The Sterilization of Inner Life
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Highlights
- If you only engage with people on a shallow level, what is the point of cultivating those inner depths that make life so rich and meaningful? There is nothing left but the surface: signaling and pleasure become the highest goods.
- As are networks become shallower, our ability to understand others as full Persons weakens. And as that ability weakens, the value of each of our inner depths weakens as well. So it should come as no surprise that people are "uninteresting." What is the point of being interesting if there is no one around to appreciate it? And the vicious cycle continues.
- Unlike the allegory of the cave, where the people are real and the shadows are false, here, other people are the shadows. Their faces, their lives. This is the delusion of the narcissist. Who believes that they alone are real. Their feelings are the only feelings that matter, because other people are just shadows. And shadows don’t feel, because they’re not real. But what if everyone lived in caves? Then no one would be real. Not even you.