The modern self has grown very thin

“Consumer society produces only brief, fleeting connections and no bonding in the melting pot. The more descriptive image of the postmodern experience would be not the melting pot but the cocktail party. This is the place of brief encounter where those who may be strangers perform the ritual of instant, but evaporating community, one that springs into being as the sun sets and is gone before the moon rises. The modern self, as a result, has grown very thin, insubstantial, and distracted. It lives in a world of fleeting experiences and constantly shifting images, images which we create and by which we sometimes even pass ourselves off as something we are not.”

— David Wells. Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, p45. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.