Lonely Time Diagnoses of the Industrial High Modernity

Modernity had reached its breaking point in 1945, and entered a new aggregate state at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. The heated early modernity ends and the cooled high modernity begins. While the early modern period was characterized by a dynamic industrialization that unleashed immense potentials for productivity and destruction, the high modern period in the Western hemisphere was initially marked by a phase of excessive material gains in prosperity, in which the promises of modernity of a life free of disappointment and care (especially through the emergence of the office and service society) initially seem to come true—and at the same time gradually becomes the cradle of a multitude of new modern lonelinesses, which increasingly overshadow the modern standard of living, but which grow directly out of it. The riches of high modernity come at a price: the increasingly burdensome experience of ever new lonelinesses that constantly overtake and trump each other. What are the specific sources for the new lonelinesses in high modernity?