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

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We’re wired for small, close-knit communities, but instead we’re lost in the chaos of a massive, impersonal society. It’s no wonder we’re struggling—this isn’t the environment we were built for. The cracks are everywhere. Just scroll through social media or read the comments on a political post, and you’ll see it: a storm of anger, hostility, and... See more

Clearly the cultural pressure to achieve a unique self is old, strong, and not unique to hipsters, so why did the authenticity drive spin out of control after CE 2000? One possible reason is that the hundreds of studies on authenticity in tourism and subcultures have also been read and in many cases sponsored by business thinkers who directly... See more