Live With 'Resonance': Reattach Your Wire to the World

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has written an 800-page tome about how we relate to the world and what constitutes a good life.

With a metaphor from physics, he illustrates how we relate to the world in a way that cuts us off from a life well-lived.

By living in resonance with the world, ourselves, and other people — we can live the good life we’re all aspiring to.

Accelerated Growth & the Promise of More

Before we get to Rosa’s solution, let’s use his previous work to set the context. Much of Rosa’s previous work centers on accelerated growth.

Growth has become wired into our mental infrastructure, and is inherent in Rosa’s very definition of modern societies:

“…[A] society is modern if its mode of stabilization is dynamic, that is, if it needs progressive growth, acceleration, and innovation just to reproduce its social structure and to maintain its status quo.”

It’s presupposed in how we expect the world to be and become in the future. We take economic growth and accelerated change for granted, and we align ourselves with that trajectory because it promises us more possibilities.

The Promise of More and accelerated growth instills us with hope that we’ll be able to take advantage of more of what the world has to offer.

And modern society delivers — you can travel to the other side of the world, and buy anything you want. You can access our collective knowledge from your phone. You can move to a city and meet more people. Education can afford you new possibilities.

Rosa calls this the ‘Triple-A Approach’ — individuals in modernity are driven to accelerated growth by implicitly believing that the good life consists in making more of the world available, attainable and accessible.

He also mentions money as a fundamental technology — “money is the magic wand with which we make the world available, accessible and attainable. In fact, our wealth indicates the scope or reach of our horizon”.

Growth expands our world and what’s potentially available seems without limit.

Yet, this world of endless possibilities does not come without cost.

The Perils of Infinite Options

In the modern condition we find ourselves in, there’s always something we can do to better ourselves, and satiate our need for more & better.

The pockets of free time naturally dispersed throughout the day can potentially be used for any number of things. Perhaps you should answer a few e-mails, read that book you’ve been meaning to read, call a friend, or do push-ups.

The accessibility of potential options means we’ll often go to bed feeling guilty for all the things we haven’t done.

It’s not that you’ve done something wrong — your only sin was not using your day in the optimal way possible. You look around and see the unused sporting equipment and your pile of unread books, and can’t help but feel a nagging sense of guilt and unease.

Hartmut Rosa claims this is the psychological situation for many people in our society.

It paints a picture of the human that has everything, yet lacks what’s most important. Even if you have a family, a stable job, and a comfortable home, you can still live without feeling connected to yourself or your surroundings.

Alienation

After publishing his book Social Acceleration, Rosa was called a guru for slowness and deceleration. But Rosa is not your regressive back-to-the-good-old-days philosopher.

We need acceleration for creativity and innovation — both critical for ensuring a better society and a good life. After all — a slow internet connection is not the solution, nor is being stuck in traffic.

Acceleration in and of itself is not a problem. It’s only when it leads to alienation we need to treat it as an issue.

The endless sea of possibilities makes it hard to commit to anything. Doing one thing means not doing something else. We always have the option to do something else. And this commitment issue remains unresolved in the back of our minds, taxing our energy, and inhibiting our ability to engage fully with what’s in front of us.

This dynamic also affects other areas of our lives.

We move and relocate more often than in our past. The places we call home are not closely intertwined with our identity and personal history. We don’t allow the roots to set, as we never exclude the option of moving somewhere else.

The things we surround ourselves with are bought, used, and discarded. It’s more convenient to buy something new than to fix what’s broken.

Furthermore, the objects we interact with are increasingly sophisticated, making it impossible for you to fix them. Thus, your experience with these things becomes more shallow, as you don’t have any understanding of how they work.

Contrast this with the things you’ve kept for a long time and are intimately familiar with. They aren’t mere physical objects. They’re saturated with meaning and emotion — almost as extensions of you.

It takes time and effort to dive deep and understand how something works.

The same goes for your decisions and actions. More often than not, we need to throw ourselves into something only partly understood, and make decisions based on limited information. These decisions can even be as momentous as choosing your educational path.

Endless possibility, paired with the finitude of time, alienates us from the decisionmaking-process and the actions we partake in.

Decision Fatigue

Surveys in most developed countries paint the same picture: most people feel they don’t have the time to do what they really want to do.

Interestingly, the same people who usher that complaint also spend north of three hours each day watching television or surfing the web. The satisfaction they report from watching television scores very low compared to other activities.

So — why do people do it, if they’d rather be doing something else?

In accelerated societies, we’re more prone to seek instant gratification, like scrolling on social media or impulse shopping.

