modern malaise

Having laid out at length the political problems with delegating the responsibility for coping with your own life to a political program, I must confess that my primary concern is personal, not political. I do not hate the knowledge workers at whom this type of essay is directed (I am one of them). I believe that large swathes of them are experienc... See more

There is only so much powerlessness, so much indignity in the mounting pressure that people can tolerate, and God, family values, or appeals to a mythical utopian past quite frankly are not going to change a single concrete thing for them. Resorting to the dopamine rush of endless scrolling, or to the sticking-plaster medical intervention of SSRIs,... See more

“More and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist cult... See more

When living “under capitalism” becomes a catch-all explanation for what you can’t manage — whether that’s getting on the metaphorical treadmill or stepping off it — it assumes the nature of a complaint to an adjudicating authority.

Unfortunately, the patterns of our techno-social order tend toward the fracturing of community and the isolation of the person. We are offered an array of tools that promise to assuage the resulting economic and psychic precarity, but, more often than not, their real aim implicit in their design is to perpetuate and accelerate social fragmentation ... See more