contrast, can be screenshot and circulated. It demands only the illusion of coherence.

In the Renaissance, beauty pointed to truth. In our time, beauty conceals the absence of truth. This is not postmodernism. It is post-significance.

We do not make art now; we curate selves. We no longer engage with the work, but with how it situates us socially, what it signals about our taste, our edge, our relevance. There is no room for mystery, no use for silence. The gallery is dead. The museum has become an Instagram backdrop. The sublime is filtered.

And yet—how ravenously we hunger for the very greatness we mock. Perhaps that’s the final mockery: we have not killed beauty. We have embalmed it, posed it, and made it dance for clicks.

And if all this sounds bleak, then perhaps you are still under the impression that relevance is the same as truth.

It is not.

I write not to complain, but to register a modest resistance: to insist, perhaps foolishly, that what goes unnoticed now may later rot the foundation entirely.

For what we consider today in jest will one day calcify into culture. And from culture, consequence. The child who learns to speak in stories measured by reach rather than reason will grow into the adult who cannot bear the unrecorded moment. The soul, no longer shaped in solitude but spliced in pixels, will lose its architecture altogether.

The cost? Nothing less than interiority. And with it, the faculties of moral judgment, true friendship, and that strange old-fashioned dignity born from having a private mind.

The future, then, is not bleak. It is hollow. And like all hollow things, it resonates most where meaning used to be.

You ask how it will affect us. I ask how it already has. Look around: a sea of selves so curated they no longer resemble people, only parodies. We speak less to be understood than to be seen; and being seen, so we think, is enough.

It is not.

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Tomorrow: “Ex Libris & Cinematica I: The Symposium & Call Me by Your Name (2017)”

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