And When It Gets Too Human

This thesis is a collection of poems that satirize contemporary absurdities and ironies individuals face in the 21st century. The absurdities I discuss involve information/choice overload, ubiquity of advertisements, ironies of “socially conscious” companies and media that undermine notions of equality, and values of progress circulated online versus their realization inside and outside digital spaces (e.g., mental health). This thesis highlights the strangeness of these situations, which amplifies one of the project’s underlying arguments that what is contemporarily familiar are the very things that should be regarded as absurd.

The broader significance of this project is to consider the contemporary simultaneous lack and abundance of personal freedom of choice/autonomy: the apparent social dilemma of individuals feeling burdened by their freedom of choice due to information overload and their experiences with imposing societal structures (e.g., economy, class, race) that create incongruities with these freedoms as well as the values that are proposed to be uplifted in contemporary society.

Finally, this project also asserts the encompassing argument that digitalization is dehumanization, as the prevalence of sensory overload, the performativity of humanness/humanity for social currency on online spaces, and the common inability to quell boredom without screens are some of the many complex factors eroding the notion of what it is to be human. As such, the concluding section of this project focuses on the miscellany of human life that should be more valued, but pales in comparison to, societally embraced, dopamine-fueled distractions.

While the above are my intentions, I have a single primary goal for this project: to create a reading experience, a momentary space, where readers can find sense in the nonsense in and outside of the text.