Boredom has been eradicated; replaced by hallow hits of dopamine.

The ever-present horizon of possibility draws on our energy, depleting our willpower and drive.

Hesitant to commit, we want to buy possibilities and options, rather than actually spending time on any given activity.

Buying possibilities gives us dopaminergic satisfaction here and now, while keeping us from something more precious — namely engaging with our lives.

A Life Well Lived: Resonance

Many people have thought about alienation since Karl Marx discussed it in his Das Kapital from 1867. But far fewer have asked the question: what is the opposite of alienation?

When Hartmut Rosa asked that question, it became clear to him that what people seek is a different way of being in the world.

His metaphor of resonance turned him into an academic superstar.

Borrowed from physics, Resonance describes two systems vibrating and moving in unison — mutually stimulating each other. Rosa used that concept to describe a relationship between human beings and the world.

Resonance is a way of relating to the world — to friends, to your work, to nature — that produces an experience of connection and being on the same wavelength. You get an answer back from your surroundings. It’s not necessarily about total harmony, but about being talked back at and moved.

It’s dialogical, not monological.

It’s a feeling of hearing the world and belonging in it.

It can be experienced listening to music, playing with your dog, enjoying a landscape, or engaging in a conversation. It might come while preparing dinner, chopping wood, or writing a text.

Rosa upholds that in this process, the resonant parties are transformed. We’re changed by and through the resonance process.

Resonance is always characterized by an element of elusiveness. No matter how hard you try, it can’t be guaranteed that you’ll get into a mode of resonance with someone or something. By his example — “…you might buy the most expensive tickets for your favorite piece of music, and yet feel untouched by the performance”.

Your Way of Relating to the World

These processes of resonance are essential for what we are as human beings. When you read a book, listen to or play music, or take a walk in the forest, you are trying to get in touch with the world in the sense of resonance.

We’re all searching for a feeling of resonance, whether or not we use that term. We strive to feel connected and entangled with the world.

In a sense, while in resonance with some Other, you’re making the boundaries of your Self more fluid — being oriented not to any internal realm, but towards others and the world. Your Self gets smaller and intermingled with what you’re resonating with.

A life well lived entails being capable of entering into relations with the world which are not merely instrumental — but resonantly vibrating on its own terms.

The Three Axes

Rosa distinguished three dimensions, or axes, of resonance.

The Horizontal axis of resonance connects us to other people in the mode of love and friendship, but also in the form of democratic politics.

The Diagonal (or material) axis of resonance connects us to material things, objects, or artifacts in the mode of work, sports, education, or consumption.

The Vertical axis of resonance gives us a sense of how we are connected to the world, or nature, or life, or some such ultimate reality as a whole. In modernity, vertical axes of resonance are established through the practices and conceptions of religion, nature, art, or history.

Through these different axes, Rosa wants to firmly establish resonance as the normative yardstick for our quality of life. He exclaims all humans are ‘resonant beings’; “we don’t need to learn to resonate, even though we might dis-learn it or lose our capacity to enter into resonant relations”.

Rosa also believes we can make normative measures of societies based on these axes:

The concrete axes of resonance are always formed in social and historical contexts. Therefore, whether or not we have access to vibrant axes of resonance — and whether or not we dispositionally approach the world in a resonant mode, or a ‘silent’, instrumental mode — depends on the social contexts we operate in.

And herein lies his thinly veiled critique of modern society:

“…a capitalist society that forces us into a mode of competition, optimization, and speed, and which creates permanent time-pressure and stress, enforces a non-resonant, instrumental, reified mode of approaching the world.”

A Resonating Future

You can’t decide to experience resonance within the next hour. It’s more elusive, and not about following a set of rules or principles. Resonance is something that happens between you and the world. All you can do is try to remain open and attuned.

Rosa’s conceptualization isn’t a quick-fix for self-help junkies — but rather a way of diagnosing a problem many of us can relate to.

When plagued with vague unease and productivity-guilt, you can realign your thinking: maybe what you want isn’t more of the same, but rather a different mode of being in, and relating to the world.

Perhaps what you need is a chance to get into resonance with people, things, and places.

Reattach your wire to the world.

If we could make resonance more of a normal state of being, rather than something only found in small pockets, at particular places, at particular times, we’d be better for it.

As a sociologist, Hartmut Rosa emphasizes the need for societal and political change to alter the conditions of our society in order to facilitate more resonance.

Hopefully, we’ll make progress towards that end. But in the meantime, I’ll do my best to be more attuned and attentive.

I hope this resonated with you.