We fret over our corporate image, as reflected in our blog layouts. We design our Yahoo, eBay or Etsy stores to communicate the right message about ourselves as brands. We attend network marketing seminars where we learn to ’sell ourselves first’. We wonder if our varied interests (if we have any left that are not market mediated or created) present a unified, sellable whole to the world.

To help us maintain our fantasy world of individualistic isolated commercial success, we pretend to have relationships with people we do not know, people who do not even exist. We have relationships with other peoples carefully crafted personal marketing messages. We develop emotional connections with the marketing messages (blogs) or commercial output (oh, I meant to say ‘lovingly handcrafted art’ but then I threw up a little in my mouth) of complete strangers and fancy ourselves on the cutting edge of a glorious return to an idyllic cottage-industry past starring us, now, here.

We sit, slowly spreading from the middle, on antique couches and ironic office chairs and hand painted porch furniture and stare at our shiny Macbooks or our sticker encrusted Thinkpads and pretend that we are going somewhere, doing something, having a relationship, when we might as well be sitting under a dryer at Flo’s Beauty Palace in pink fuzzy slippers reading Woman’s Day. No, on second thought, there would be actual real human beings at Flo’s, so that’s not it.

Whatever the analogy may be, congratulations to us. We have finally managed to become exactly what Maggie Thatcher said we were - individuals without a society. As long as the market provides each and every one of us the raw materials to construct a story out of in which there is a society, and it revolves around us, we won’t need, or want, a real society, what with all the messy multiplicity and sweaty, odoriferous interaction with competing starlets down at Flo’s.

We are hyper-focused on ourselves, what we are doing at this very moment, where we are right now. Even our counter-culture, if you could call the self-indulgent me-fest of the 1960’s a counter-culture, exhorts us to Be Here Now, to over-develop our sense of self, our obsessive awareness of our surroundings (home decoration, clothing, etc) and our myopic devotion to right now, eschewing any past, any history, any story that does not star us, doing this, right now. Currently, one need to look no further than the fringes of right-libertarianism and lifestyle anarchism to find paeans to the revolutionary possibility of becoming even more devoted to self, isolated in a permanent insurrectionary present.

There are however, activities that work to break down this hegemony of immediatism, activities that reconnect us to a great chain of human history, that locate us inside a timeline, instead of outside all time and space, contemplating our perfect, individual now. Outside of the basic biological functions of the human body - which certainly have a part to play in breaking down our barriers to considering the distant, temporal world - the activities that most challenge these notions of atomized Thatcherite/Right-Libertarian self-obsession are the ones that humans have always engaged in, telling stories, building our own shelter, hunting, growing food…

These activities change our perception of time and of history. They lengthen the scale of our personal time to encompass all of history (and pre-history). No one can long kneel on the ground, hands in the dirt, coaxing plants out of the soil without feeling some connection to almost every human being who has ever come before. No one can sit around a campfire and hear a story told or a song sung and not become aware of how primal and basic to being human this activity is. No one can stalk their quarry through the woods as silently as they know how without some inkling of how we, as humans, have always lived and died.

So, for me, here, now, writing this down for all to see, publishing it across a vast web of common knowledge; for me, and for anyone else who has despaired at the relentlessly vapid simulacrum of modern life, this is a simple reminder that there are still ‘real’ activities out there. All it takes is getting up off of the couch, walking away from this ‘technosphere’ full of good little atomized people consuming each others lives, and spending time face to face with other people, with the animals of the field and forest, and our food as it comes out of the ground. Ennui cannot survive in the face of reality, and reality is right outside your door.