‘Soft Life’ and the Search for Meaning
I’ve been fascinated by a number of articles that I’ve read recently talking about ‘soft life’ or ‘soft living’.
The origin of the term is interesting - as is the way it’s now being appropriated. In essence, it’s a reference to people choosing to leave the rat race and make choices which enable them to prioritise themselves and their own well being. To be able to do this obviously means someone is in a relatively priveleged position. Having the means (either financial or circumstantial) to simply check out of day-to-day capitalism places you in a rarefied group, I would suggest.
Aside from the specifics of people’s individual motivations or circumstances, I’m interested in the broader point here - which is that for those beginning a ‘soft life’ - the meaning and value they derived from what society typically offered them had diminished to the point of looking for meaning elsewhere.
Quite by chance, a number of the books I’ve read recently have skirted around aspects of this. In Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, George Bowling realises he is fat, forty and staring down the barrel of another war in Europe. He has devoted his ‘interwar’ years to working and making a home. He finds himself questioning what it’s all been for, and reaching for a bygone era characterised by a carefree innocence. In Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time we see how religous ideas take hold in society. In the case of Klara, I was fascinated by how an artificial being started to ascribe spiritual and religious significance to events and places and agents in the world around them. In Children of Time it was incredible to see how a community of spiders, ‘elevated’ by the interference of human science formed a relationship with their maker.
More and more, I come back to Voltaire’s statement that ‘if God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him’.
Much of modern, western society - now emboldened by the knowledge of Science - may be increasingly 'secular’, but that is not to say that we’re not religous. We might not worship God in the way of Christianity, but we have found new gods - money, products (brands, even), wellness…. New things to create meaning for us in our lives. But - as Leon Festinger asked - what happens when prophecy fails?
