essay on modern life

Essay on Life for Students and Children

500+ words essay on life.

First of all, Life refers to an aspect of existence. This aspect processes acts, evaluates, and evolves through growth. Life is what distinguishes humans from inorganic matter. Some individuals certainly enjoy free will in Life. Others like slaves and prisoners don’t have that privilege. However, Life isn’t just about living independently in society. It is certainly much more than that. Hence, quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.

Why is Life Important?

One important aspect of Life is that it keeps going forward. This means nothing is permanent. Hence, there should be a reason to stay in dejection. A happy occasion will come to pass, just like a sad one. Above all, one must be optimistic no matter how bad things get. This is because nothing will stay forever. Every situation, occasion, and event shall pass. This is certainly a beauty of Life.

Many people become very sad because of failures . However, these people certainly fail to see the bright side. The bright side is that there is a reason for every failure. Therefore, every failure teaches us a valuable lesson. This means every failure builds experience. This experience is what improves the skills and efficiency of humans.

Probably a huge number of individuals complain that Life is a pain. Many people believe that the word pain is a synonym for Life. However, it is pain that makes us stronger. Pain is certainly an excellent way of increasing mental resilience. Above all, pain enriches the mind.

The uncertainty of death is what makes life so precious. No one knows the hour of one’s death. This probably is the most important reason to live life to the fullest. Staying in depression or being a workaholic is an utter wastage of Life. One must certainly enjoy the beautiful blessings of Life before death overtakes.

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How to Improve Quality of Life?

Most noteworthy, optimism is the ultimate way of enriching life. Optimism increases job performance, self-confidence, creativity, and skills. An optimistic person certainly can overcome huge hurdles.

Meditation is another useful way of improving Life quality. Meditation probably allows a person to dwell upon his past. This way one can avoid past mistakes. It also gives peace of mind to an individual. Furthermore, meditation reduces stress and tension.

Pursuing a hobby is a perfect way to bring meaning to life. Without a passion or interest, an individual’s life would probably be dull. Following a hobby certainly brings new energy to life. It provides new hope to live and experience Life.

In conclusion, Life is not something that one should take for granted. It’s certainly a shame to see individuals waste away their lives. We should be very thankful for experiencing our lives. Above all, everyone should try to make their life more meaningful.

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English Essay on “Modern Lifestyle” English Essay-Paragraph-Speech for Class 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 CBSE Students and competitive Examination.

Modern Lifestyle

In olden days, life was natural, slow (less mechanical), difficult at times but healthy. Today, in modern times, life is fast paced (mechanical), comfortable, ready made, stressful and unhealthy.

Modern lifestyle slowly crept in with changing times-joint families have given way to nuclear families with migration to different cities in search of jobs and better life. Once there was a better job there were more comforts-with a touch of button any domestic work can be done. Environment at work places also changed with the arrival of computers and related technologies. Children reached school by buses, vans or cars and are having more choices now than ever, when compared to children of earlier generations. From children, to adults the ways of life has changed. Presently, we are leading a comfortable life with less physical activity-men and women are working hard, sometimes odd hours of work and find no time for exercise or outdoor activities. The work pressure at times is so high that it creates stress. In family where both parents are working there is less outdoor activity. Children find TV more enjoyable than outdoor games. Children going out to play to sweat it out are very rare sight. With growing competition, children are forced to attend many hobby classes, tuition which leaves very less time for play.’ Even, during the leisure time, they are glued to TV. Or play games on the internet for hours. Taking advantage of the situation arc companies who are attracting children with more variety of video games & parlours. So, ways of family entertainment has totally changed.

Another important aspect of modern life style is changes in food habits. In most the homes traditional simple food has given way to quick and fast food-which am high in calories. Children too are attracted to fried and oily food, now easily available at the nearest bakery or fast food outlets. Greater purchasing power of people is also the reason for the success of some of the fast food chains. Families frequently eat out resulting consumption of lot of soft drinks, fatty food and cm calories. Eating habits, such as eating while watching TV snacking in between meals and munching on when there is no work has all contributes to lifestyle diseases modem day. Babies, to children to adults put on weigh which has become a very common problem in the urban scenario.

Changing work condition, less physical activity. sedentary jobs, comfortable but stressful life and bad eating habits has exposed us to Nome dangerous health hazards like blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. These have become common lifestyle diseases and are a cause of worry allover the world. These conditions which were earlier seen in people pasts fifty years are seen in young people and, children. More people are ending up with heart problems and obese bodies. Easily available, preserved and chemically treated food has also contributed to health risks. There is also an increasing complain of eye problems, back ache problems (especially among women) and mental stress. Deaths due to heart attacks or heart ailments are on the rise in developing countries like. India.

The world health organization (WHO) estimates that worldwide. 24 million people will die of stroke by 2030. Overweight or obesity results is various other health problems like, breathing problems, increased cholesterol levels, imbalance in hormones and depression due to low self-esteem. A little caution, small changes in life style and care if taken, we can prevent these lifestyle diseases from increasing. Mindless eating, lazy ways and attitude should change.

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Modern Life Changes the Brain. Here's How to Change It Back

What is "frontal fatigue" and how do we treat it.

Posted June 6, 2022 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• The demands of modern life are relentless and can have negative effects on our brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC).
• A weakened PFC can make us more vulnerable to mental disorders and poor well-being.
• I call this weakened and vulnerable state "frontal fatigue," and argue that most people in the modern world have it to some degree.
• There are ways to minimize frontal fatigue and protect ourselves from its effects.

Suicide . Depression . Anxiety . Medication . Psychiatric hospitalizations.

The signs are everywhere. Across the industrialized world, urban and rural, east and west, our mental states seem to only get worse by the year. The biggest commonality in this passage of time is that our societies become increasingly more modern and more technological. In spite of the many priceless benefits of modernity, it is also true that for any group, the more modern they become, the more mental illness and less emotional well-being they tend to have.

In a recent article , I explored ways to understand our modern predicament. Modern life is a constant flood of choices, decisions, and tasks, each more complex and abstract than the last. The most common and the most momentous parts of our lives are equalized by calendar reminders. Many cultures and traditions that formerly guided us in the work of living are now the stuff of nostalgia . Meanwhile, social media can distort our identities into cartoon versions, often depressed and alone.

How did we build such a world? In my last post, I argued that we built the modern world to run on the sizeable power of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC). We use our mighty PFCs to manage our current world, often enough with success. However, there’s a chink in the armor. The incessant and stressful demands we put on the PFC tend to weaken it. Weakened, it fails at its work while releasing vulnerabilities to mental illness and negative emotions.

This weakened, tired PFC is what I call "frontal fatigue" and describe in my book, Frontal Fatigue. The Impact of Modern Life and Technology on Mental Illness. Frontal fatigue is the vulnerability we all carry due to the demands of the modern world, our dearth of personal connections, and the effects all this has on our brains.

Unfortunately, the pace of modern life’s demands shows no sign of slowing down—in fact, they are escalating. Any individual person can, however, take steps to moderate the effects of this assault on their brain. Unplugging and leaving stress behind are not options for most of us. For those of us who must remain plugged in, there is still much we can do to attend to the health of our PFCs, and thus our minds.

3 Steps to Take Care of Your PFC

In the middle of the 20th century, it became obvious that, for the first time in human history, we had to exercise and diet to have a healthy body. A similar time has come for our minds. Disciplines such as meditation and yoga are wonderful but take considerable practice. I believe a more targeted approach affords control and relief without such efforts.

There are three methods I recommend to address this broad personal project. These are different from general stress reduction. They are aimed more directly at the PFC by supplying both outlets and control over these brain functions and hopefully restore some balance to our lives.

These three categories summarize my approach.

• Know when the PFC is strained. This is different from just stress or fatigue, and we need to recognize it.
• Have reliable ways to disconnect not just from technology, but from engaging the world only through the PFC.
• Because much of the time we will remain stuck in our own minds, and thus PFCs, we need to be greater masters of our thoughts and feelings.

These approaches are not intended to reinvigorate us so we can jump back into the thick of things. Instead, we should strive for a better sense of balance and control over how our lives and PFCs interact. If, as you examine these plans, they seem like one more thing to add to your to-do list, then you may not have time available. Rest may be what you need the most. Otherwise, focus on and practice the tasks that resonate with you.

1. Know the signs of PFC strain.

• Do you strain to maintain attention ? Especially reading difficult material or repetitive data such as numbers in a column—do you often need caffeine to continue?.
• Do you forget words and small things? Where you put things; what you thought a moment ago; the word you are looking for, often a name or a word you uncommonly use? This is a breakdown of working memory .
• Do you struggle to multi-task? This is really rapid-shifting as in cooking multiple dishes or managing multiple tasks simultaneously by jumping from one to the next.
• Do you let emotions slip through? Usually irritability. Or, do you say emotionally charged things you would not normally say?

When these signs appear, it likely means your PFC is at its limit due to stress, fatigue, or overuse. If you can, disengage from what you’re doing. Do something simpler, or nothing at all. The PFC is the only part of the brain that actually fatigues like a muscle with overuse. As with muscles, rest is essential.

