The Lost Beauty of the Tragic

I think modern people have an undercurrent of shame because of our failure to live up to our demands for constant happiness and positivity. This shame is like a sleepwalking giant underground, a looming presence that terrifies us but we cannot name or see. We refuse to acknowledge our own losses and sadnesses because we have deemed unhappiness to be a disease to eradicate. In our mission to destroy unhappiness we have destroyed the elements of our own soul that gave life its irreversible meaning. If anything lost can be found again, then nothing has meaning. If life is perpetually recoverable, if the beings who we’ve lost are interchangeable, then nobody and nothing will ever mean anything again. And, we have retroactively erased the meaning of all the souls with whom we’ve shared contact through this retroactive inversion of meaning. Since loss and sadness is a disease to be therapied or medicated away, and since beings with whom we’ve co-created love spheres with are interchangeable with anyone else, the individual soul becomes a cog in a machine. A replaceable part that is standardized in its manufacture, only having various flaws or benefits. We even capitalize ourselves in our self marketization in terms such as value and benefit. In the final stage of modernity we have not only stripped ourselves of our own souls, we have retroactively erased the meaning and love of all the souls we’ve known prior, making ourselves a project of continual market renewal. We market ourselves like a product with features, benefits, and trial periods. In this final stage we tread ever onward towards happiness, while in fact delving deeper into the sewer of meaninglessness. In the age of good vibes only, it seems we have bad vibes only, because underneath our positive veneer is meaninglessness, which is a darkness that is most antithetical to human life. Out of all things that a human being needs, meaning is the most important, the most necessary. To be able to strive against difficulty, meaning alone is what helps us make sense of our suffering. Yet in our erasure of the tragic, we have also erased what made our lives meaningful, and so we endure a meaningless life, for no reason, going nowhere, meaning nothing, coming from nowhere, and having nowhere leading that we can name. And this is our age of happiness we find ourselves in. The age where the tragedy is extant is the meaningless age, the end of history, the end of time.