Today's Social Weather Analysis

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less”, Havel states in his book “Today’s Social Weather” (256). Almost everyone has thoughts about happiness and it seems that everybody has created their own, idiosyncratic idea of it. The study of happiness has now advanced for more than a century, and what has changed on the way to modernity is mainly restricted to happiness. In new research approaches, happiness is conceived as subjective wellbeing, more precisely as the overall enjoyment of life. However, compared to the classic notions about happiness and how it is achieved, today’s idea of enjoyment has been switched and here rises the tragedy. Thus, where …show more content…
The statistics says it all; "The to 1% own 48% of global wealth, but even they aren't happy. A survey by Boston College of people with an average net worth $78m found that they too were assailed by anxiety, dissatisfaction and loneliness" ( Shifting Narratives, 127) . So , beside the biological physical weaknesses that can arise as a result of media addiction like anxiety and overweight , individualism seems much more important. Today, sociologist don't talk about people, they talk about individuals. Simmel developed the modern idea of individuality and placed it as a characteristic of modernity. The view that people need to develop their individuality to be happy has been challenged by the opposite view that individualism will create an unlivable society. But how would a man create an unlivable place for himself? Mankind, has created a new age of life , the age of loneliness. Everyone is just independent on the other , ignoring most morals of live socializing and …show more content…
The pressures set on teenagers by sites such as Facebook are well-known. News of cyber-bullying, happy-slapping, even self-harm and,suicide attempts motivated by social networking sites turn out to be increasingly common in the eight years since Friendster – and then MySpace, Bebo and Facebook – launched. But the subtler drawbacks for a generation that has grown up with these sites are only now being touched. In March last year, the NSPCC published a thorough breakdown of calls made to ChildLine in the last five years. Though overall the number of calls from children and teenagers had increased by just 10%, calls about loneliness had closely triplicated, from 1,854 five years ago to 5,535 in 2009. Between boys, the number of calls about loneliness was greater than five times higher than it had been in 2005. This is not just a teenage conflict. In May, the Mental Health Foundation released a report called The Lonely Society. Its survey found that 53% of 18-34-year-olds had felt miserable because of loneliness, compared with just 32% of people over 55. The inquiry of why was, in part, answered by another of the report's findings: nearly a third of young people stated they spent too much time connecting online and not enough in