The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises. Home improvement stores, flower shops, and furniture stores assure us that we can design our own homes in such a way that they begin to sing, while travel agencies and real estate brokers inform us that the world sings somewhere else. And at a secondary level, local history guides, travel memoirs, sentimental dramas of the countryside (Heimatfilme), and documentaries about German emigrants starting new lives abroad all likewise suggest that responsive segments of world indeed exist.

The hope of finding such a segment of world — or, rather, of establishing a relation of resonance to a segment of world — is by no means limited to physical space alone, but extends just as well to the social world. Find your home! as an imperative of modernity may well [363] mean first and foremost: Find people with whom you can enter into a resonant relationship. The social embeddedness of modern subjects is no longer a priori predetermined along estates-based or class lines or by traditional or conventional commitments such as arranged marriages. The psychosocial and psycho-emotional basis of social association in the private realm is rather formed by the notion that every subject has both the right and the responsibility to seek out and find friends and romantic partners who want and are able to enter into affirming, productive, lasting responsive relationships with them. Love and friendship have changed shape in modernity, in that they are now directly understood as resonant relationships and have become the social responsibility of the individual.

These two paragraphs set up this extraordinary, and (dare I call it?) convicting, insight and metaphor:

Modern society is thus characterized by the fact that it demands that those who live in it move through social space as seismographs of resonance, establishing social bonds when and where they are mutually called or addressed, i.e. where there is a “spark” between the participants in an interaction. The idea, at least, is that intense private social relationships are thus freed of estates-based, ritual, courtly, or religious stipulations and instead conceived as pure relationships of resonance. The fact that late modern subjects are clearly increasingly inclined to enter into partnerships and friendships with people who are like them as opposed to those who are “other” (sociostructurally or in terms of cultural or social background) does not necessarily contradict the criterion of resonance. They expect successful relationships from and are more likely to feel addressed by people who are similar to them. From a diagnostic perspective, this behavior could, however, also be read as an indication that subjects under late modern conditions tend to steer clear of what is genuinely other. They seek out harmony and consonance and avoid dissonance — though at the price of confusing harmony for resonance and thus forfeiting the possibility of adaptive transformation. Not unlike those potentially depressive types who keep their homes immaculately clean and smelling of flowers, they are at risk of moving in environments that are beautiful, but do not speak.

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 362–63. As the meme goes: “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”