It's now very close to Vancouver's winter Olympics and I feel with my personal disruption and the accelerated schedule of getting on with things that I'm in my own little world. It is less about feeling uncertain or emotional but more about trying to keep on with the next steps and so I have personal blinkers on.

This shot I took while walking around last weekend looking for places to live. I decided this week that I was not going to live downtown -- although it was obviously full of people and I spend most of my day life working there -- it also felt for some reason isolated. I thought back to my early psychology subjects in university. Was it Durkheim? I forget, whoever introduced the concept of anomie.

Anomie

Anomie refers to an environmental state where society fails to exercise adequate regulation or constraint over the goals and desires of its individual members (Durkheim, 1951: 241—276). It is important to note that Durkheim’s conceptualization of anomie is based on a general assumption about the psychological or biological nature of individual human beings. He wrote that the human “capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss” (1951: 247). From Durkheim’s viewpoint, individual happiness and well-being depend on the ability of society to impose external limits on the potentially limitless passions and appetites that characterize human nature in general. Under the condition of anomie, however, society is unable to exert its regulatory and disciplining influences. Human desires are left unchecked and unbounded—the individual “aspires to everything and is satisfied with nothing” (1951: 271).


From the Durkheim Tradition

Lest you think to the extremes, I don't feel at the bottom of an abyss. However, it is interesting to think about one's desires as regulated by society. Myself, now that I am on the edge of being liberated in a sense; I also feel frightened but excited.

What am I to do?

What will I pursue?

Where will I choose to live?

Who will I choose to associate with?