The four concepts upon which our existence is built and sustained are beauty, love, sex, and happiness, which in this 21st century are undergoing an unprecedented and dizzying metamorphosis. Journalist Winston Manrique Sabogal, director and founder of WMagazín, analyzes this situation in his book, The Great Transformation: Beauty, Love, Sex, and Happiness in the 21st Century (Galaxia Gutenberg). This polyphonic, cross-cutting, and interdisciplinary work features contributions from more than 250 writers, philosophers, artists, political scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, and scientists with whom he has spoken throughout his three decades of journalism in Spain and Colombia.

This collaborative book stages a new, dynamic landscape and how the authors perceived it at each moment, reinterpreting it within the universal imagination to help us understand aspects of our current human condition. It is the confirmation of the polytheism of the four cardinal desires of humankind, which we are all transforming in these early stages of the dual, analog and digital world. This world desacralizes traditional canons and concepts amidst the challenges, illusions, fears, and uncertainties of the post-truth era, the algorithm, inclusion, and climate change.

How, when, and why is this revolution of beauty, which contains everything; of love, as the driving force of life; of sex, a crucial incentive; and of happiness as the sought-after horizon, taking place? And with the acceleration of time, the great awakening of the self, and the popularization of music as the main drivers of this transformation, whose changes are unpredictable and touch all areas of society.

The press has given it very positive reviews: “It is a vademecum of wisdom”, according to the EFE News Agency; “a portrait of society”, according to the Spanish newspaper El País; “It offers a vast array of perspectives, although one thesis prevails: the neoliberal model and its current mechanisms have led us to an individualism that has atomized us as a society”, according to the supplement El Cultural, of the newspaper El Español; all this by bringing “more than two hundred creators into dialogue to compose a collective narrative that attempts to explain what has happened to us, how we got here, and why we are moving so fast”, according to the supplement ABC Cultural, of the newspaper ABC.

In The Great Transformation there is a dialogue between people who belong to different generations, different disciplines, nationalities and interests: Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Elena Poniatowska, Piedad Bonnett, Clara Janés, Samanta Schweblin, Umberto Eco, Javier Marías, Frank Wilczek, Álvaro Pombo, Dacia Maraini, Dario Fo, Irene Vallejo, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Isabel Coixet, Olga Tokarczuk, Percival Everett, Rachel Cusk, Liudmila Ulítskaya, Marta Sanz, Kazuo Ishiguro, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Mircea Cārtārescu, Katie McCabe, Bernardine Evaristo, André Aciman, Chuck Palahniuk, Gilles Lipovetsky, Azahara Alonso, Annie Ernaux, Aurora Luque, Tess Gunty, Manuel Cruz, Adam Zagajewsky, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Fernanda Melchor, Peter Handke, Isabel Muñoz, Fernando Vallejo, Vivian Gornick, Alberto Olmos, Bernard Pivot, Hilary Mantel, Gao Xingjian, Ana Blandiana, Alex Ross, Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, Colm Toíbín, J. M. Coetzee…

The vectors of The Great Transformation: Tiempo, Self and Music

We are experiencing a new pollination of beauty, love, sex, and happiness that disrupts the known world to give rise to its own polytheisms. Two moments constitute the accelerating platforms of this great metamorphosis: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The first rewritings of this new history began in 1989. What happened beyond the geopolitical effect? ​​It is as if, once the fear of nuclear war was banished, a cycle closed and searches and explorations were precipitated. The moment when beauty, love, sex, and happiness are definitively liberated, under the auspices of an unbridled self, a dizzying pace of time, and a complicit and hedonistic music.

Ramón Andrés: “God has fragmented, exploded, and broken into minuscule gods, and each of those gods has taken up residence in an individual”.

