ennui antenna

No, I don’t have cute or pret­ty im­ages to share here, al­though there is a pletho­ra of these things; uni­corns in­clud­ed. Iron­ic, con­sid­er­ing I’m a graph­ic de­sign­er and artist.

In­stead, I’m shar­ing here the residue of a con­ver­sa­tion I just had with a young woman; one who has a keen and car­ing heart for this world. She ex­pressed to me a deep, al­most tear­ful, frus­tra­tion that her friends, her gen­er­a­tion does not want to talk about the pol­i­tics of our times or “how we got here.”

“It’s de­press­ing to them,” was her lament.

Maybe I’m a sen­si­tive an­ten­na to this fre­quen­cy of angst, yet I do read about, and hear this ennui’s great preva­lence.

Some­how, some way, we have to in­cite more care for what is go­ing on around us with­in those now com­ing into their own adult ex­is­tences. Oth­er­wise, the ap­a­thy is go­ing to un­der­mine our progress. Don’t think so?

Have you kept track of the grow­ing dystopi­an movies, tv shows and video games? There’s a rea­son the me­dia finds suc­cess with scan­dalous and wretched things tran­spir­ing. These ex­cess­es of may­hem and the dis­traught just adds to a con­flict­ed sense of rage and ap­a­thy. These ex­tremes may feel good, much like it’s sat­is­fy­ing to ‘scratch-that-itch,’ in the mo­ment, yet the scars from the ex­ces­sive ag­i­ta­tions will be per­ma­nent and mu­tate into some­thing can­cer­ous. Will we rec­og­nize our­selves any­more?

Is the sce­nario of this young woman’s angst dire? Lis­ten care­ful­ly, this young woman’s plaint is ex­act­ly what many young peo­ple are FEEL­ING; many are look­ing for es­cape and avoid­ance be­cause there’s a lack of ef­fec­tive lead­er­ship – in the macro and mi­cro of their lives – and with a will­ing­ness to change.

What will it take for the many of us to get deeply pas­sion­ate about how our ex­is­tences are de­fined? Feel­ing the angst yet?

Em­brace it and let it mo­ti­vate you and those around you.
 
 

—eric ward

Flom­mist Eric Ward is a Hu­man Los An­geli­no (there are oth­er kinds), hu­man­ist, artist, in­dus­tri­al and graph­ic de­sign­er, nov­el­ist, toy in­ven­tor and en­tre­pre­neur. Life-long pur­suit is “What to do with a piece of pa­per?” Copy­right © 2018 Eric Ward. Pic­tured: George Grosz, Wid­mung an Os­kar Paniz­za (cropped), 1917–18, source.

MOR D’ARTÍCULOS  MOR FLOMM !

READ SOME  RELATED  DER TUNG  POSTS  :

damp­ness ‘is this thing on?’ at the mall ‘are you on drugs?’ don’t ‘woke’ the fuzzy duck names shhh … i’m writ­ing