Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world

Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or ev... See more

The negative side effects from this new way of living are too countless to list. We don’t have the patience for anything, let alone the slow unfolding of human emotion. Ask anyone on a dating app how that looks up close, how it plays out over time. Pundits lament that the global populace is enduring a plague of psychobabble that adds up to elaborat

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All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f

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We inhabit, in ordinary daylight, a future that was unimaginably dark a few decades ago, when people found the end of the world easier to envision than the impending changes in everyday roles, thoughts, practices that not even the wildest science fiction anticipated. Perhaps we should not have adjusted to it so easily. It would be better if we were

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The end of the world used to be quite seductive to her,

until she considered that the obsession with the apocalypse is actually a longing that those who are dissatisfied with the world have for something different.