the.com/alienation
the slow realization that the life you're living was never quite yours to begin with
means The state of feeling estranged or disconnected — from other people, from society, from your own work, or from yourself.
from From Latin alienare, 'to make another's, to estrange,' built on alienus, 'belonging to another' — itself from alius, 'other.' The same root that gives us 'alien' originally meant simply 'someone else's,' and 'alienation' long served as a dry legal term for transferring property to another owner. By the 19th century philosophers, Marx most famously among them, repurposed that sense of being made-someone-else's into a name for the modern feeling of being cut off from the fruits of your labor and from yourself — a word that started by describing handed-over land and ended by describing handed-over lives.
- Marx's term
- Workers estranged from what their own hands make
- German root
- Entfremdung means making the familiar foreign
- Legal sense
- Property law calls selling land alienation
- Brecht's tool
- Theater that breaks the spell on purpose
karl marx theory — marx described worker alienation from labor in the german ideology (1845), foundational to communist theory
erik erikson identity crisis — erikson's 1968 identity: youth and crisis documented adolescent alienation and disconnection from society during developmental stages