“The Metropolis and Mental Life,” by George Simmel demonstrates how urban life changes mental life. The read was a bit confusing but after hitting some of the main points in class, it may have cleared up my understanding. The transition between rural to urban life is rather substantial, where personal interactions become impersonal and where feeling and emotion turn intellectual. As discussed in class, intellectualization is when one blocks out emotion, turning to reason or logic, a way to basically remain blind to reality. The urban life is governed by the objective, where everything is fact, there is nothing personal, as opposed to the rural life, where the small town where one can be subjective, having some sort of personal interpretation or experience. Because we are so bound to the city life, and as Simmel suggested, we are more or less robotic, sustaining our subjective selves, running around like little puppets under money hungry capitalists (at least in today’s society), taking away from any individuality thats left in us.
“Life makes one blasé because it stimulates the nerves to their utmost reactivity until they finally can no longer produce any reaction at all,” (329). This is just another way of saying that things go unnoticed, that there is no indifference. This goes back to the fact that people in big cities are in fact “mathematical formulas.” You can’t change the formula because you won’t get the same output. This pertains to the individuals engulfed by the metropolis life; everything is calculated, or a better term, measurable; time is everything. We can’t do anything different than what we are used to doing, this daily robotic routine, because we need to produce money, it must be our product, we can’t change it because we need that output. It’s just all about money and time, therefore taking away any kind of value, meaning or reaction, making everything superficial. Because we have no emotional response, or any kind of regard to something that’s out of the ordinary demonstrates there is no more qualitative value within the community, rather a move quantitative based setting, a money economy. Furthermore, Simmel says, “Money, with all its colorless and indifference quality, can become the common denominator of all values,” (330). Money is the motive, at least in the city it is.