Existentialist Approaches to Modern Alienation

Modern society is progressing at an unprecedented rate, with technologies like the internet enabling us to publicize life-changing words at a press of a button. Through these powerful tools, we have overcome traditional boundaries to create online communities, but reckless use of these tools has also deteriorated our human relationships. This disconnection can be described as an alienation from our society, and by extension, we experience alienation from ourselves. By applying the ideas of existentialist philosophers who have wrestled with alienation in the 20th century, my thesis suggests that individuals can reorient ourselves and our place in society by maintaining consciousness of the human realities that alienation reveals, refraining from tendencies that keep us under illusions, and defending true freedom for ourselves and for others. Simultaneously, society must reorient itself by encouraging equal participation, personal growth, and honest representation of complex identities.