To be insecure, then, means being unfixed and unsure, to be in a place of possibility. Depending on the context, this kind of insecurity can be unpleasant or even terrifying, and it is especially awful when it is foisted on us by those looking to take advantage of our disorientation. But under the right conditions—when it is buttressed by a more

Things falling apart can portend doom, but it can also presage regeneration, allowing new possibilities to emerge amid the ruins.

Purchasing property is a way to compensate for the absence of a robust and trustworthy welfare state, particularly the lack of adequate public pensions in old age. Houses, in our current paradigm, are both places to live and investments: they are our de facto retirement accounts, emergency funds, and inheritable wealth.

As social provision shrunk, striving became a form of personal insurance against future risk; as employment became more precarious, education was advertised as the most reliable path to upward mobility. Competition was extolled as the most effective way to keep afloat, and the purchase of new products the surest path to self-expression.

When the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a poll asking if people would prefer financial stability to upward mobility, more than nine out of ten respondents said they would eagerly abandon the pursuit of wealth for security.

The idea that the “attainment is well worth all the toil,” Smith wrote, is a “deception”—a useful fallacy that propels capitalism forward. It is a ruse that “rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” motivating farmers to plow bigger fields, entrepreneurs to open factories, colonizers to seize other people’s territory,

The security of having our needs met allows us to have real autonomy and creative agency in the world.

Security means having some assurance of future stability and the ability to plan ahead.

Capitalism thrives on bad feelings, on the knowledge that contented people buy less—an insight the old American trade magazine Printers’ Ink stated bluntly: “Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones.”4 Consumer society thus capitalizes on the very insecurities it produces, which it then prods and perpetuates, making us all