Americanism
Workplace Burnout is Nothing New - JSTOR Daily
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“Neurasthenia” was once the diagnosis used to refer to a spectrum of symptoms, from fatigue to depression to anxiety. Also called nervous exhaustion, nerve deficiency, or nerve weakness, it was a burgeoning problem when the term was popularized by neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869. He didn’t characterize it as a curable disease, but as a distress signal from a brain assailed with and overcome by the hefty demands of a fast-paced, urban life. (The condition was also called “Americanitis.”)
The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Gary Snyder — poet, anthropologist and ecological steward
Studies have found that when people spend more time on social-media platforms, they are more likely to buy more things and to do so impulsively—especially when they feel emotionally connected to the content they watch. This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism... See more