A Fundamental Lack

I have just realized what Korea, and general society, is sincerely lacking. What seems to be lost  in this, and many overstimulated societies is an awareness of feeling, or emotional intelligence. Feeling seems to be  intensely avoided at any cost it. If we pause and take a moment to focus on the  primary modes of  interpreting reality, we can divide these interpretations into three broad categories. They are the visual,  auditory, and emotional or using feelings as a mode to interpret reality. These ways can further be categorized into motivation towards constructing a comprehensive understanding of one’s self, and a destructive avarice towards one’s place in the world.

Korea is consumed with visual stimulation. One only needs to look around to notice the zombie like bumbling of people on their cell phones, or people glued to oversized plasma shadows to notice the invasive visual stimulation. Auditorily this is the case as well. Ipod’s, loudspeakers, and a general lack of silence marks the intensity of drowning in audio. Both of these modes construct an avoidance of reality. What about feeling? I have lost count of the lone children I have seen crying, the businessman stumbling drunk and complaining about the should’ves. It all seems like escapism on the grand scale from any sort of feeling. This is aided by the general tools of avoidance that manipulate the audio and visual ways of understanding. This isn’t a Korean issue alone. It is an issue in North America as well.

How are we to combat this smothering feeling of overstimulation with an amplified lack of emotion and feeling? This becomes more problematic when it is coupled with the manufactured and commodified emotion which audio and visual modes recreate, as if to satisfy our emotional lack. While the question may arrive at: What should we do? The better question is: Can we cope?