What books express the loneliness and longing of the modern age best?

>implying the modern age is not about the suppression of loneliness and thus the destruction of all reflexive psyche
Get a load of this turbopleb talking with hundred of interconnected people over a fucking computer.

You are never alone, because loneliness is scary. That is also why you will not write your book.

Kafka metamorphosis

I ain't lonely nor do I long for anything. Speak for yourself.

The novel I'm working on now desu

>Goethe next to Elliot Rodger

You say that like you've never felt alone in a room full of people.

wizard theme

>kinda related to OP
>tfw constantly being desensitized to the humor of absurd and highly inappropriate situational humor b/c Veeky Forums and dark neurotic personality

If I continue down this path will I eventually circle around to finding normal things funny because they are so absurd in the context of my mentality? Is this why certain people laugh all the time at things that aren't funny? Are they just more jaded than I could even imagine?

The Recognitions
Pretty depressing desu

It happens all the time, but that's not loneliness, that's fear.
>fear of broadcasting your self
>fear of not being accepted
>fear of not being up to the perceived social standard
>fear of asserting your need
All in all, it's all about the fear of being hurt. Now that I typed all this, I think the truth is halfway between my initial position and OP's. There is this tension between the fear of pain and loneliness - which is, staying alone to avoid pain.

Kind of how the hook up culture allows for an intermediate state, akin to togetherness without connectedness.

Sad Girl by Lisa and Marge Simpson

my diary desu

Loneliness is scary but alleviating it is scarier

nothing is more essential to modern survival than a developed sense of humor

>fear of broadcasting your self
>fear of not being accepted
>fear of not being up to the perceived social standard
>fear of asserting your need
I never feel any of this though. I never have any issue with making my wants, needs, and thoughts known, it's the easiest thing in the world. I don't have any issues with being accepted because as far as I've been told for my entire life I'm a very likable person, and on that note meeting any perceived social standard is kind of child's play.

When I say being alone in a crowded room I mean less like walking through some ghetto being afraid of being shot and more going up to someone, asking if they can give your car a jump, and then finding that their car battery doesn't have enough juice to get the job done. It doesn't matter how well we both go through the motions if the spark just isn't there, and if it isn't there then they can't really give me what I need.

I'm not agoraphobic and I'm not anti-social, I just have a great deal of trouble finding meaningful human interactions in the sea of all the trivial bullshit that most people seem to prefer. Even on a site like Veeky Forums where most people seem to be closer to me than to the norm it's a rarity these days to find someone who understands that feeling.

London frog here. Do my collated posts have potential?

you're not lonely, you're just depressed

>implying I can't be both
You assume a lot, lad.

Interesting list.

Anyway you wanna know my theory? I think people are bored and lonely these days because they lack the will to express themselves. Everybody's morphed into this quasi-everyman with no distinctive personality because they feel its a weakness not to blend in. So too everybody else becomes suspicious of it with leads to a cycle of everybody feeling terrified to express themselves. Reasons? Economic perhaps but probably more likely technology. The panopticon of social media has burrowed into our minds. Even Veeky Forums ends up shunning those who expresses themselves without being part of the hive-mind and we're supposedly the outsiders of the world. Veeky Forums is better than most boards though. I'll give it that.

I don't know about books (maybe Houllebecq?) but Her is a brilliant movie that gets right to the heart of it. The sublime Los Angeles city looms over Joaquin Phoenix who embodies a quiescent creative sliding into nothingness rather than choosing to break out from his shell. Contrast it to Repo Man (also set in LA) and you'll see a massive difference in terms of personality between the supposed denizens of that particular city. Punk is dead. Everything is banal. Everything is grey.

Infinite Jest, hands down.

Tao Lin

Some people really don't like this; I think it's absolutely wonderful.

But when you say 'the modern age', are you talking about 'the modern age' as in the age of modernity, characterized broadly as an age of breakdown of tradition and new experiences of liberated/alienated subjectivity faced with existential questions of choice, freedom and finitude in relation to a lack of pre-established meaning. Or are you talking about present, postmodern times? If yes, I agree. But you are confusing terms.

why read a book when you could leave your room and feel it first hand

Because I don't live in Ancient Greece you stupid fuck

How the fuck has the obvious answer, The Culture of Critique, not been mentioned yet? I didn't think this board was so blue pilled

what does that mean

Dude you are a faggot

I'm sure that means something coming from you.

good post

I feel like that's what happened to me. I laughed at an elderly lady that fell down at work. Everyone looked at me with disgust.

I'd say that seems on point.

It is interesting that you mentioned "the spark" earlier on. I can get to talk a lot of people, and I am highly sociable too ; it doesn't change the fact that I can feel miserable, and not connect meaningfully with people at times.

Either it's because your environment is shit, either it's because you are indeed depressed. Finding no one to connect to is depressing, I agree; but most of the time, isn't this caused by your inner lack of drive to discover the Other and to break the ice? It seems to me that the "trivial bullshit" is just something most people build around them to avoid meaningful interactions.

Good post. The MC of her really struck me as a repressed creative indeed. The fact that he is writing poetry for a living, under the guise of strangers' love letters, makes it all the more visible. He cannot for the life of him express his inner feeling, until a machine, expressly designed to appeal to him, opens him up.

I am indeed, but that stemmed from the OP. I was referring to contemporaneous times, but preferred to keep the same terminology.

For me personally depression is completley independent from loneliness. Depression is kind of a constant for me, it's in my mindset and it's something that runs in the family. I just happened to get hit with whatever stick that gives it out a bit harder than anyone else in my family to date.

I've gotten quite good at coping with it all things considered. Though I have to consider my own happiness as a secondary motivation as opposed to a primary one if I really want to continue existing. It's obviously not idea, but I make it work well enough to suppress the oftentimes nigh irresistible urge to off myself.

>I agree; but most of the time, isn't this caused by your inner lack of drive to discover the Other and to break the ice?
For me at least I try but really fail to find those connections. Even when I push past the trivial stuff there just isn't a connection to be made. I know a lot of it is to do with me being pretty hyper-intellectual in my intrests whereas that's just not the norm and most people don't really have any really intellectual intrests at all beyond the most basic stuff that keeps people up at night.

Don't get me wrong, I can talk to people about other stuff and participate in the conversation just fine. However I find that I really do crave deep and stimulating conversations about abstract topics that most people either seem uninterested in or just straight up unwilling to have. Pair that with the fact that most of the long time friends I used to have that would be willing to discuss these things have either become unavailable or have decided to move onto greener pastures and you might start to see the reason I'm struggling with loneliness too.

Yes