2. Disconnect.

We need to engage with the world in ways other than just our PFCs. The PFC is always working, but we can use other brain systems to directly engage with life. There are no tricks or unusual techniques to learn here. These are fully human activities. Your body and mind will feel at home with their practice. We did these things every day in pre-modern societies:

• Engage life with your hands. Do crafts, cooking, art, play an instrument, garden, or take on a DIY project. Physical (as opposed to virtual) experience brings a level of care and easy focus.
• Engage life with your senses. We are starved for common beauty. Enrich your senses. See, smell, hear, and taste what life offers. Investigate new foods, art, music, and especially nature. Whatever pulls you in via a sense door, follow it (within reason). Green environments are very important in this endeavor. More and more, research finds them to be calming, restorative, and necessary for a healthy mind.
• Engage life with others. Talk with, question, greet, or chat with others—and not just those close to you, but people you see, work with, pass by, and wait in line with. People love to talk about themselves. Let them and hear their stories. I do not believe that chit-chat is mindless and trivial. Connecting dilutes the minor struggles of the day: the weather, traffic. It relieves stress by spreading out concerns among more people. Participate in some chit-chat even if it’s not your concern at the moment.

3. Better manage your thoughts and feelings.

As I mentioned above, you will not always be able to get out of your head and away from PFC-based activities. So, you must cultivate certain skills to use on an ongoing basis. These are not intended to conquer the mind or any similar grand spiritual goals . Rather, they give you more options when the effects of frontal fatigue build up.

• Practice a way to quiet your mind. You can hear, see, and feel the mind. You want it quiet sometimes such as before bed, but it can be so during the day. This need not be meditation, which can require practice and skill—although breathing exercises are easier and can accomplish this goal. Most people commonly quiet their minds with diversion. I have taken up landscape painting. Others use sports, crafts, or long walks. Learn to listen in on your mind to see how noisy it is. You will find things that quiet it down. Practice these.
• Read deeply. This is western meditation. It focuses, engages, and slows the mind all at once. Find something to read that intrigues or entertains you, but with a challenge. In other words, not page-turners. We have become skim readers due to the amount we digest from the internet’s constant flow. Read slowly on purpose.
• Begin to own your emotions. Observe that you are not irritat ed , but rather, irrit able . This halts the arguments in your mind and the search for blame. I mention this, of all the ways we can explore our inner selves, because it allows you to reassert control over emotions that the PFC has lost. This is a large project in itself. Begin with one pair of feelings, contrasting an external and internal source then owning the internal one. Irritated/irritable is a good choice for most (other choices are: angered and nearly angry; saddened and already sad).

Lastly, disconnect from tech and social media whenever you can. This will enhance the effects of all the tools listed above. As we further develop our understanding of how modernity fits into our lives, we can better refine what a mentally healthy life means for each of us.

Mark Rego, M.D., is a psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Meaning of Life — The Meaning of Life in Modern Society

The Meaning of Living in a Modern Society

• Categories: Meaning of Life Society

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Published: Aug 10, 2018

Words: 1103 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

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50 Must-Read Contemporary Essay Collections

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Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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I feel like essay collections don’t get enough credit. They’re so wonderful! They’re like short story collections, but TRUE. It’s like going to a truth buffet. You can get information about sooooo many topics, sometimes in one single book! To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone.  Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

I’ve included a brief description from the publisher with each title. Tell us in the comments about which of these you’ve read or other contemporary essay collections that you love. There are a LOT of them. Yay, books!

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“In this valuable and revealing anthology, cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay collects original and previously published pieces that address what it means to live in a world where women have to measure the harassment, violence, and aggression they face, and where they are ‘routinely second-guessed, blown off, discredited, denigrated, besmirched, belittled, patronized, mocked, shamed, gaslit, insulted, bullied’ for speaking out.”

Sunshine State: Essays  by Sarah Gerard

“With the personal insight of  The Empathy Exams , the societal exposal of  Nickel and Dimed , and the stylistic innovation and intensity of her own break-out debut novel  Binary Star , Sarah Gerard’s  Sunshine State  uses the intimately personal to unearth the deep reservoirs of humanity buried in the corners of our world often hardest to face.”

The Art of the Wasted Day  by Patricia Hampl

“ The Art of the Wasted Day  is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins with two celebrated eighteenth-century Irish ladies who ran off to live a life of ‘retirement’ in rural Wales. Her search then leads to Moravia to consider the monk-geneticist, Gregor Mendel, and finally to Bordeaux for Michel Montaigne—the hero of this book—who retreated from court life to sit in his chateau tower and write about whatever passed through his mind, thus inventing the personal essay.”

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life  by Jim Harrison

“Jim Harrison’s legendary gourmandise is on full display in  A Really Big Lunch . From the titular  New Yorker  piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses, to pieces from  Brick ,  Playboy , Kermit Lynch Newsletter, and more on the relationship between hunter and prey, or the obscure language of wine reviews,  A Really Big Lunch  is shot through with Harrison’s pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between the lines the pieces give glimpses of Harrison’s life over the last three decades.  A Really Big Lunch  is a literary delight that will satisfy every appetite.”

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me  by Bill Hayes

“Bill Hayes came to New York City in 2009 with a one-way ticket and only the vaguest idea of how he would get by. But, at forty-eight years old, having spent decades in San Francisco, he craved change. Grieving over the death of his partner, he quickly discovered the profound consolations of the city’s incessant rhythms, the sight of the Empire State Building against the night sky, and New Yorkers themselves, kindred souls that Hayes, a lifelong insomniac, encountered on late-night strolls with his camera.”

Would You Rather?: A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out  by Katie Heaney

“Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn’t). As she revisits her past, looking for any ‘clues’ that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn’t always move directly from point A to point B—no matter how much we would like it to.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else: Essays  by Chelsea Hodson

“From graffiti gangs and  Grand Theft Auto  to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.”

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.: Essays  by Samantha Irby

“With  We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. , ‘bitches gotta eat’ blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form. Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making ‘adult’ budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s ’35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something’—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.”

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America  by Morgan Jerkins

“Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In  This Will Be My Undoing , Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.”

Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  by Fenton Johnson

“Part retrospective, part memoir, Fenton Johnson’s collection  Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays  explores sexuality, religion, geography, the AIDS crisis, and more. Johnson’s wanderings take him from the hills of Kentucky to those of San Francisco, from the streets of Paris to the sidewalks of Calcutta. Along the way, he investigates questions large and small: What’s the relationship between artists and museums, illuminated in a New Guinean display of shrunken heads? What’s the difference between empiricism and intuition?”

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter: Essays  by Scaachi Koul

“In  One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter , Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself.”

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions  by Valeria Luiselli and jon lee anderson (translator)

“A damning confrontation between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children seeking a new life in the U.S. Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation,  Tell Me How It Ends  (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman’s essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear—both here and back home.”

All the Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers  by Alana Massey

“Mixing Didion’s affected cool with moments of giddy celebrity worship, Massey examines the lives of the women who reflect our greatest aspirations and darkest fears back onto us. These essays are personal without being confessional and clever in a way that invites readers into the joke. A cultural critique and a finely wrought fan letter, interwoven with stories that are achingly personal, All the Lives I Want is also an exploration of mental illness, the sex industry, and the dangers of loving too hard.”

Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays  by Tom McCarthy

“Certain points of reference recur with dreamlike insistence—among them the artist Ed Ruscha’s  Royal Road Test , a photographic documentation of the roadside debris of a Royal typewriter hurled from the window of a traveling car; the great blooms of jellyfish that are filling the oceans and gumming up the machinery of commerce and military domination—and the question throughout is: How can art explode the restraining conventions of so-called realism, whether aesthetic or political, to engage in the active reinvention of the world?”

Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America  by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding

“When 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, how can women unite in Trump’s America? Nasty Women includes inspiring essays from a diverse group of talented women writers who seek to provide a broad look at how we got here and what we need to do to move forward.”

Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life  by Peggy Orenstein

“Named one of the ’40 women who changed the media business in the last 40 years’ by  Columbia Journalism Review , Peggy Orenstein is one of the most prominent, unflinching feminist voices of our time. Her writing has broken ground and broken silences on topics as wide-ranging as miscarriage, motherhood, breast cancer, princess culture and the importance of girls’ sexual pleasure. Her unique blend of investigative reporting, personal revelation and unexpected humor has made her books bestselling classics.”

When You Find Out the World Is Against You: And Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments  by Kelly Oxford

“Kelly Oxford likes to blow up the internet. Whether it is with the kind of Tweets that lead  Rolling Stone  to name her one of the Funniest People on Twitter or with pictures of her hilariously adorable family (human and animal) or with something much more serious, like creating the hashtag #NotOkay, where millions of women came together to share their stories of sexual assault, Kelly has a unique, razor-sharp perspective on modern life. As a screen writer, professional sh*t disturber, wife and mother of three, Kelly is about everything but the status quo.”

