Post-individualism

Of course families have fallen apart in every generation. But even a few decades ago children from broken homes had communities, they had neighbourhoods. Now our families fall apart and there is nothing, nobody, to catch us. We live far from extended family. We are more estranged than ever. And I can’t get across how little familiarity Gen Z has

It does not matter what comfort and convenience we have if we think love is dead. Who cares what cool technologies we have, if the closest thing we’ve got to community is an online forum?

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

suffering is conceptualized in ways that protect the current economy from criticism—namely, as rooted in individual rather than social causes, which means we must favor self over social reform