Society has become a Liminal Space for many
First off I'll say the main body of this post I had AI generate for me. Heads up (I will denote where it begins). Not because I want to rely on AI, but more because it refines my points far better than I can more succinctly. The ideas are mine; the presentation isn't, that's all.
So this is something I've noticed for a looooong time but haven't seen many hint at openly. Recently I myself have likened modern delayed "adulthood" as a liminal space, and now The Functional Meloncholic has made a video on it.
So I've been on the fence about trying to make a post about this topic, and finally broke down and had AI do it for me. What follows is more or less what it generated;
The modern crisis of COL and meaning is not simply alienation from labor. It is failed initiation. Many people today are stuck in a permanent liminal state: they are no longer children, yet never fully incorporated into meaningful adulthood. We inherit responsibilities without cosmology, labor without vocation, survival without purpose.
Traditional societies at least understood that adulthood required symbolic transformation. There were structured rites of passage, symbolic sacrifices, and obligations tied to meaning; you suffered toward something.
Modern systems dissolved many of those value-imbuing structures, while preserving the burdens they place upon us. So now people perform adulthood performatively and procedurally while internally remaining suspended between stages of life with no coherent understanding of why and what for.
This is why “liminal spaces” and the Backrooms may resonate so deeply lately. Empty offices, fluorescent hallways, waiting rooms, dead mall; these are the symbolic architectures as mirrors of our own deferred becoming. Spaces designed for transition that became permanent habitats; life itself has become like those hour long meetings that could have been a 3 minute email.
The real horror is not that we are trapped, it is that many of us never have and likely never will "arrive", the question of by good or bad faith aside.
Debord and Baudrillard already hinted at this: the spectacle increasingly simulates initiation rather than providing it. College/student loans on the one hand and teenage entry into blue collar jobs on the other, is closest approximation of initiation entry into adulthood for many. Corporate onboarding simulates belonging. Productivity culture simulates purpose. Social media simulates identity. The ritual shell survives though the metaphysical core has rotted out.
So people drift in a strange condition: all the responsibilities of adults, none of the joy of children, and no meaningful rite connecting the two. I feel that a civilization that fails to initiate people into purpose, produces populations that are haunted by their own lives.
[End personally edited, AI generated content]
Am I just being edgy, or is there something to this culturally? Should I just burry the hatchet and keep smiling until my fake smile means something? I'm a middle aged millennial and that performative routine is all I've every personally known, just it's been on my radar lately that it's becoming a larger societal problem, as RR recently said;
>Because when enough men make the same private decision [to socially check out], it stops being a personal story. It becomes an economic event. And right now, that event has a price tag. Everything built on men keeps collapsing.
I know correlation isn't causation but I do feel a inherent connection between the widespread loss of personal meaning and social collapse... ? I've always known "I'm missing something" but this feels close to what it is. What are we "supposed to become", besides a relentless torrential "becoming" itself? Is that what classical initiation was supposed to bring about, or was it to make us "become the role" like the old guilds? Is reality as we know it always merely "at sixes and sevens"? And I'm just being melodramatic and falling for memes? Haha let me know!