I want to start by saying – I’m okay 🥹 The response to the first post in this series, “Are you a lonely Londoner?” has been out of this world! I’ve never gotten so many heartfelt messages from strangers and friends alike. I wrote last week’s post (read below) because I’ve had the opposite experience since arriving in London.
Every week has been filled with meaningful coffee dates, co-working sessions, game nights, adventures outside of London, excursions into nearly every neighborhood in London, and Sundays lingering at KFC with friends after church (for my American readers, yes, KFC is a social thing here lol). When I arrived I only knew a handful of people and now my in-person social network is hard to keep track of.
This is all new to me, mostly because I’m an introvert. So since I’ve come to London my major concern has been finding time to be alone (and write….my dissertation newsletters 😂).
A few days before I saw the Instagram reel on Lonely Londoners, I started reading How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks. I began to notice that many of the problems Brooks pointed out were clearly impacting people in this lovely city of London.
As a naturally curious person, I wanted to delve deeper into what was causing some of these problems. (I’m that one person in the horror movie that’s like “I wonder what’s behind that door” and everyone in the theater goes):
As a historian, I wanted to see what history could tell me about why people are feeling so disconnected.
As a writer, I like to contemplate the human condition, both past and present. A simple question I often ask of people and situations is:
How are you coping with being constricted by time and space, yet having minds that can imagine worlds beyond these constrictions? We can’t be everywhere all at once. We have perspectives limited to our own experiences. Yet, our minds can attempt to understand experiences, places, and people outside ourselves or even invent new ones.
All of this is to say–thank you for all of your emails! Even if I can’t respond to all of them, I read every single one.
Maybe we’re not as disconnected as one would think!
Hey, this is Shae from the past interrupting this week’s newsletter to say how grateful I am that you’re here! I look forward to writing these newsletters each week. Turning on subscriptions doesn’t quite work for this publication yet. However, if you would like to support me, you can buy me a matcha, so I can keep producing these newsletters in a slightly caffeinated state–thanks!
Welcome back to our series on the history of modern living. The more research I did this week, the more I thought about the meaning behind words like modern, modernity, and modernism. What does it mean to be a modern person? Are we modern people or are we living in a post-modern era?
Defining Modernism
Modernism is a term that emerged in the late 19th century and developed as a response to the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and transformation of major urban cities. Even though, modernism or even the idea of modernity tends to focus a lot on America and Europe, one of the earliest uses of the word modernism can actually be found in Latin America. Timothy Mitchell found:
The concept of modernismo was coined in 1890 by "a Nicaraguan poet, writing in a Guatemalan journal, of a literary encounter in Peru," announcing a declaration of cultural independence by Latin American writers against the authority of Spanish literature. "1
Modernism is a movement that shaped art, architecture, literature, and history from about 1890 to the 1960s. (You might have that one friend whose entire aesthetic is the clean crisp lines of mid-century modern furniture).
What Is Modern Life?
As machines began to increasingly take over so did certain ways of living. A standard was created not just in terms of machine parts, but on how to live. Even though people were yearning for different ways to express themselves that went against Victorian norms and ideals, people in major cities began fitting into a particular standard of living.
Soon, everyone needed an automobile. Department stores emerged selling a specific way to dress and adorn oneself. Things and people just started to look the same. There was a universal standard created now that things could be (re)produced more easily.
What did this do to people? Social pressure to keep with a family named the Jones started to become a thing. In 1913, a comic strip by the Cartoonist Arthur Momand. appeared in The New York Globe. This is where the idiom “keeping up with the Jones” comes from!
Throughout the comic strip’s run, someone constantly complains about matching the lifestyles of their more affluent neighbors aptly called the Jones. It was a common last name back then yet, they were never seen in the comic strip. Here is the grander metaphor, modernism is about everyone being held and molded to a universal standard that doesn’t even exist.
As universal as a standard as modernity/modernism attempted to be, it didn’t create uniquely Western problems. The idea of modernity, characterized by rapid industrialization, capitalist expansion, etc., was exported around the world on a large scale during this period as well.
For example, modernizing a place often had the connotation of taking industries and countries, oftentimes in Asia and Africa, and getting them up to speed with how the West does politics, culture, or business.
In fact, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a school of thought developing in major American universities called “Modernization Theory.” During this time, the American government gave grants to academics at elite institutions to study, visit, and advise newly independent or emerging Asian and African countries on how to structure their lives, people, and businesses the “Western” way. This put pressure on these nations to open themselves up to Western culture, investments, and capital.2
By 1969, the world was swept up in social protests. The promises modernity made about social progress and prosperity were not being kept. People and newly independent nations were told if they acted like a particular set of people and did what the West was doing, then they would be successful and thus happier.
Not quite. In the 1970s, a global economic recession made matters worse. It completely damaged and restructured a lot of national economies and people’s wallets. In came, what many historians call the post-modern period. This is the time we’re currently living in according to historians, but what makes it post-modern?
Well, post-modernism is about the chucking away of the universal standard modernism attempted to create. It’s the idea that the truths about ourselves and society that we’ve accepted for so long are not actually truths at all.
Everything is relative and everyone is skeptical. In fact, most academics can’t even agree on a definition of post-modernism.
So what does all this mean for today’s lonely Londoner/city dweller?
People are skeptical, simply, because it feels like we’re doing everything right, but not getting as good of results as our parents or grandparents (have you seen mortgage interest rates lately???).
By some UN standards, it may seem people are more well off and healthier than they were a hundred years ago, but the following question still remains: Why do people feel lonelier, more disconnected, less fulfilled, and less satisfied than their parents or grandparents were?
Something’s awry, but don’t worry, we’re going to keep looking into this next week!
Stay tuned,
Hi, I’m Shae! I’m a doctoral candidate in History at Harvard University. I am also a writer weaving together storytelling, literature, primary sources, and whatever else catches my attention to bring us all closer to understanding this thing we collectively call life. This is a digital classroom, a TED Talk stage, and sometimes just a spot in a coffee shop where two friends gather. Whatever this space is for you, I’m glad you’re here 🤓.
Timothy Mitchell, Questions of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6.
To learn more about this, I recommend David C. Engerman, Staging Growth : Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).