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman  by Anne Helen Petersen

“You know the type: the woman who won’t shut up, who’s too brazen, too opinionated—too much. She’s the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud , Anne Helen Petersen uses the lens of ‘unruliness’ to explore the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Lena Dunham, Nicki Minaj, and Kim Kardashian, exploring why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures. With its brisk, incisive analysis,  Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud  will be a conversation-starting book on what makes and breaks celebrity today.”

Well, That Escalated Quickly: Memoirs and Mistakes of an Accidental Activist  by Franchesca Ramsey

“In her first book, Ramsey uses her own experiences as an accidental activist to explore the many ways we communicate with each other—from the highs of bridging gaps and making connections to the many pitfalls that accompany talking about race, power, sexuality, and gender in an unpredictable public space…the internet.”

Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls  by Elizabeth Renzetti

“Drawing upon Renzetti’s decades of reporting on feminist issues,  Shrewed  is a book about feminism’s crossroads. From Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign to the quest for equal pay, from the lessons we can learn from old ladies to the future of feminism in a turbulent world, Renzetti takes a pointed, witty look at how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go.”

What Are We Doing Here?: Essays  by Marilynne Robinson

“In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America like Emerson and Tocqueville inform our political consciousness or discussing the way that beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson’s peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.”

Double Bind: Women on Ambition  by Robin Romm

“‘A work of courage and ferocious honesty’ (Diana Abu-Jaber),  Double Bind  could not come at a more urgent time. Even as major figures from Gloria Steinem to Beyoncé embrace the word ‘feminism,’ the word ‘ambition’ remains loaded with ambivalence. Many women see it as synonymous with strident or aggressive, yet most feel compelled to strive and achieve—the seeming contradiction leaving them in a perpetual double bind. Ayana Mathis, Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, and a constellation of ‘nimble thinkers . . . dismantle this maddening paradox’ ( O, The Oprah Magazine ) with candor, wit, and rage. Women who have made landmark achievements in fields as diverse as law, dog sledding, and butchery weigh in, breaking the last feminist taboo once and for all.”

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life  by Richard Russo

“In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery,  The Destiny Thief  reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.”

Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race by Naben Ruthnum

“Curry is a dish that doesn’t quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn’t properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta’s  Karma Cola  and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford’s  Heat , Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters.”

The River of Consciousness  by Oliver Sacks

“Sacks, an Oxford-educated polymath, had a deep familiarity not only with literature and medicine but with botany, animal anatomy, chemistry, the history of science, philosophy, and psychology.  The River of Consciousness  is one of two books Sacks was working on up to his death, and it reveals his ability to make unexpected connections, his sheer joy in knowledge, and his unceasing, timeless project to understand what makes us human.”

All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom (Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God)  by Deborah Santana and America Ferrera

“ All the Women in My Family Sing  is an anthology documenting the experiences of women of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It is a vital collection of prose and poetry whose topics range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance, and self-worth. These brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of women of color as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in today’s turbulent world.”

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America  by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page

“For some, ‘passing’ means opportunity, access, or safety. Others don’t willingly pass but are ‘passed’ in specific situations by someone else.  We Wear the Mask , edited by  Brando Skyhorse  and  Lisa Page , is an illuminating and timely anthology that examines the complex reality of passing in America. Skyhorse, a Mexican American, writes about how his mother passed him as an American Indian before he learned who he really is. Page shares how her white mother didn’t tell friends about her black ex-husband or that her children were, in fact, biracial.”

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith

“Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world’s preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to  The New Yorker  and the  New York Review of Books  on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.”

The Mother of All Questions: Further Reports from the Feminist Revolutions  by Rebecca Solnit

“In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller  Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.”

The Wrong Way to Save Your Life: Essays  by Megan Stielstra

“Whether she’s imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra’s work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.”

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms  by Michelle Tea

“Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, this is Tea’s first-ever collection of journalistic writing. As she blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own, she turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the price that art demands be paid from life.”

A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  by Shawn Wen

“In precise, jewel-like scenes and vignettes,  A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause  pays homage to the singular genius of a mostly-forgotten art form. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and meticulously observed performances, Wen translates the gestural language of mime into a lyric written portrait by turns whimsical, melancholic, and haunting.”

Acid West: Essays  by Joshua Wheeler

“The radical evolution of American identity, from cowboys to drone warriors to space explorers, is a story rooted in southern New Mexico.  Acid West  illuminates this history, clawing at the bounds of genre to reveal a place that is, for better or worse, home. By turns intimate, absurd, and frightening,  Acid West  is an enlightening deep-dive into a prophetic desert at the bottom of America.”

Sexographies  by Gabriela Wiener and Lucy Greaves And jennifer adcock (Translators)

“In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives.  Sexographies  is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.”

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative  by Florence Williams

“From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.”

Can You Tolerate This?: Essays  by Ashleigh Young

“ Can You Tolerate This?  presents a vivid self-portrait of an introspective yet widely curious young woman, the colorful, isolated community in which she comes of age, and the uneasy tensions—between safety and risk, love and solitude, the catharsis of grief and the ecstasy of creation—that define our lives.”

What are your favorite contemporary essay collections?

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Alt-Berlin, Waisenstraße (1927) by Hans Baluschek. Courtesy of the Märkisches Museum, Berlin/Wikipedia

Money and modern life

Sociologist georg simmel diagnosed the character of modern city life: finance, fashion and becoming strangers to one another.

by Daniel Lopez   + BIO

Georg Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin in 1858. That city epitomised the tensions of Germany’s special path to modernity. Rapid urbanisation and financial speculation propelled Berlin to the world stage. An avant-garde cultural elite flourished uneasily alongside central Europe’s aristocracy while a young proletariat fought the state and the bourgeoisie for rights, political and economic. A proliferation of modern technologies generated power and wealth while eroding the landed Prussian Junker nobility, the foundation of Bismarck’s united German Reich. The Hohenzollern dynasty – one of the oldest in Europe – reigned over a volatile empire, intoxicated by the most modern ideas.

The University of Berlin, which gave Simmel his education, was saturated with neo-Kantianism’s critical, historicist spirit. Yet Simmel found it hard to conform to Germany’s staid academic culture. His first dissertation, on ethnomusicology, was failed as too ‘speculative, aphoristic and stylistically careless’. Although he earned his doctorate in 1881 and his habilitation in 1885, his examiners perhaps had a point: his published articles often omitted references and refused scholarly narrowness. As Gustav von Schmoller, one of Simmel’s contemporaries, wrote of his style: ‘he prefers to provide more caviar than black bread, to illuminate with a firework than a study lamp.’

Not at home in the treatise, taxonomy or monograph, Simmel was foremost an essayist. As his fellow German scholar Theodor Adorno wrote of the essay form, thinking of Simmel, it ‘does not let its domain be prescribed for it … The essay does not play by the rules of organised science and theory …’ Instead of fashioning a comprehensive system, essays lightly gesture towards hidden depths and the connectedness of phenomena, often to greater effect. The impression is of a temporarily illuminated whole that fades rapidly, leaving one with the sense that there is more to be discovered, provided another flash of brilliance. Take the opening lines of Simmel’s essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903):

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

Simmel effortlessly establishes a rich framework of enquiry. But more than this, we don’t just hear the individual in general, but also this individual, who struggled to find a place in a hostile world. Yet Simmel also loved his world. ‘Perhaps I could have achieved something that was also valuable in another city,’ he reflected later, ‘but this specific achievement, that I have in fact brought to fruition in these decades, is undoubtedly bound up with the Berlin milieu.’ This is why Berlin found its self-consciousness in his essays.

T he analysis in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ centres on two interlocking social forms: money and the city. As they become dominant, they erode natural rhythms of production and traditional social bonds. This is liberating: cash doesn’t care about birthright, it is ‘concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value’. Yet, there is a hidden cost: money reduces what is uniquely valuable to a number, a price. In the right ratio, fine hand-crafted goods are equal to mass-produced junk. This devalues commodities – nothing that can be bought is unique – while simultaneously accelerating the search for whatever is truly unique and incomparably valuable.

The city accelerates the calculable logic of money, encroaching even on our experience of time. As Simmel wrote:

If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time.

Time is no longer governed by the seasons or celestial bodies, but is abstracted and measured. The city also compresses space, social and geographical. Diverse classes, strata, cultures, linguistic groups and vocations are brought into close proximity. This is why, as Simmel observed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached against the city bitterly: it threatened to subsume his noble individualism into a mass.

While Simmel was a deep reader of Nietzsche and shared his romantic attraction to ‘an endless succession of contrasts’, he took an urbane distance from the latter’s aristocratic radicalism. Instead of seeking extremes in the mountains of Sils Maria, Simmel found them in the metropolitan crowd, where one can feel the uniquely modern loneliness of passing a thousand faces without recognising a friend. Nietzsche’s peaks and valleys produced noble heights and abject depths. Simmel’s metropolis instead cultivated blasé citizens who, afraid of being subsumed, distinguish themselves with externally cool indifference.