“The fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with the end of a discourse and an economic system that sought and needed to regenerate itself. (…) The ultraliberal expansion, with the explosion of social media, the intellectual regression of educational programs, and the empty promises to the population regarding a state of comfort and security, among other things, demonstrate that what seemed like a truce has been nothing more than a hiatus, a mere few moments that have allowed capitalism to reformulate itself and become even more incisive. It has been a false alarm for the inner freedom of the individual, and also for society, which has lost sight of the common good due to the individualism instilled in its citizens. This reality has produced a difficult-to-resolve conflict and is a hallmark of modernity. I am referring to the split that has occurred between the self and the external world, terms that today seem antagonistic”.

Michael Spitzer: “Music allows society to expand; it is the engine of social expansion and, therefore, of culture, once again, long before the arrival of language”.

El Roto: “There is an exaggerated presence of the self. I don’t know if it has to do with the overabundance of almost everything. To stand out, you have to exaggerate, you have to make yourself visible somehow. All of that seems quite pathetic to me. (…) I think there is an ever-increasing concealment of reality. We are superimposing layer upon layer on reality, and we are moving further and further away from an immediate and real perception. It’s as if all these flashes are making us increasingly blind”.

Beauty, Emancipation

Beauty is a window through which to look not so much at the world as at ourselves as individuals and as a society. And if that perfect storm of 2007/2008—the economic crisis, the digital boom that brought the world closer together and fostered greater connection, while simultaneously creating changes in habits—from leisure to romantic relationships—making some business models obsolete and generating new ones for work, and causing almost imperceptible shifts on the geopolitical chessboard—affected it in any way, it was to accelerate the normalization and acceptance of its mixed nature. The self has always been, and always will be, there. Only now, its unprecedented power has generated an explosion of expressions of beauty that reveal the plurality of its expanding universe.

Umberto Eco: “There are no longer any criteria for distinction. Therefore, beauty and ugliness become merely class distinctions: beauty for the rich and beauty for the poor. (…) I speak of the polytheism of beauty, of the different eras in which there were different models. Today, all of them are valid, and the media have contributed to disseminating various models of bad taste”.

Frank Wilczek: “The search for and exploration of beauty have helped to decipher the world and its advances (…) Human beings have a genetic basis for recognizing beauty”.

Antoni Tàpies: “The aesthetics of disorder and ugliness is an insurrection against everything artificial. Although I am always suspicious when ideas become fashionable. A positive and necessary trend to balance this highly efficient world”.

Enrique Gil Calvo: “Break the mold to be unique, and the spectrum of ugliness offers more possibilities. (…) Beauty is emasculating and limited. Classic identities no longer sell; they are not competitive”.

John Banville: “The artist’s mission is to make the world blush with beauty”.

Tess Gunty: “My idea of ​​beauty combines those two definitions: wonder and terror. I even see beauty as the complete embodiment of the person, of an individual’s unique personality. That is, when you are authentically yourself, I see that as beautiful, and a work of art, right? This is what attracts me most in art, in people, in places. That they don’t shrink from external pressures, but are themselves. This is what truly moves me”.

Gilles Lipovetsky: “The culture of authenticity is manifesting itself even in the most resistant spheres to this ideal. […] Brands and designers are currently striving to liberate fashion from the stereotypes and dictates of beauty that they accuse of destroying women’s self-confidence. The trend now consists of celebrating all body types, all sizes, all ages, all skin tones. The current moment is marked by the emergence of ‘inclusive fashion”.

Love, fluidity 

Just when it seemed easier to navigate a romantic relationship, it has become complicated and backfired due to the commodification and cheapening of love as a shortcut to happiness, and the overabundance of promises from Cupid in the minefield of cyberspace. It is an ecosystem in constant metamorphosis where love seems more fragile as five myths of a hegemonic, heteronormative world are shattered, leading to unpredictable and ever-changing shifts:

1. The incorporation of women into professional and social life, which means they are no longer passive subjects nor do they have to put up with anyone;
2. The feminist struggle for equality, which entails changes in gender roles;
3. The increase in singlehood, especially among women, for whom having a partner is no longer obligatory, nor is it necessary to feel the pressure of fulfillment solely through motherhood;
4. The increasing normalization of the fluidity of feelings among all kinds of people in a liquid modernity, as Zygmunt Bauman called it;
5. And the growing recognition and normalization of the diversity of people of different genders or sexes and their recombinations, who can love and be loved without having to hide, with the consequent change this implies in family and social structures—these latter aspects being among the most novel”.

