I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Today’s thinker: Zygmunt Bauman (1925 to 2017), a Polish-British sociologist and philosopher.
Bauman is best known for his concept of liquid modernity:
Bauman’s concept of “liquid” modernity describes the shift from stable, institutionally guaranteed life conditions to a society of uncertainty, flexibility, and de-bounding. Social bonds, career paths, and identities are no longer given but must be individually constructed and continually adapted. Liquid modernity demands adaptability—without reliable orientation. It creates freedoms but also new forms of precarity and isolation.
Here, modernity means “of right now,” but as a historical, philosophical, and sociological concept it refers to the period and sensibility that emerged in the 20th century, from the influences of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions, and industrial capitalism. Key themes of the modern include a faith in progress, an increasing dependence on technology, and a trend towards urbanization.
Compare Bauman’s liquid modernity to Byung-Chul Han’s achievement society. Han suggested that before the achievement society, in which everyone is encourage to be all they can be through self-optimization and constant hustle, we lived in an obedience society, where institutions controlled our behavior. Bauman’s liquid modernity and Han’s achievement society both point to the same set of changes. Some thinkers call the period after the modern, post-modern. Post-modern thinking is skeptical of objective truth and anti-authoritarian, having emerging after World War II. This line of thinking introduced cultural relativism alongside identity politics. Bauman did sometimes use the term post-modern but later fully developed his thinking around the concept of liquidity, where there are no longer guardrails for how you live or who you are because institutions have weakened while the individual becomes responsible for herself:
Individualization Without Institutionalization
Bauman uses this phrase to describe the paradoxical conditions of liquid modernity: Individuals are increasingly left to manage their lives on their own—yet lack stable institutional frameworks to support them. Whereas previous generations built their biographies within clear social roles and collective safety nets (e.g., welfare state, unions), many today lack that societal backing. The result is uncertain self-realization under precarious conditions.
Identity and belonging in liquid modernity
In a modern industrial society, individuals define themselves as producers, based on what kind of work they do. In liquid modernity, a person defines their identity themselves, through consumption rather than production. This means that those who have money to consume rise in the social ranks while those who are in poverty are relegated to the sidelines, even if they work.
In modernity, institutions need workers and bureaucrats. In liquid modernity, the economy needs consumers.
In liquid modernity, belonging is mediated through consumption rather than class or milieu.
[Consumption] increasingly replaces traditional forms of social integration. Belonging is performatively produced—through brands, lifestyles, and symbolic consumption. Those who can consume are included. Those who cannot are excluded as “wasted lives.” Bauman sees this as a new form of social division in which exclusion operates not only materially but also culturally.
The liquid of liquid modernity means that there are no structures, no safety nets, no standard ways of living a life. This brings freedom but also danger and a sense of precariousness. This is the logic of the achievement society: “Yes, you can do anything!” but you are largely on your own in doing it.
The aesthetic vs the ethical life, again
In his book Either/Or, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard proposed that you might choose between an aesthetic life, devoted to pleasure, novelty, and the pursuit of experience or the ethical life, founded on commitment and duty.
You see on TikTok and Instagram how people define themselves not by what they do or who they are but by what style they express — this is the aesthetic life taken to an extreme. Instead of identifying as a social worker, or an oncologist, or a dog foster, you are a soft girl (highly feminine, wearing pastels and ruffles) or a coastal grandma (cozy upscale beach-focused clothes and interiors) or a mob wife (fur coats, dramatic makeup, fierce vibes). You devote your financial and other resources towards purchasing the right things and then exhibiting yourself wearing them on social media.
What does the ethical life look like in a post modern society? It looks like orienting yourself towards others instead of simply focusing on your own consumption and aesthetic presentation. It looks like participating in communities of care. It looks like finding horizons of meaning beyond the latest Instagram aesthetic. It looks like doing things in the world that aren’t routinized, machine-driven, as efficient and productive as possible.
Philosophers from Levinas to Murdoch to Han to Taylor have proposed that the key to living ethically is to stop making everything about yourself and instead orient yourself to the reality, and needs, of other people. Han diagnosed a serious dysfunction in our culture that people only ever look for reflections of themselves in other people. Levinas proposed that a genuine ethical life begins with recognizing an unconditional responsibility to others independent of any calculation of benefit to yourself. Murdoch suggested that cultivating attention to other people is a necessary step in living ethically. Charles Taylor said that true authenticity requires not just reflecting on yourself but also engaging in dialogue with others and orienting yourself towards meaning that transcends your own concerns.
Of course voluntary simplicity — a deliberate choice to reduce consumption — can be a key antidote to the consumerist society that Bauman critiques, but what to replace it?
Another antidote to the consumer society is offered by Richard Sennett and his ideas on craftsmanship, rescuing manual labor from intellectual disdain and from override by machine. With craftsmanship, you can find meaning in doing something well for its own sake, not for external reward or recognition. He thought that sustained engagement with material and development of skills forms the person. Here, a kind of work builds identity, but not in the same way as in the modern industrial world (“I am a factory worker,” “I am a middle manager”). One can be a craftsman in the Sennettian sense in any domain: parenting, daily blogging, building a backyard deck, volunteering to walk dogs at a local shelter.
And this leads to yet another different way of being in the world: working for communal good, whether at the micro level (within a community or even just a family) or at the macro level (organizing politically).
David Graeber identifies a kind of everyday communism that we all practice:
Everyday communism (with a small c) can only be understood in contrast by rejecting such totalizing frameworks and examining everyday practice at every level of human life to see where the classic communistic principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ is actually applied. As an expectation of mutual aid, communism in this sense can be seen as the foundation of all human sociality anywhere; as a principle of cooperation, it emerges spontaneously in times of crisis; as solidarity, it underlies almost all relations of social trust. Everyday communism then is not a larger regulatory body that coordinates all economic activity within a single ‘society,’ but a principle that exists in and to some extent forms the necessary foundation of any society or human relations of any kind. Even capitalism can be seen as a system for managing communism (although it is evidently in many ways a profoundly flawed one).
Philosophers Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings developed ethics focused on care — care of children, the sick or the elderly, of animals. This is the everyday communism that Graeber is pointing to.
In my own life
I have much more to say about this, and will do so in tomorrow’s Friday Flash.