Simmel Tragedy of Culture and The Ozempic Era
I am by far not an expert on Simmel so feel free to argue
by Christine C
Simmel Tragedy of Culture and The Ozempic Era
If you know anything about the celebrity world nowadays, it’s fair to assume you have seen the before-and-after pictures, the phrase “Ozempic face” or “Ozempic body”, and sat through Serena Williams promoting GLP-1s during the Super Bowl. It has become part of our society as a whole, as a tool for the rich to skip the trainers, the diet, and the discipline. Looking at the work of George Simmel, we see his worries about modernity come to life through this phenomenon. The process of struggle and growth, he believed, shaped the nature of the common man, which was replaced by injections. In this paper, I will discuss how Simmel’s "Tragedy of Culture" and the rise of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic represent the triumph of "Objective Culture" over "Subjective Culture”. This results in a biological alienation where the physical result of health is detached from the lived experience of self-cultivation.
Subjective vs. Objective Culture
Before we can go into the connections between Simmel's theories and Ozempic/GLP-1s, I must explain his beliefs on the philosophies of life through the tensions between Objective and Subjective Culture. Simmel always saw these two to be at odds with each other.“The subjective soul is the life of the individual who has certain needs for its preservation. It stands opposed to the products of culture, the works of art and literature, of industry and technology, the laws and regulations of the economy and society, which have an objective existence of their own (Beiser 2026). Subjective culture is the self-cultivation of the experiences and struggles that make us human. We see that human creativity develops into its own structures of logic. The once ideas of man, like art, technology, and systems, become independent and demanding of a standard of perfection that man must now strive for and serve. Simmel argued that the triumph of Objective culture over Subjective culture is shown in the rise of Ozempic. The tragedy of losing the inner journey is what Simmel described as the Tragedy of Culture. Beiser (2026) explains that Simmel felt this would happen across all of modern life, noting how "the things within culture—tools, means of transportation, the products of science, technology and art—have become increasingly sophisticated; however, the culture of individuals has become more impoverished" (p. 123). We keep building more and more sophisticated objects, and the average person keeps falling further behind in their ability to understand or truly engage with them.
The Tragedy of Culture
The tragedy Simmel preached was not something physical like an earthquake or a flood; it was a slow overtaking. Objective Culture grows and becomes rooted in our everyday things. Subjective Culture can only grow at the pace of a human life. Our creations do not die with us; they continue to grow and become their own. Beiser says, “A single product is the work of many individuals, so that no individual alone has the power and knowledge to produce it. The more the product of labor is the work of many hands, the more it is alien to a single laborer and seems like a power that dominates him" (p. 123). What started as a tool for humans like technology becomes the master. Some criticisms of Simmel's work were that his theories were not relevant anymore. But Mendes and Caetano (2022) argue that his ideas are actually more relevant today than when Simmel first wrote them. Looking at the twenty-first-century social media algorithms and digital platforms, growing pharmaceutical markets, and the increase in AI, they argue that Simmel's way of thinking about how objects and systems take on lives of their own is a way of further understanding where we are now. This leads to the application of his theories to our topic of Ozempic...