There is a pervasive feeling that modernity is bland: Buildings, clothes, cars and interior design are minimalist and identical everywhere. Emotional blandness or numbness gets less attention. People, on average, seem less emotional than they used to be. I cannot prove this, since there is no way to quantify societal emotionality, especially not retrospectively for past epochs. All I have is a sense that people expressed deeper emotions in the past
Men around 1800 talked and wrote about their love interests a lot more than men today. Consider Beethoven, Schubert, Goethe and even Napoleon: They all wrote intense love letters. What changed? Writing letters like this to a married woman would be a bold move today and if they ever got published you would get roasted on Reddit, if not canceled altogether.
It’s not just love. Today, the emotions that are publicly expressed are negative, like anger and fear. The great emotions of opera and the religious feelings that led to the construction of the cathedrals now seem more muted. Contemporary entertainment is analytical rather than emotional. Consider Seinfeld, both the man and the show: Very funny, but also devoid of warmth or other emotions, which probably isn’t a coincidence, because they aren’t that funny.
Is this lack of emotional expression a cause or a result of the blandness we see elsewhere? Or is there something that causes both of them? Your guess is as good as mine.
Nehaveigur 