Gabriel García Márquez: “Why on earth do they ask me why I equate love with demons? I don’t equate them: love is the most terrible, the most wonderful of all demons”.

Toni Morrison: “Today, in our society, we observe love more through the lens of sex”.

Álvaro Pombo: “Job instability is correlated with emotional instability. People don’t know how to live with or cope with today’s free love. Partly due to the persistent feeling that we’re missing out on something, which leads to a fleeting romantic life, even though, deep down, we still yearn for the same old thing: eternal love”.

Peter Watson: “Desire is the central problem of our emotional life. It never goes away. Each individual must come to terms with their own desire, learn about it, and respect the desires of others. (…) We rush headlong around the desired object and end up being strangers to ourselves”.

André Aciman: “Love goes beyond male or female gender; it’s about people, about feelings. Intimacy with someone is better than no intimacy”.

Marta Jiménez Serrano: “We’ve been trying to dismantle a series of gender patterns, and suddenly, when we enter into a relationship, all of that is rebuilt; within the relationship, it’s much harder to dismantle it. (…) Everything has become more fluid, points of reference are less unequivocal, life is much more mobile, jobs too, and all of that makes relationships more fragile”.

Juan Antonio González-Iglesias: “It’s a paradox. Young people don’t have as much freedom or the capacity for connection as it seems. We have to consider the multiplicity of categories and labels, which is exhausting. There’s a return to platonic love, even more idealized”.

Tamara Tenenbaum: “Everything is happening; relationships have changed a lot, single life has changed”.

Annie Ernaux: “Feelings, and among them, love, are crucial. And they continue to be, despite these times of social media. It’s still something different for men and for women. Love is vital. The sexual impulse is basic and instinctive, and you can’t stop it; that’s just how it is. Love is something basic in human beings; it’s sexual instinct because we are mammals, and human beings have managed to make something immense out of it. André Breton, the surrealist artist, defined love as a core of night. And that, for me, is love”.

Patricio Pron: “The digital world provides access to a catalog of known and secret desires, where for many people it is easier to find someone whose desires coincide with their own, while reinforcing the idea of ​​gender as a continuum in which roles such as those traditionally considered masculine and feminine, and the opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality, can be adopted and then abandoned without essential aspects of a person’s identity being called into question”.

Frank Tallis: “The internet has both positive and negative consequences for love. These relationships are built on firmer foundations than sexual attraction. Despite this, most cyber influences are negative. Access to pornography has made many young people afraid of sex because they feel they must behave like porn stars. The internet has also created a culture of narcissism”.

Dacia Maraini: “Love is a historical fact, not a biological one. Love is something cultural. We love according to culture, not biology. Human beings don’t have fixed rules. We cannot be passive in the face of change, but must guide it”.

Richard Firth-Godbehere: “We live in an era of searching for love and happiness, and we arrive at this toxic happiness, happiness at any price, that is sold on social media”.

Yanina Rosenberg: “Men and women acted according to predetermined roles, and each gender accepted these impositions. But the women’s cry of ‘enough’ left men several steps behind. Women were always told they were the weaker sex, and men, from their alpha male role, were told they should protect them. But what if men aren’t comfortable in their mold either? What if they don’t want the role of the protective superhero? Can’t they also feel unprotected?”.

Clara Janés: “Love is always positive, even if you’re ignored. (…) I do believe that you can love someone you’ve never met and there’s no reciprocation, because in the end, it’s all in the mind”.

Agustín Fernández Mallo: “Love is like letting someone put you inside their head and play with you and vice versa, creating between the two of you a shared game, which is unique and creates its own language”.