The salon he cultivated around his house was as important to his work as the library

Disillusioned by advertising and overstimulation, Simmel suggested that blasé individuals search for quality in their last refuge – personality:

Man is tempted to adopt the most tendentious peculiarities, that is, the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism, caprice, preciousness … the meaning of these extravagances … [lies] in its form of ‘being different’, of standing out in a striking manner and thereby attracting attention.

Simmel knew such characters well because they regularly came over for dinner. The salon he cultivated with his wife, Gertrud, around his house was as important to his work as the library. Margaret Susman, a regular guest at the Simmel household, writes:

The weekly jours … were a sociological creation in miniature: that of a sociability whose significance was the culturation of the highest individuals. Here conversation … floated in an atmosphere of intellectuality, affability and tact, detached from the ultimate burden of the personal element … Only exceptional people, distinguished by intellect or even by beauty, took part in these social events.

Simmel’s guests included Stefan George, the symbolist poet, and Lou Andreas-Salomé, psychoanalyst, author and one-time apple of Nietzsche’s eye. In return for their patronage, Simmel held a mirror to this cultural elite. His public lectures were acclaimed, and attracted the best of central Europe’s intelligentsia . For a brief period prior to the First World War, figures as diverse as Leon Trotsky, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Mannheim, Georg Lukács, Karl Jaspers and Emil Lask bumped knees at Simmel’s lectures.

His international impact was easily equivalent to that of Simmel’s contemporaries, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, finding an audience in Chicago as early as the 1890s. Nevertheless, he was perpetually denied academic promotion. As his father had died while Simmel was young, he was appointed a guardian who owned a music publishing house and who left Simmel a considerable inheritance, financially securing his intellectual pursuits. From 1885 to 1900, Simmel remained a Privatdozent , a lecturer whose pay is dependent on the ability to attract students. Money doesn’t discriminate and neither did Simmel – so he welcomed women as guests to his lectures, in violation of contemporary conventions. During the 1890s, despite Bismarck-era antisocialist laws, Simmel also associated with socialist circles and even published in their paper, Vorwärts. The fact that he moved in the wrong circles and attracted the wrong students added barriers to academic advancement.

Finally, in 1898 he was promoted to Ausserordentlicher Professor , the uncommon rank of ‘professor without a chair’, paid at half the rate. This also denied Simmel the right to take on doctoral students. Perhaps he imagined that The Philosophy of Money (1900), his magnum opus, would demonstrate once and for all his suitability for a full professorship.

I f you look carefully at a 100-mark Reichsbanknote from 1908 – issued one year after the revised edition of The Philosophy of Money was released – it lets slip a lot. One’s eye is first attracted to the ‘100’, then the red serial numbers and the seal of the Reichsbankdirektorium . Between these are signatures, above which hover the date of issue, assurances of authenticity and – of course – an elaborate blackletter typeface once more stating the note’s value. The imagery, very different from Enlightenment motifs found on French or American banknotes, hints at Germany’s romantically inflected nationalism. On the reverse, a feminine personification of Imperial Germany, well-armed but at peace, sits amid symbols of culture, science and industry. Behind her stands an ancient oak, symbolic of Donar (the German equivalent of Thor) and in the distance coal-fuelled battleships pass in procession.

These aesthetics combine the abstract and the concrete: on one pole is a numerical value; on the other, illustrations of a nation’s wealth and virtues; and in between, pointless, quasimagical legal assurances. All this is as it should be. Money is a unique social object, useless by itself but given power by a state bank and backed (in those days) by gold. Money can equate tangible goods as diverse as medicine, industry or even the cultural pleasure (and sub-Dionysian revelry) one might expect for the price of a ticket to Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Bayreuth.

Money is nothing, but it flows everywhere and mediates between everything. In keeping with this mysterious quasitranscendental status, Simmel’s method combined aesthetics and philosophy. The ‘great advantage of art over philosophy’, he explained:

is that it sets itself a single, narrowly defined problem every time: a person, a landscape, a mood. Every extension of one of these to the general, every addition of bold touches of feeling for the world is made to appear as an enrichment, a gift, an undeserved benefit.

Philosophy, for its part, demands that this aesthetic heuristic submit to the ‘infinite reciprocity’ of reason. The result is a philosophy of money that is critical precisely because it’s honest about its subjective, aesthetic foundation and necessary incompleteness.

‘For man, who is always striving, never satisfied, always becoming, love is the true human condition’

The centrepiece of Simmel’s work is a conceptualisation of exchange, an act between two people that produces value, a ‘third term, an ideal concept which enters into the duality but is not exhausted by it’. This irreducibility is why value can, in the form of money, take on a life of its own, which Simmel describes as ‘the reification of exchange among people, the embodiment of pure function’. Of course, no one said exchange would always be fair: as bandits and medical insurance companies know, one will pay any price to live. Nevertheless, as acts of exchange proliferate, currencies and prices rationalise and standardise value.

Money, like Heraclitus’ river, constantly moves while staying the same. Because it has no goal beyond its own circulation, money points towards noneconomic values. Yet, as the market grows, the ‘teleological chain’ of transactions extends, making nonmonetary goals more distant and more valuable. Take love, for instance. As we become more anonymous and distant from one another, love – which wishes to overcome distance between the self and the loved one – flourishes. As Simmel put it: ‘For man, who is always striving, never satisfied, always becoming, love is the true human condition.’ This is also why, as he notes in his essay on prostitution, money can buy sex – but it can’t buy you love.

By reducing time to a measurable quantity – for example, an hourly wage – money creates yearning for quality time. This could be a night out, a holiday, or a duration in which seconds feel like hours, in which time rushes by or in which one simply forgets time. As Simmel argues in his essay ‘The Adventure’, an adventurer is someone who styles his life around qualitative time. It appears that the adventurer is blessed with skill – but he merely aestheticises the blind, indifferent luck that makes such a life possible. So, the adventure always ends with failure or retirement (which amounts to the same thing). Romance, which promises to make quotidian time beautiful, is the adventurer’s genuine escape route.

Simmel didn’t glorify the monetary economy. Not only did he link it with disenchantment, he was aware of its victims: with the extension of the economy, a ‘larger proportion of civilised man remains forever enslaved, in every sense of the word, in the interest in technics’. In such passages, we can see Karl Marx’s influence on Simmel, and Simmel’s on both Lukács and Martin Heidegger. While Simmel avoided the radical politics associated with these two, his character types become more radical. For instance, Simmel speaks of the modern cynic, who is intoxicated by the awareness that money can reduce the highest and the lowest qualities to the same basic form:

The nurseries of cynicism are therefore those places with huge turnovers, exemplified in stock exchange dealings, where money is available in huge quantities and changes owners easily.

Worn-down spiritually, cynics have convinced themselves that only crude consumption and exchange are real.

Every cynic is a spurned lover. On the other hand, the person with a blasé outlook knows it is better to have loved and lost. And the moment that love seems possible again, the blasé are one step away from leaving behind their indifference and becoming the cynic’s opposite: the sanguine enthusiast.

I n The Philosophy of Money , Simmel defends absolute relativism . This fit with common neo-Kantian sensibilities that, having been burned by the mid-19th-century collapse of Hegelian absolute idealism, focussed on the validity of limited, particular truths. However, while one swallow might not make for spring, one true statement does presuppose a series of dependent meanings, assumptions and propositions. To vouchsafe this infinite chain of truth once and for all, it would be necessary to know the whole – an object too vast – or to go to the root, to the most fundamental truths from which all others stem, though this risks reductionism. Simmel rejected both strategies.

Instead, he concluded that ‘truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’. Simmel saw that the individual’s quest for truth would inevitably fail, revealing itself to be as perniciously circular as the movement of money. Thus, relativism – a doctrine of constant flux – was to be the only viable absolute. Simmel presented this as liberating: ‘the expropriator will now be expropriated, as Marx says of a process that is similar in form – and nothing remains but the relativistic dissolution of things into relations and processes.’ But there is also an element of tragedy here: to love truth is to love something we feel duty-bound to seek, even though it remains always out of reach. Like Herman Hesse’s protagonist in Steppenwolf (1927), Simmel chased an elusive absolute.

He also continued to apply for a professorship. His application for the second chair of philosophy at Heidelberg University was praised extensively by their philosophy faculty but ultimately rejected on the basis that Simmel’s expertise was confined to sociology, then a marginal and distrusted discipline. This was only half the story: a report prepared for the minister of education in Baden hinted at a deeper reason. Its author described Simmel as an ‘Israelite through and through’.

Simmel’s family had converted from Judaism to Christianity, and he observed his mother’s Lutheran faith. But this wasn’t about religion: since the late-19th century, Wilhelmine antisemites had transformed Jewishness into a racial category. In a cruel irony, Simmel understood antisemitism better than many contemporaries; his essay ‘The Stranger’ is still paradigmatic. In a crueller irony, antisemitic tropes weaponised the social and cultural forms that sustained him: the monetary economy, the cosmopolitan city, the iconoclastic avant garde , and the combination of closeness and distance from German culture characteristic of the Jewish community. Cruellest of all, antisemitism was a symptom of an underlying disease: civilisational crisis.

