The contemporary world is filled with paradoxes. It offers us various possibilities, needs, and desires, and imbues us with a sense of purpose tied to certain overarching narratives. However, to actually fulfill these narratives, we often need to abandon them. Let us take happiness as an example. The dominant narrative of various self-help manuals and digital media culture promotes happiness as something that needs to be achieved. Some self-help even gives us steps to take in order to become happy. However, the nature of happiness cannot be forced. In order to be happy, we need to be happy because of something or someone. Therefore, happiness is a relational concept. It requires our intentionality to be somewhere other than aiming to be happy. So, it is a paradox. To be happy, we must devote ourselves to something other than being happy. This paradox not only blocks us from acquiring happiness but also makes us miserable because, no matter what we do, we cannot achieve it.

The same thing could be said about the concept of freedom. It has become a sort of meta-narrative of the contemporary world. Everyone fights for freedom, even those who would deny it to others. In order to promote that, let's call it discursive freedom, we need to follow a certain exclusive narrative which transforms the freedom into a certain capital. An example of this could be cancel culture, which deals with freedom exclusively, making itself the bourgeoisie of the discourse of freedom. They have the means of production for new freedom motives, narratives, terminologies, etc. The other side should not be spared in this analysis either. Those who oppose woke culture, or more specifically, cancel culture, could consider themselves fighters for freedom of their own expression. But in doing so, they are excluding everyone who does not fit their narrative. Nevertheless, they all fight for freedom, which is imbued with a narrative. It seems that the goal is not freedom but a constant fight for the ideology to which we belong. It is freedom that enslaves us.

The third paradox, which we need to address and which is central to our argument here is the paradox of love in the contemporary world. As everyone deserves to be happy and free, everyone deserves to be loved. This is the narrative of the contemporary consumerist world. It creates the holy trinity of the culture of narcissism. We cannot be happy if we are not loved; we cannot be fully free if we love. Can freedom lead to happiness? It is a mixture of narratives mutually exclusive in their own form. But let us explore the concept of love.

For Erich Fromm (1956), love is not only a feeling or passion; it is an art. As art, it is not effortless but requires some dedication and a loss of comfort. Love is devotion, but without losing oneself. In order to love, we neither can devote ourselves to the other person completely nor can we demand that the other to love us. Either side corresponds with a certain deviation. Complete devotion to others can be understood as a form of masochism, and complete devotion to being loved could be understood as a form of sadism. As we said that today's narrative is more about being loved, we could say that it is eluding love in its own sense of the word.

To be loved indeed involves another person engaging in a loving relationship with us, but if we center the love on ourselves, it cannot last. In love, we learn to embrace the other, to be one, but also to be ourselves at the same time. Love forms a lasting relationship which exceeds passion (but does not exclude it when we are talking about romantic relations) and orientation on self. The self becomes "more" in the manifestation of "togetherness." It does not diminish but becomes enriched. However, to create this loving person inside of us, we need to let go of our basic narcissistic drives. More simply put – I don't love you because I need you; I need you because I love you (see Fromm, 1956).

This concept of love seems very hard. It is especially so in our consumerist culture, which values (as we already stated, narratively) individual happiness and freedom. How to even see love as commitment if we are fed by love as a feeling which requires zero tolerance and a zero ratio? Love is completely (in popular culture context) shown to us as a feeling which will make us special and happy and that will let us experience a transcendental plane of life. How disappointing it would be for Narcissus to realize that the heaven of love is not what he/she/they were promised.

But let us get back to the paradox. When searching for love to make yourself happy, acknowledged, and special, you are searching for it for a secondary reason alone. The first reason to love is to care about another person. It is first and foremost an intimate relationship of respect and devotion. The paradox is most evident in the rise of INCEL (Involuntary Celibate Community). Mostly consisted of young men, it is a term (and a certain community because they are active in the digital sphere) to describe a person who cannot acquire a romantic or sexual relationship with others despite trying. Now, if we get back to our "story" of love, it is easy to see the mentioned paradox. By searching for love for the reasons of self, love will forever elude you.

So, it is a paradox full of frustration – frustration which is manifested in INCEL throughout the hostility and resentment over people who reject them. It is also greatly misogynistic. That alone is an argument for our approach, as well as misogyny rises from the fact that certain people that could fall in the INCEL category feel that they have a right to owning the love, sexuality, etc. So, in a way, it is a relationship of owning, not being. As such, it is discursively oriented towards romantic relationships but resents love in the full sense of the word. This is an extreme case, but to look into more moderate examples we can look at the divorce rates, rates of marriages, and long-term partnerships and relationships we can conclude that our culture today is more and more making us forget how to love.

A culture of narcissism, which we explored in our previous articles, is making us incapable of long-term love. In a world where we are the center of our own universe, we could ask ourselves: Does love have a future, or is it becoming an empty meta-concept like freedom or happiness are starting to be?