But for the rest of us, it's too late. We got indoctrinated culturally and/or intellectually at an early age, and have a different cross to bear. That cross is to find relief from cynicism, irony, and despair that permeates from the crumbling institutional edifices that once served us with a common ethos.
But if we "postmodernists" are really honest with ourselves, we can't truly be labelled as relativists. Sure, we can espouse relativism, as in the way we go about our day saying "whatever works". But we can't really live that way. In other words, we do give a f*ck about something (even when an angst-ridden adolescent says otherwise).
This is point to Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Now, I have to give Manson credit for the clever title. It's a perfect gateway for someone who has no desire to read some self-help gobbledygook. Using reverse psychology, it draws you in enough to make you believe you're about to read a book that makes you feel good about your cynicism.
But as you get into reading it, you realize that's not the point at all. It's all a matter about caring about what's important, and don't sweat the small stuff. So for us postmodernists, it comes back to how do we pick good values? Manson does a pretty good job distilling it to a few things: values that are reality-based, constructive, and controllable, as well as more process than goal orientated. Or in other words, values that bring us closer to Truth (a point postmodernists take issue with).
Manson doesn't get overly spiritual in his book, other than in the section where he evokes Ernest Becker. Becker saw civilization as one big "immortality project" to counter our anxiety around death. We want to leave something behind when our physical body comes to an end. It's one of the reasons we have children, leave our names on buildings, and write blogs (doh!).
But even these "immortality projects" begin to have diminishing returns towards our happiness and aligning with the deeper Truth. We all have a fleeting sense that there has be something more, which is the Source that paradoxically impels us toward seeking itself.
Becker offers the cure so beautifully here...
“Best of all, of course, religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at it highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one's whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality. Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic-and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to "see God" is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one's very creatureliness, one's insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unimaginable to us.”Now, that's something worth giving a f*ck about.