Imagine a tree cultivated from wild stock over years to bear good fruit abundantly. Now, compare it with a ship’s mast fashioned from the same tree. The latter has been transformed completely. It is a product of instrumental reason. In contrast, while the fruit tree couldn’t have come about without human technique, its product ‘ultimately springs from the tree’s own motive forces and only fulfils the possibilities which are sketched out in its tendencies’. The mast is made by destroying a tree for an exterior purpose, while the fruit tree is cultivated according to a kind of reason capable of grasping nature as valuable in its own right.

The ascetic saint is a revolutionary who would see the world burn for the promise of future wholeness

This is the central metaphor in Simmel’s essay ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’. His view of culture is Aristotelian: we are like the tree in that human life requires cultivation to flourish. Yet, as Simmel notes, the more culture grows, the more it crystallises and becomes fragmented, specialised and ill-suited to cultivation; as our tree grows, our fruit becomes smaller, less abundant, harder to reach and less nourishing. If a culture can’t nourish us spiritually, it risks withering. Culture lives only because we cultivate it and are cultivated by it.

Simmel identifies two more alternative character types that emerge in response to this problem. The first is the ‘ascetic saint’ who refuses specialisation, and instead tries to preserve the unity of the soul by rejecting a culture en toto . Taken to extremes, the ascetic saint is a revolutionary who would see the world burn in exchange for the promise of future wholeness. Because such characters reject culture as a totality, their enemy must be a universal one – a social class or a system. One is reminded of a character in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924): Leo Naphta, a strange nihilist hybrid of the Jewish tradition, Jesuitism and Marxism. Disgusted with enlightenment liberalism, he declares the ‘mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is – terror.’

The contrary character is the ‘specialist fanatic’ who is deformed and dehumanised by the narrow slice of culture they have mastered. To find a place in a fragmented whole, they fragment themselves. This path also leads to an irrationalist desire to save life from culture. Only, because specialists have a place, their path leads not to submission to a mystical otherworldly whole, but to a passion for violent struggle that might revitalise their culture. So, the whole of society need not be made into an enemy. What is needed, instead, is a particular scapegoat for the cultural sickness the specialist fanatic intuits. This tendency led to the political Right, who designated foreigners and particularly Jews as the enemy.

Although he never endorsed antisemitism, Simmel was attracted to the cult of national regeneration associated with this path. He concluded:

But this is the true destiny of life, for life is struggle in the absolute sense that overrides the relative distinction between struggle and peace, while absolute peace, which perhaps also overrides this distinction, remains a divine mystery.

This mention of absolute peace – in addition to leaving open a last-minute escape route – suggests that Simmel was becoming exhausted. It coincided with the last, unhappiest period in his life. In 1914, he was finally appointed as chair of philosophy at Strasbourg University in France. He left Berlin reluctantly. After only one semester of teaching, war broke out. Simmel was caught up in patriotic militarism. Jarringly, for one so subtle, he wrote:

I love Germany, and therefore want it to live – to hell with all ‘objective’ justification of this will in terms of culture, ethics, history, or God knows what else.

Most commentators speculate that Simmel was motivated by a now desperate desire for recognition and stability. In place of the minor key of his early work, perhaps he found fleeting grandeur in the major key of Heil dir im Siegerkranz , the empire’s national anthem. Whatever the case, after attending a prowar lecture of Simmel’s, his onetime student Ernst Bloch felt compelled to compose a letter that he never sent: ‘You have avoided the Truth your whole life long … Now you locate the Absolute in the trenches.’

O n 7 November 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Scholar’s Work’ (usually translated as ‘Science as Vocation’) at Munich University. He spoke in a small lecture theatre to an audience assembled by the Left-leaning Free Students Association. A year and two days from the November Revolution that ended the war and the Hohenzollern dynasty, Weber’s audience was well aware of the dire situation and the precariousness of their dreams of an academic vocation. Weber reflected:

But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: Of course, I live only for my ‘calling’. Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.

Surely, Weber had his friend Simmel in mind as one of these few.

Over time, Simmel’s support for the war waned. The deaths of his friends, the philosophers Lask and Wilhelm Windelband, provoked a crisis of faith. Simmel left his mother’s Church, stating a need for religious independence. By war’s end, he had retreated to a house in the Black Forest. Shortly before liver cancer claimed his life, Simmel’s tree bore its last and most philosophical fruit.

In his final book, The View of Life (1918), Simmel abandoned his earlier relativism in favour of a philosophy of life. Life offered a new, richer heuristic. Money and culture both glimmer in the metaphysical tension between subject and object, and between past and present. But as financial crisis drove Europe into a war of opposed cultures, it became clear that the relativism of money and culture concealed nihilism. Instead, Simmel suggested that life itself is the genuine source of all transcendent values. Life – human, animal, even plant – creates boundaries (between self and other, here and there, this and that) and constantly overflows them by growth, consumption, reproduction and death. Humans add a further dimension when we reflect on these boundaries: we ‘deny the boundary the moment we know its one-sidedness, without ceasing thereby to stand within it’, as Simmel put it. Take the divide between past and future, for example. Simmel argued that:

As long as past, present, and future are separated with conceptual precision, time is unreal, because only the temporally unextended (ie, the atemporal present) moment is real.

It’s true, money and culture both bridge between past and future in their ways – but, by themselves, they can’t guarantee a rich existence. Instead, Simmel writes:

life is the unique mode of existence for whose actuality this separation [between past and future] does not hold … Time is real only for life alone.

Instead of the cynical absolute relativist, caught in a vicious circle of negation, and the sanguine enthusiast of dogmatism, who conceals finitude behind a brittle absolute, Simmel came to understand that, to be true, the true must be finite – and, in realising this, we grasp the infinite as our own. This is a magnificent achievement. The cynic and the sanguine enthusiast both locate their goal outside of their lives. In contrast, Simmel’s philosophy of life proposes that the truth is ours, not in spite of, but because of our limits. As soon as we name these limits, we transcend them: ‘By virtue of our highest, self-transcending consciousness at any given moment, we are the absolute above our relativity.’

Simmel’s life was lived in the liminal space between recognition and estrangement

By discovering their basis in life, Simmel de-sublimates religious doctrines that place ultimate meaning beyond this world. For example, the transmigration of souls, part of Buddhist cosmology, is something we experience constantly: in every living moment, an individual soul combines change and permanence. Similarly, the Christian passion for ethical perfection is an estranged expression of grief for a fallen world and a confession that goodness does exist – in this world. Seen this way, dogmatic systems of valuation can find their real content in our finite world, while dropping their alienated form. This opens a path to concrete spiritual freedom: whether life is an etude, a nocturne or a mazurka is subject to our influence as we participate in the polyrhythmic harmony of social life.

Simmel’s own life was lived in the liminal space between recognition and estrangement. And because he faced it with undiminished intellectual integrity, it focused his mind and work. This is why his thought overflows the cup of sociology which, despite its broad scope, is historically delimited by time and place. In his journal of aphorisms, he described his legacy with characteristic humility:

I know that I shall die without spiritual heirs (and that is as it should be.) Mine is like a cash legacy divided among many heirs …

But here Simmel sold himself short. At the very least, his legacy has accumulated interest. Our age of unrestrained financialisation and resurgent nationalism has made Simmel’s philosophical sociology more prescient than ever. The related dangers of catastrophic climate change and pandemic have made his philosophy of life urgent.

In Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), Simmel wrote:

Being and becoming are the most general, formal, and inclusive formulations of the basic dualism that patterns all human beings: all great philosophy is engaged in founding a new reconciliation between them, or a new way of giving decisive primacy to one over the other.

This is also true for Simmel himself. By opening his soul to these extremes, he finally discovered a style of life, that of the philosopher, that could reconcile his individuality with his world. In so doing, he contributed a philosophy to our culture that broadens our knowledge and deepens our soul – and helps us live.

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The Internet has turned our existence upside down. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication. In almost everything we do, we use the Internet. Ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messaging. Before the Internet, if you wanted to keep up with the news, you had to walk down to the newsstand when it opened in the morning and buy a local edition reporting what had happened the previous day. But today a click or two is enough to read your local paper and any news source from anywhere in the world, updated up to the minute.

The Internet itself has been transformed. In its early days—which from a historical perspective are still relatively recent—it was a static network designed to shuttle a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals; it was a repository of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this electronic leviathan, and the content is very much our own, for now we are all commentators, publishers, and creators.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet widened in scope to encompass the IT capabilities of universities and research centers, and, later on, public entities, institutions, and private enterprises from around the world. The Internet underwent immense growth; it was no longer a state-controlled project, but the largest computer network in the world, comprising over 50,000 sub-networks, 4 million systems, and 70 million users.

The emergence of  web 2.0  in the first decade of the twenty-first century was itself a revolution in the short history of the Internet, fostering the rise of social media and other interactive, crowd-based communication tools.

The Internet was no longer concerned with information exchange alone: it was a sophisticated multidisciplinary tool enabling individuals to create content, communicate with one another, and even escape reality. Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity. Personal stories go public; local issues become global.

