self-absorbtion

Walker Percy, in his book Lost in the Cosmos makes the point that the modern human self is empty. He points out that we attempt to fill our vacous soul with the meaning of the things of the world around us but, instead of ending up with a meaningful self, we end up with a meaningless world. Our empty modern souls devour the fullness of the meaningfulness around us and leave only invisible (to us at least) meaningless stuff. This is why, he argues, our fashion, funiture and culture flop between retro and grotesque (or both at once), because we imagine that the inherited meaning of old stuff or the shock value of "completely new" stuff will give our selfhood, previously drained of meaning by our self-absorbtion, lasting meaning, but instead, you get meaningless tye-dye and mullets and nudity and negliges in public that are no longer seductive in the bedroom. Perhaps this is also the reason behind moderns inability to use, understand, or develop subtlety and fullness of symbolism. When we do attempt it, we use it like morse code or worse, like bible code and end up with weasle sucked words.