Sex, freedom

The multiverse of sex is expanding rapidly. What happens when we approach desire beyond binary categories? These changes are being led by Millennials and Generation Z. They see open relationships and polyamory as normal. (…) Amid the revision and restructuring of traditional relationships, society is facing an unprecedented, dizzying change with a new element: gender, which affects all sectors of society and all phases of life. Although the political and public debate often focuses on “genitalization” or sexualization, what is truly important is the individual’s harmony with their emotions and feelings.

Mayra Montero: “Young people are experiencing everything. It won’t be a sense of weariness, but rather a return to a more innocent age because they’re doing everything now, trying all sorts of sexual practices we couldn’t imagine a few years ago”.

Mayra Santos-Febres: “It is necessary to put an end to this sense of difference. Different doesn’t mean better or worse, but distinct. Even so, the problem remains: what do we do with differences? The answer is: we suppress them. But in our relationships with the opposite sex, with the same sex, with our doorman or our boss, the question resurfaces. Do I fall in love with my equal, with my fellow human being, or can I fall in love with the differences?”.

Frank Tallis: “Human sexual behavior has no limits. Virtually anything can be a sexual stimulus. (…) We must not impose artificial limitations on human sexuality”.

Darian Leader: “We should welcome efforts to change the effects of patriarchy on sexual life and on society in general, but what we see today in sexual relationships is a tension between the emphasis on equality and the desire to create inequality. (…) Global internet pornography consumption spikes in the final stretch of Sunday nights and remains high throughout Monday. It’s quite possible that the pornographic appeal to sexual images serves an analgesic purpose”.

“It’s a crucial moment; we see how sexual identity and sexual practice don’t always fit together so well or coincide. Many people recognize themselves in one of the new labels, but this doesn’t tell them what to do with another person of flesh and blood, and there’s a whole range of new labels to designate those who prefer to avoid the physical aspects of sexual contact”.

José Antonio Marina: “After millennia of asymmetrical relationships, symmetry in couples is proving very difficult. That’s why machismo hasn’t completely disappeared. For a long time, it was thought that all sexual problems stemmed from repression, and that if this disappeared, sexuality would be idyllic. Experience has shown that this wasn’t true. People don’t aspire to a life of continuous sexual and polyamorous experiences, but rather to a loving cohabitation, which is something different”.

Lionel Shriver: “The Me Too movement is in danger of becoming anti-sexual. It’s as if it doesn’t accept desire. It forgets that women like it too. There’s mutual seduction; it’s like a dance”.

B. B. Easton: “We have to rise above thousands of years of suppression to fully embrace our sexuality, because those fears and stigmas still persist in many of us”.

Happiness, the illustrated eye 

Everything human beings do is aimed at achieving happiness, from seeking love to improving democracy, equality, and caring for the planet, and anything that hinders these goals tarnishes their horizon of happiness. Hence the search for shortcuts to happiness. Polycentric mirages emerged with the advent of the internet, later fueled by social media, leaving us with a growing sense that happiness lies elsewhere, that we were missing out on something. Happiness was reaffirmed as an elusive and unattainable aspiration. This perverse dynamic has led to it perhaps being the concept that has received the most pressure in recent decades, even generating illnesses ranging from stress to anxiety or depression in an overstimulated world of constant validation on social media.

Javier Gomá Lanzón: “The concept of happiness has been replaced by the search for meaning. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people didn’t ask about the meaning of their lives. Suddenly, the individual emerges from the cosmos and discovers two things: that they possess infinite dignity and that they are destined for the indignity of death. Today, death is ever-present, from the news to children’s video games, but as a biological fact, not as an acknowledgment of our mortality, of the fact that we have a finite life”.

Ray Loriga: “Happiness as an obligation seems to be the cause of all evils, a condemnation. Although as a yearning, it’s not bad. (…) We see everyone happy on social media. Happiness has almost proclaimed itself an obligation”.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio: “Identity is not only the place where we were born. We belong to the nationality of what we love, of our lovers, of the people and things that influenced us, and of our neighbors”.