The rise of the Internet has sparked a debate about how online communication affects social relationships. The Internet frees us from geographic fetters and brings us together in topic-based communities that are not tied down to any specific place. Ours is a networked, globalized society connected by new technologies. The Internet is the tool we use to interact with one another, and accordingly poses new challenges to privacy and security.

Information technologies have wrought fundamental change throughout society, driving it forward from the industrial age to the networked era. In our world, global information networks are vital infrastructure—but in what ways has this changed human relations? The Internet has changed business, education, government, healthcare, and even the ways in which we interact with our loved ones—it has become one of the key drivers of social evolution.

The changes in social communication are of particular significance. Although analogue tools still have their place in some sectors, new technologies are continuing to gain ground every day, transforming our communication practices and possibilities—particularly among younger people. The Internet has removed all communication barriers. Online, the conventional constraints of space and time disappear and there is a dizzyingly wide range of communicative possibilities. The impact of social media applications has triggered discussion of the “new communication democracy.”

The development of the Internet today is being shaped predominantly by instant, mobile communications. The mobile Internet is a fresh revolution. Comprehensive Internet connectivity via smartphones and tablets is leading to an increasingly mobile reality: we are not tied to any single specific device, and everything is in the cloud.

People no longer spend hours gazing at a computer screen after work or class; instead, they use their mobile devices to stay online everywhere, all the time.

Anyone failing to keep abreast of this radical change is losing out on an opportunity.

Communication Opportunities Created by the Internet

The Internet has become embedded in every aspect of our day-to-day lives, changing the way we interact with others. This insight struck me when I started out in the world of social media. I created my first social network in 2005, when I was finishing college in the United States—it had a political theme. I could already see that social media were on the verge of changing our way of communicating, helping us to share information by opening up a new channel that cuts across conventional ones.

That first attempt did not work out, but I learned from the experience.I get the feeling that in many countries failure is punished too harshly—but the fact is, the only surefire way of avoiding failure is to do nothing at all. I firmly believe that mistakes help you improve; getting it wrong teaches you how to get it right. Creativity, hard work, and a positive attitude will let you achieve any goal.

In 2006, after I moved to Spain, I created Tuenti. Tuenti (which, contrary to widespread belief, has nothing to do with the number 20; it is short for “tu entidad,” the Spanish for “your entity”) is a social communication platform for genuine friends. From the outset, the idea was to keep it simple, relevant, and private. That’s the key to its success.

I think the real value of social media is that you can stay in touch from moment to moment with the people who really matter to you. Social media let you share experiences and information; they get people and ideas in touch instantly, without frontiers. Camaraderie, friendship, and solidarity—social phenomena that have been around for as long as humanity itself—have been freed from the conventional restrictions of space and time and can now thrive in a rich variety of ways.

Out of all the plethora of communication opportunities that the Internet has opened up, I would highlight the emergence of social media and the way they have intricately melded into our daily lives. Social media have changed our personal space, altering the way we interact with our loved ones, our friends, and our sexual partners; they have forced us to rethink even basic daily processes like studying and shopping; they have affected the economy by nurturing the business startup culture and electronic commerce; they have even given us new ways to form broad-based political movements.

The Internet and Education

The Internet has clearly impacted all levels of education by providing unbounded possibilities for learning. I believe the future of education is a networked future. People can use the Internet to create and share knowledge and develop new ways of teaching and learning that captivate and stimulate students’ imagination at any time, anywhere, using any device. By connecting and empowering students and educators, we can speed up economic growth and enhance the well-being of society throughout the world. We should work together, over a network, to build the global learning society.

The network of networks is an inexhaustible source of information. What’s more, the Internet has enabled users to move away from their former passive role as mere recipients of messages conveyed by conventional media to an active role, choosing what information to receive, how, and when. The information recipient even decides whether or not they want to stay informed.

We have moved on from scattergun mass communication to a pattern where the user proactively selects the information they need.

Students can work interactively with one another, unrestricted by physical or time constraints. Today, you can use the Internet to access libraries, encyclopedias, art galleries, news archives, and other information sources from anywhere in the world: I believe this is a key advantage in the education field. The web is a formidable resource for enhancing the process of building knowledge.

I also believe the Internet is a wonderful tool for learning and practicing other languages—this continues to be a critical issue in many countries, including Spain, and, in a globalized world, calls for special efforts to improve.

The Internet, in addition to its communicative purposes, has become a vital tool for exchanging knowledge and education; it is not just an information source, or a locus where results can be published, it is also a channel for cooperating with other people and groups who are working on related research topics.

The Internet and Privacy and Security

Another key issue surrounding Internet use is privacy. Internet users are becoming more sensitive to the insight that privacy is a must-have in our lives.

Privacy has risen near the top of the agenda in step with an increasing awareness of the implications of using social media. Much of the time, people started to use social media with no real idea of the dangers, and have wised up only through trial and error—sheer accident, snafus, and mistakes. Lately, inappropriate use of social media seems to hit the headlines every day. Celebrities posting inappropriate comments to their profiles, private pictures and tapes leaked to the Internet at large, companies displaying arrogance toward users, and even criminal activities involving private-data trafficking or social media exploitation.

All this shows that—contrary to what many people seem to have assumed—online security and privacy are critical, and, I believe, will become even more important going forward. And, although every user needs privacy, the issue is particularly sensitive for minors—despite attempts to raise their awareness, children still behave recklessly online.

I have always been highly concerned about privacy. On Tuenti, the default privacy setting on every user account is the highest available level of data protection. Only people the user has accepted as a “friend” can access their personal details, see their telephone number, or download their pictures. This means that, by default, user information is not accessible to third parties. In addition, users are supported by procedures for reporting abuse. Any user can report a profile or photograph that is abusive, inappropriate, or violates the terms of use: action is taken immediately. Security and privacy queries are resolved within 24 hours.

We need to be aware that different Internet platforms provide widely different privacy experiences. Some of them are entirely open and public; no steps whatsoever are taken to protect personal information, and all profiles are indexable by Internet search engines.

On the other hand, I think the debate about whether social media use should be subject to an age requirement is somewhat pointless, given that most globally active platforms operate without age restrictions. The European regulatory framework is quite different from the United States and Asian codes. Companies based in Europe are bound by rigorous policies on privacy and underage use of social media. This can become a competitive drawback when the ground rules do not apply equally to all players—our American and Japanese competitors, for instance, are not required to place any kind of age constraint on access.

Outside the scope of what the industry or regulators can do, it is vital that users themselves look after the privacy of their data. I believe the information is the user’s property, so the user is the only party entitled to control the collection, use, and disclosure of any information about him or herself. Some social networks seem to have forgotten this fact—they sell data, make it impossible to delete an account, or make it complex and difficult to manage one’s privacy settings. Everything should be a lot simpler and more transparent.

Social networks should continue to devote intense efforts to developing self-regulation mechanisms and guidelines for this new environment of online coexistence to ensure that user information is safe: the Internet should be a space for freedom, but also for trust. The main way of ensuring that social media are used appropriately is awareness. But awareness and user education will be of little use unless it becomes an absolute requirement that the privacy of the individual is treated as a universal value.

The Internet and Culture

As in the sphere of education, the development of information and communication technologies and the wide-ranging effects of globalization are changing what we are, and the meaning of cultural identity. Ours is a complex world in which cultural flows across borders are always on the rise. The concepts of space, time, and distance are losing their conventional meanings. Cultural globalization is here, and a global movement of cultural processes and initiatives is underway.

Again, in the cultural arena, vast fields of opportunity open up thanks to online tools. The possibilities are multiplied for disseminating a proposal, an item of knowledge, or a work of art. Against those doomsayers who warn that the Internet is harming culture, I am radically optimistic. The Internet is bringing culture closer to more people, making it more easily and quickly accessible; it is also nurturing the rise of new forms of expression for art and the spread of knowledge. Some would say, in fact, that the Internet is not just a technology, but a cultural artifact in its own right.

In addition to its impact on culture itself, the Internet is enormously beneficial for innovation, which brings progress in all fields of endeavor—the creation of new goods, services, and ideas, the advance of knowledge and society, and increasing well-being.

The Internet and Personal Relationships

The Internet has also changed the way we interact with our family, friends, and life partners. Now everyone is connected to everyone else in a simpler, more accessible, and more immediate way; we can conduct part of our personal relationships using our laptops, smart phones, and tablets.

The benefits of always-online immediate availability are highly significant. I would find a long-distance relationship with my life partner or my family unthinkable without the communication tools that the network of networks provides me with. I’m living in Madrid, but I can stay close to my brother in California. For me, that is the key plus of the Internet: keeping in touch with the people who really matter to me.

As we have seen, the Internet revolution is not just technological; it also operates at a personal level, and throughout the structure of society. The Internet makes it possible for an unlimited number of people to communicate with one another freely and easily, in an unrestricted way.

Just a century ago, this was unimaginable. An increasing number of couples come together, stay together, or break up with the aid—or even as a consequence—of social communication tools. There are even apps and social networks out there that are purposely designed to help people get together for sex.

