Modernity is not primarily a historical era

Modernity is not primarily a historical era. It is an assortment of intellectual assumptions, biases, and tendencies to which humans have been susceptible from time immemorial. As a disorder, modernity has profoundly debilitating effects on the person, psychological as well as physiological effects. In extraordinary cases it may spread to social and political institutions, breeding decadence on a vast scale. There were isolated outbreaks of modernity even among the ancients, but it never attained to a level of an epidemic. As a designation of roughly the last five hundred years of Western history, the term modernity denotes an era during which every sector of society has been more or less infected. Today, modernity threatens to become a pandemic.

The typically modern individual suffers from a variety of ailments: melancholy; lethargy; malaise accompanied by a hauntingly vague disorientation; a sense of meaninglessness. In short, nihilism. Many try to escape their dis-ease by diverting attention away from their troubled minds through various bodily indulgences. The most popular of these diversions are of course alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, obsessive attachment to popular culture, extreme athletic exertions. Anything that inhibits thought. The typical modern society condones and even promotes these activities, in part because the markets upon which such societies depend profit from the products and services associated with them; also because these societies lack the spiritual resources to recognize them as pernicious.  (from PURE by Mark Anderson)