The Illusion of Catharsis

Many are trapped in catharsis. The cathartic illusion. The feeling where one feels better, happier, some how more meaningful, connected, or somehow whole, and things begin to make sense. This feeling is now provided on a regular basis. It is embedded in every aspect of modern life, in every form of mass media, like films, newspaper stories, the Internet and most notably music in our ear-buds. Don't get me wrong, catharsis is great. But it is often an experience at a climactic end. Hence that feeling of motivation or meaning and purpose is short lived and rather than creating or manifesting our own cathartic moment, what I call a holy moment, it is fed to us. Of course it can be argued that it is necessary to revisit external cathartic moments, but the problem is, what happens when we are cathartic on a regular basis? What happens when we are always made to feel whole or connected? At the moment I tend to argue that we as a result become passive observers. We immerse ourselves and surrender ourselves to a read-only culture. A way of life in which our intentions are good and true, but any sense of having to go out and make something, make an impact or a difference, tends to be satisfied by a movie or that one great song. For example, I learn of injustices happening around the world and in light of the revolutionary attitude I turn up the volume on Coldplay's Viva La Vida, and I am overwhelmed by this heightened sense of catharsis, where I experience a rush of ideas and for whatever reason I feel content and blissful that somehow everything makes sense in that moment and that things are okey. Afterward there is a sense of satisfaction and that some sort of resolution was made as I feel in some way spent and tired of all the rapid synapses going off in my brain during that cathartic moment. But in the end nothing is actually done. Maybe a few motivational lines are written in a journal or a pretty picture gets doodled or painted, but soon afterward it is put aside while I soon after loose myself in the mumbo-jumbo of the Internet or a video game. No where is the real issue resolved. Instead what seems to happen is that the very issue of injustice becomes used to simply fuel a desire for catharsis, a selfish subconscious desire for a heightened feeling of mortality, which in turn fuels a chain reaction. Where in return the "inspirational" event simply fuels a desire to be fed, a desire to quench ones thirst, one's divine discontent, and make one's self feel better. By no means am I proposing that this trend is universal, because thank god there are those that are quite proactive in creating their own catharsis by directly dealing with issues such as an injustice and who do not feel content or satisfied with a movie, book, or painting. What I fear though is the fact that where there is one, there are often many others just like it/them. I fear that my experiences with the illusion of catharsis are shared by millions of others. I fear that the intensification of information available in conjunction with the exponential growth of technology and media outlets will in turn shape a world where humankind's innate discontents may become quickly ignored and forgotten, creating a truly passive society.