Of course, when compared to face-to-face communication, online communication is severely limited in the sense impressions it can convey (an estimated 60 to 70 percent of human communication takes place nonverbally), which can lead to misunderstandings and embarrassing situations—no doubt quite a few relationships have floundered as a result. I think the key is to be genuine, honest, and real at all times, using all the social media tools and their many advantages. Let’s just remember that a liar and a cheat online is a liar and a cheat offline too.

The Internet and Social and Political Activism

Even before the emergence of social media, pioneering experiments took place in the political sphere—like  Essembly , a project I was involved in. We started to create a politically themed platform to encourage debate and provide a home for social and political causes; but the social networks that have later nurtured activism in a new way were not as yet in existence.

Research has shown that young people who voice their political opinions on the Internet are more inclined to take part in public affairs. The better informed a citizen is, the more likely they will step into the polling booth, and the better they will express their political liberties. The Internet has proved to be a decisive communication tool in the latest election campaigns. It is thanks to the Internet that causes in the social, welfare, ideological, and political arenas have been spoken up for and have won the support of other citizens sharing those values—in many cases, with a real impact on government decision making.

The Internet and Consumer Trends

New technologies increase the speed of information transfer, and this opens up the possibility of “bespoke” shopping. The Internet offers an immense wealth of possibilities for buying content, news, and leisure products, and all sorts of advantages arise from e-commerce, which has become a major distribution channel for goods and services. You can book airline tickets, get a T-shirt from Australia, or buy food at an online grocery store. New applications support secure business transactions and create new commercial opportunities.

In this setting, it is the consumer who gains the upper hand, and the conventional rules and methods of distribution and marketing break down. Consumers’ access to information multiplies, and their reviews of their experience with various products and services take center stage. Access to product comparisons and rankings, user reviews and comments, and recommendations from bloggers with large followings have shaped a new scenario for consumer behavior, retail trade, and the economy in general.

The Internet and the Economy

The Internet is one of the key factors driving today’s economy. No one can afford to be left behind. Even in a tough macroeconomic framework, the Internet can foster growth, coupled with enhanced productivity and competitiveness.

The Internet provides opportunities for strengthening the economy: How should we tackle them? While Europe—and Spain specifically—are making efforts to make the best possible use of the Internet, there are areas in which their approach needs to improve. Europe faces a major challenge, and risks serious failure if it lets the United States run ahead on its own. The European Commission, in its “Startup Manifesto,” suggests that the Old World be more entrepreneur-friendly—the proposal is backed by companies like Spotify and Tuenti. Europe lacks some of the necessary know-how. We need to improve in financial services and in data privacy, moving past the obsolete regulatory framework we now have and making a bid to achieve a well-connected continent with a single market for 4G mobile connections. We need to make it easier to hire talent outside each given country.

The use of e-commerce should be encouraged among small and medium-sized enterprises so that growth opportunities can be exploited more intensely. Following the global trend of the Internet, companies should internalize their online business. And much more emphasis should be placed on new technologies training in the academic and business spheres.

Modern life is global, and Spain is competing against every other country in the world. I do not believe in defeatism or victim culture. Optimism should not translate into callousness, but I sincerely believe that if you think creatively, if you find a different angle, if you innovate with a positive attitude and without fear of failure, then you can change things for the better. Spain needs to seize the moment to reinvent itself, grasping the opportunities offered up by the online world. We need to act, take decisions, avoid “paralysis through analysis.” I sometimes feel we are too inclined to navel-gazing: Spain shuts itself off, fascinated with its own contradictions and local issues, and loses its sense of perspective. Spain should open up to the outside, use the crisis as an opportunity to do things differently, in a new way—creating value, underlining its strengths, aspiring to be something more.

In the United States, for instance, diving headfirst into a personal Internet-related startup is regarded as perfectly normal. I’m glad to see that this entrepreneurial spirit is beginning to take hold here as well. I believe in working hard, showing perseverance, keeping your goals in view, surrounding yourself with talent, and taking risks. No risk, no success. We live in an increasingly globalized world: of course you can have a Spain-based Internet startup, there are no frontiers.

We need to take risks and keep one step ahead of the future. It is precisely the most disruptive innovations that require radical changes in approach and product, which might not even find a market yet ready for them—these are the areas providing real opportunities to continue being relevant, to move forward and “earn” the future, creating value and maintaining leadership. It is the disruptive changes that enable a business, product, or service to revolutionize the market—and, particularly in the technology sector, such changes are a necessity.

The Future of Social Communications, Innovation, Mobile Technologies, and Total Connectivity in Our Lives

The future of social communications will be shaped by an  always-online  culture.  Always online  is already here and will set the trend going forward. Total connectivity, the Internet you can take with you wherever you go, is growing unstoppably. There is no turning back for global digitalization.

Innovation is the driving force of growth and progress, so we need to shake up entrenched processes, products, services, and industries, so that all of us together—including established businesses, reacting to their emerging competitors—can move forward together.

Innovation is shaping and will continue to shape the future of social communications. It is already a reality that Internet connections are increasingly mobile. A survey we conducted in early 2013 in partnership with Ipsos found that 94 percent of Tuenti users aged 16 to 35 owned cell phones, 84 percent of users connected to the Internet using their phones, and 47 percent had mobile data subscriptions for connecting to the Internet. A total of 74 percent of users reported connecting to the Internet from their phone on a daily basis, while 84 percent did so at least weekly. Only 13 percent did not use their phones to connect to the Internet, and that percentage is decreasing every day.

Mobile Internet use alters the pattern of device usage; the hitherto familiar ways of accessing the Internet are changing too. The smartphone activities taking up the most time (over three hours a day) include instant messaging (38%), social media use (35%), listening to music (24%), and web browsing (20%). The activities taking up the least time (under five minutes a day) are: SMS texting (51%), watching movies (43%), reading and writing e-mail (38%), and talking on the phone (32%). Things are still changing.

Smartphones are gaining ground in everyday life. Many of the purposes formerly served by other items now involve using our smartphones. Some 75 percent of young people reported having replaced their MP3 player with their phone, 74 percent use their phone as an alarm clock, 70 percent use it as their camera, and 67 percent use it as their watch.

We have been observing these shifts for a while, which is why we decided to reinvent ourselves by placing smartphones at the heart of our strategy. I want to use this example as a showcase of what is happening in the world of social communication and the Internet in general: mobile connectivity is bringing about a new revolution. Tuenti is no longer just a social network, and social media as a whole are becoming more than just websites. The new Tuenti provides native mobile apps for Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone, as well as the Firefox OS app and the mobile version of the website, m.tuenti.com. Tuenti is now a cross-platform service that lets users connect with their friends and contacts from wherever they may be, using their device of choice. A user with a laptop can IM in real time with a user with a smartphone, and switch from one device to another without losing the thread of the conversation. The conversations are in the cloud, so data and contacts are preserved independently of the devices being used. This means the experience has to be made uniform across platforms, which sometimes involves paring down functionalities, given the processing and screen size limitations of mobile devices. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on are all evolving to become increasingly cross-platform experiences. But Tuenti is the first social network that has also developed its own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)—the company is an Internet service provider over the mobile network. Tuenti is an MVNO with a social media angle, and this may be the future path of telecommunications.

Social media are evolving to become something more, and innovation must be their hallmark if they are to continue being relevant. Tuenti now embraces both social communications and telecom services provision, offering value added by letting you use the mobile app free of charge and without using up your data traffic allowance, even if you have no credit on your prepaid card—this is wholly revolutionary in the telecom sector. The convergence of social media with more traditional sectors is already bringing about a new context for innovation, a new arena for the development and growth of the Internet.

Just about everything in the world of the Internet still lies ahead of us, and mobile communications as we know them must be reinvented by making them more digital. The future will be shaped by innovation converging with the impact of mobility. This applies not just to social media but to the Internet in general, particularly in the social communications field. I feel that many people do not understand what we are doing and have no idea of the potential development of companies like ours at the global level. Right now, there may be somebody out there, in some corner of the world, developing the tool that will turn the Internet upside down all over again. The tool that will alter our day-to-day life once more. Creating more opportunities, providing new benefits to individuals, bringing more individual and collective well-being. Just ten years ago, social media did not exist; in the next ten years, something else radically new will emerge. There are many areas in which products, processes, and services can be improved or created afresh. The future is brimming with opportunities, and the future of the Internet has only just begun.

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Modern Life – Makes Us Healthy or Weak?

Essays , Technology Advantages and disadvantages of , essay on modern life , Modern Life - Makes Us Healthy or Weak? , modern life advantages and disadvantages 0

Last Updated on October 21, 2020

Modern Life – Makes Us Healthy or Weak? :

• Modern Life is fanatic filled with fun and frolic
• Our lifestyle has changed and we live in a modern world
• Modern life makes us weaker in many ways
• Science and Technology has advanced a lot
• But, Modern Life does not lead to a healthy life

Modern Life – Makes Us Healthy or Weak? : (Short Essay)

What is modern life? In simple words, modern life has made everything fast – Fast communication, Fast production, Fast education, Fast food and so on. With our new ways of living, we have been seeing rapid changes around. Fast is good, but fast in everything is not going to help in living a healthy life.  We become healthy by eating natural foods, taking a walk to the nearby place, doing simple works ourselves and such other activities. But, modern life is slowing reducing all these things which definitely is not a good sign for us. By only accepting simple and good activities that lead a healthy life, we can lead a happy life.

