Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

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Carrying the weight of the world

I love this expression from Peter Sloterdijk’s Selected Exaggerations loc 944:

Carrying the weight of the world is an art that can be practised in many different ways. I think it is right to say that it is fundamentally the same art. It consists of answers to the burdensome nature of life …

This is what I see as the core of an existential sociology: the predicament of life, the diversity of responses to it and the contexts which condition that unfolding. As he goes on to write on loc 951:

An idiot has different strategies for mastering life than the cleverest person in the same culture. I’m convinced we should look for the great gap that yawns between people on the level of individual strategies.

Do we have a sociology of these individual strategies? A key part of my book on distraction is an analysis of the novel strategies that are now emerging within the horizons of digital capitalism e.g. lifestyle minimalism, the 4 hour work week and self-quantification.

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