Olga Tokarczuk: “Tenderness is the most modest form of love. […] Tenderness is a way of seeing that shows the world how I live, interconnected, cooperating, and codependent upon myself”.

Salman Rushdie: “An American essayist said that Puritanism is the fear that someone could become happy. Thus, pleasure becomes a revolutionary act”.

Irene Vallejo: “Writing names, captures, and perpetuates the fleeting flow of our sensations and discoveries. It anchors us in a calm bay surrounded by chaos. […] That is why cultivating reading means caring for our societies and our democracies”.

Guadalupe Nettel: “The rise of feminism is one of the best things that has happened in recent years”.

Socorro Venegas: “It’s taken for granted that a mother has to be happy with her pregnancy and her child. There’s also the need for permanence, society’s need to reproduce and follow a natural cycle that can’t be threatened. And, of course, a woman questioning whether or not she wants to be a mother represents a danger to the species. That’s why we’ve lacked that honest space for women to connect and see each other”.

Nuccio Ordine: “Deceived by the euphoria of constant connection, we don’t realize that we’re experiencing a new and terrible form of loneliness. Ultimately, we believe we’re free and happy inside a prison whose walls we can’t see”.

Emanuele Felice: “While global inequality wounds the humanist dream in the developed world, happiness retreats once again to become an individual concept, based on material pleasures, on hedonism; on ‘artificial paradises’. (…) For all this to now translate into happiness and be lasting, it is necessary that the ‘revolution of pleasure’, to call it something, be accompanied by an ‘ethical revolution”.

Albert Lladó: “Capitalism has been able to use happiness as just another act of consumption, and we know that consumption, obviously, does not lead to happiness. Happiness is, practically speaking, a project. Furthermore, it is also essential to make room for sadness, anger, and other feelings. We must recover the idea of ​​happiness as a project of emancipation, not as a project of consumption”.

Margaret Atwood: “I don’t know where democracy is headed, but what I do know is that we must be able to create a system to help the poor and prevent the world and all its wealth from being controlled by 1% of the population, as is the case today. The gap between rich and poor has widened”.

Martin Baron: “The great danger is that now in societies, in the United States and in many other countries, we cannot agree on the facts; we don’t share a common set of ideas about those facts. And it’s even worse: we cannot agree on how to establish what is a fact, what elements we need to establish that something is a fact. We have to ask ourselves what the elements were that we used before to establish a fact. These include education, experience, knowledge, and, above all, evidence. All of these elements have been devalued in our societies. Many people deny, they have no respect for education, they don’t respect experience, they deny the knowledge of experts, and they also turn a blind eye to evidence”.

Paco Roca: “I’m frightened by those surveys that show the extent to which people are willing to sacrifice freedoms to have basic necessities. Because they would be capable of living under a totalitarian government if it provided them with those necessities. That makes you seriously question what young people understand by happiness”.

Juan José Millás: “Paleolithic man was happy and moved around freely, ate lean meat, was well-fed, and even drew marvelous bison in the Altamira caves. And it is there that the writer pauses and adds: And if I could wish for anything, I would like to be one of those who painted those bison. We should never have left the Paleolithic era”.

• La gran transformación. La belleza, el amor, el sexo y la felicidad en el siglo XXI. Winston Manrique Sabogal (Galaxia Gutenberg).
• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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Other articles from our English edition that may interest you:

László Krasznahorkai, 2025 Nobel Laureate in Literature: “Human beings remain the same, dangerous to themselves”. You can watch it HERE.

Complete series of Artificial intelligence in the world of books and literature:

• Artificial Intelligence in the World of Books and Literature (1): Authorship and the New Role of Humans in Creation. You can watch it HERE.
• Artificial Intelligence in the World of Books and Literature (2): Writing and creativity in the posthumanist era. You can read the article HERE.
• Artificial intelligence in the world of books and literature (3): Cultural revolution and paradigm shift. You can read the article HERE.

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