Modern Life – Makes Us Healthy or Weak? : (Brief Essay)

The topic does not in to become a good debate – but also is a question that needs to rise in the minds of each and every one of us.

Modern life is a way of living which has separated man from nature. The life span of man was more than hundred years in ancient period. It slowly came down and was 80 to 85 years few decades back. Now, it has reduced even to 70 to 75 years or lesser. This clearly indicates that the way of life we are following is not right.

The kids today sit under air conditioner during summer and have heater during winter. This makes their body less adaptable to climatic changes; hence they become very weak and less immune. The rapid changes in our world have left us only with falling health. Fast foods are easy to prepare, but are they good for health is a big question mark.

When it comes to entertainment, the whole meaning of the word has changed. There was a time when kids played in the ground and run all around. This, in a way, improved their health and in another way built relationships. Kids nowadays like racing cars, play stations, television programs and internet browsing.

Newly invented equipment, highly advanced technologies and big factories have led to unemployment problems in society, laziness among individuals, pollution in the environment and health hazards due to usage or consumption of products.

There are much more things that can be quoted; modern life has lots of disadvantages over advantages. Before we meet the consequences face to face, it is time to wake up and rectify my mistakes as much as possible. A healthy world is much important than a fast moving world.

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Is a robot writing your kids’ essays? We asked educators to weigh in on the growing role of AI in classrooms.

Educators weigh in on the growing role of ai and chatgpt in classrooms..

Remember writing essays in high school? Chances are you had to look up stuff in an encyclopedia — an actual one, not Wikipedia — or else connect to AOL via a modem bigger than your parents’ Taurus station wagon.

Now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence. According to new research from Pew, about 1 in 5 US teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Kids in upper grades are more apt to have used the chatbot: About a quarter of 11th- and 12th-graders who know about ChatGPT have tried it.

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, and educators continue to grapple with the ethics surrounding its growing popularity. Essentially, it generates free, human-like responses based on commands. (I’m sure this sentence will look antiquated in about six months, like when people described the internet as the “information superhighway.”)

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I used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: “Write an essay on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Within moments, ChatGPT created an essay as thorough as anything I’d labored over in AP English.

Is this cheating? Is it just part of our strange new world? I talked to several educators about what they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it. Before you berate your child over how you wrote essays with a No. 2 pencil, here are some things to consider.

Adapting to new technology isn’t immoral. “We have to recalibrate our sense of what’s acceptable. There was a time when every teacher said: ‘Oh, it’s cheating to use Wikipedia.’ And guess what? We got used to it, we decided it’s reputable enough, and we cite Wikipedia all the time,” says Noah Giansiracusa, an associate math professor at Bentley University who hosts the podcast “ AI in Academia: Navigating the Future .”

“There’s a calibration period where a technology is new and untested. It’s good to be cautious and to treat it with trepidation. Then, over time, the norms kind of adapt,” he says — just like new-fangled graphing calculators or the internet in days of yore.

“I think the current conversation around AI should not be centered on an issue with plagiarism. It should be centered on how AI will alter methods for learning and expressing oneself. ‘Catching’ students who use fully AI-generated products ... implies a ‘gotcha’ atmosphere,” says Jim Nagle, a history teacher at Bedford High School. “Since AI is already a huge part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise our students are making it a part of their academic tool kit. Teachers and students should be at the forefront of discussions about responsible and ethical use.”

Teachers and parents could use AI to think about education at a higher level. Really, learning is about more than regurgitating information — or it should be, anyway. But regurgitation is what AI does best.

“If our system is just for students to write a bunch of essays and then grade the results? Something’s missing. We need to really talk about their purpose and what they’re getting out of this, and maybe think about different forms of assignments and grading,” Giansiracusa says.

After all, while AI aggregates and organizes ideas, the quality of its responses depends on the users’ prompts. Instead of recoiling from it, use it as a conversation-starter.

“What parents and teachers can do is to start the conversation with kids: ‘What are we trying to learn here? Is it even something that ChatGPT could answer? Why did your assignment not convince you that you need to do this thinking on your own when a tool can do it for you?’” says Houman Harouni , a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harouni urges parents to read an essay written by ChatGPT alongside their student. Was it good? What could be done better? Did it feel like a short cut?

“What they’re going to remember is that you had that conversation with them; that someone thought, at some point in their lives, that taking a shortcut is not the best way ... especially if you do it with the tool right in front of you, because you have something real to talk about,” he says.

Harouni hopes teachers think about its implications, too. Consider math: So much grunt work has been eliminated by calculators and computers. Yet kids are still tested as in days of old, when perhaps they could expand their learning to be assessed in ways that are more personal and human-centric, leaving the rote stuff to AI.

“We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration. Five years from now, you and I might be talking about schools wherein teaching and learning is happening in a very self-directed way, in a way that’s more based on … igniting the kid’s interest and seeing where they go and supporting them to go deeper and to go wider,” Harouni says.

Teachers have the chance to offer assignments with more intentionality.

“Really think about the purpose of the assignments. Don’t just think of the outcome and the deliverable: ‘I need a student to produce a document.’ Why are we getting students to write? Why are we doing all these things in the first place? If teachers are more mindful, and maybe parents can also be more mindful, I think it pushes us away from this dangerous trap of thinking about in terms of ‘cheating,’ which, to me, is a really slippery path,” Giansiracusa says.

AI can boost confidence and reduce procrastination. Sometimes, a robot can do something better than a human, such as writing a dreaded resume and cover letter. And that’s OK; it’s useful, even.

“Often, students avoid applying to internships because they’re just overwhelmed at the thought of writing a cover letter, or they’re afraid their resume isn’t good enough. I think that tools like this can help them feel more confident. They may be more likely to do it sooner and have more organized and better applications,” says Kristin Casasanto, director of post-graduate planning at Olin College of Engineering.

Casasanto says that AI is also useful for de-stressing during interview prep.

“Students can use generative AI to plug in a job description and say, ‘Come up with a list of interview questions based on the job description,’ which will give them an idea of what may be asked, and they can even then say, ‘Here’s my resume. Give me answers to these questions based on my skills and experience.’ They’re going to really build their confidence around that,” Casasanto says.

Plus, when students use AI for basics, it frees up more time to meet with career counselors about substantive issues.

“It will help us as far as scalability. … Career services staff can then utilize our personal time in much more meaningful ways with students,” Casasanto says.

We need to remember: These kids grew up during a pandemic. We can’t expect kids to resist technology when they’ve been forced to learn in new ways since COVID hit.

“Now we’re seeing pandemic-era high school students come into college. They’ve been channeled through Google Classroom their whole career,” says Katherine Jewell, a history professor at Fitchburg State University.

“They need to have technology management and information literacy built into the curriculum,” Jewell says.

Jewell recently graded a paper on the history of college sports. It was obvious which papers were written by AI: They didn’t address the question. In her syllabus, Jewell defines plagiarism as “any attempt by a student to represent the work of another, including computers, as their own.”

This means that AI qualifies, but she also has an open mind, given students’ circumstances.

“My students want to do the right thing, for the most part. They don’t want to get away with stuff. I understand why they turned to these tools; I really do. I try to reassure them that I’m here to help them learn systems. I’m focusing much more on the learning process. I incentivize them to improve, and I acknowledge: ‘You don’t know how to do this the first time out of the gate,’” Jewell says. “I try to incentivize them so that they’re improving their confidence in their abilities, so they don’t feel the need to turn to these tools.”

Understand the forces that make kids resort to AI in the first place . Clubs, sports, homework: Kids are busy and under pressure. Why not do what’s easy?

“Kids are so overscheduled in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s so much enormous pressure on these kids, whether it’s self-inflicted, parent-inflicted, or school-culture inflicted. It’s on them to maximize their schedule. They’ve learned that AI can be a way to take an assignment that would take five hours and cut it down to one,” says a teacher at a competitive high school outside Boston who asked to remain anonymous.

Recently, this teacher says, “I got papers back that were just so robotic and so cold. I had to tell [students]: ‘I understand that you tried to use a tool to help you. I’m not going to penalize you, but what I am going to penalize you for is that you didn’t actually answer the prompt.”

Afterward, more students felt safe to come forward to say they’d used AI. This teacher hopes that age restrictions become implemented for these programs, similar to apps such as Snapchat. Educationally and developmentally, they say, high-schoolers are still finding their voice — a voice that could be easily thwarted by a robot.

“Part of high school writing is to figure out who you are, and what is your voice as a writer. And I think, developmentally, that takes all of high school to figure out,” they say.

And AI can’t replicate voice and personality — for now, at least.

Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @kcbaskin .