Aging & Wisdom Quote by Georg Simmel

Modernity, for Simmel, isn’t just new gadgets and faster streets; it’s a slow-motion coup against the self. The line lands because it borrows the language of biology - “tissues,” “absorb” - to make culture feel like a living organism that keeps expanding while quietly changing what it metabolizes. What it no longer needs, Simmel suggests, is you in your full, messy particularity.

The key move is his loaded use of “objective.” In ordinary speech, objectivity sounds like progress: clearer thinking, fairer rules, less superstition. Simmel weaponizes that optimism. “Objective culture” is the accumulation of institutions, technologies, scientific methods, bureaucracies, and money economies - systems that run on “impersonal energies” and scale precisely because they don’t depend on any one person’s inner life. That’s the subtext: modern culture becomes powerful by becoming indifferent.

This sits in the context of Simmel’s broader diagnosis of metropolitan life: sensory overload, the “blasé” attitude, and the dominance of calculation. The individual is still there, but increasingly forced into a defensive posture, carving out personality as a private style choice rather than a social necessity. “Absorb less and less the subjective entirety of the individual” isn’t nostalgia for a premodern golden age; it’s a warning about asymmetry. Culture grows enormous and intricate, while the person’s capacity to meaningfully inhabit it - to recognize themselves in it - shrinks. The result is not just alienation, but a new kind of freedom that feels suspiciously like eviction.