Post-modern stress

Originally published Tuesday, May 16, 2006.

There is only so much different influences that one could take. While writing this iTunes (set on shuffle) started playing the theme from MASH (Robert Altman, 1970) "suicide is painless". This didn't make me think of committing suicide. However, it did made me think about how we are bombarded with different messages and ideas most of our waken time. The headline above was intended to be a pun derived from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm nevertheless quite certain that it's possible to suffer from post-modern stress. Moreover I'd like to entertain the thought that this might be something that's a common condition for people of my generation. So, what is post-modern stress? This might be a real condition or disorder for all I know but in my mind it stands for the problem with all the data we have to interpret on a day to day basis. We're being flooded with information from all kind of media which is crippling ourselves. I personally find it hard to do anything creative while there is so many things to analyse, breakdown, comment, criticise and evaluate. The term postmodernism (or "pomo" in slang) itself is difficult to pin down. I guess the best thing one could do is to not think about pomo stress.

I'm being postmodern, before it's fashionable