Who's crying first?

The coffee went cold around the time I stopped pretending to read. The cup is still in my hand because putting it down would require a decision, and I’ve been spending whatever I have on other things for the past two hours, maybe the past decade. There is a man near me whose right thumb keeps returning to his phone without his face showing any intention about it. His hand does it the way a tongue finds a sore tooth. His wife or partner or whoever she is has been talking about something I can’t quite hear, and she’s looking at him, and he is looking at the table, and neither of them has named what is happening between them, and I think they won’t.

The ceiling fan makes a sound between a tick and a sigh on every third rotation. I’ve counted enough of them to know it’s a loose bearing, not something about to fail, just something living out the rest of its life slightly wrong. The barista has refilled the pastry case twice since I sat down. Near the door, a child is eating something very carefully with both hands, and the concentration on her face is the purest thing in this room right now. She doesn’t know she’s being watched. She doesn’t know that things she cannot see are processing her presence in this room as data attached to her parents’ profiles, filed somewhere, added to a record that will outlast this morning by decades. But she doesn’t know that yet. For now she’s just eating, and that is something, and I keep coming back to it.

I’ve been sitting with a question for a while now, which is: at what specific point in your life did you begin performing presence instead of having it. Not performing for other people only, though that too, but performing it for yourself, narrating the experience in real time while it’s happening rather than living inside it cleanly. I can remember the texture of being a child in summer, the particular quality of boredom that felt like being filled with something nameless and fine, and I cannot get back there. I don’t know if that’s age or damage or whether those two things can be separated at all anymore.

The man near me picks up the phone finally. His face rearranges. He puts it down and the rearrangement stays, like water disturbed, and the conversation he’s in now is not the conversation it was thirty seconds ago because he’s brought something into it from somewhere else, from whatever lit up on that screen, and she can feel it and he can feel her feel it and neither of them says anything about it. This is the mathematics of how two people lose ground so gradually that neither can find the moment it started.

What his body did in the twenty seconds after the screen lit is not complicated if you know what to look for. The phone flashed and his nervous system registered an unpredictable signal and because the interval between such signals is variable and not calibrated to any rhythm he controls, his body cannot settle between them. It stays in a state of low readiness, waiting, which is the same posture the body takes before a threat. B.F. Skinner documented the mechanics of this in the 1950s using pigeons and random grain dispensers. The people who designed the notification systems of modern platforms read that literature professionally. They were not naive about what they were building. They built it anyway, and now approximately five billion people carry Skinner boxes in their pockets and experience this as ordinary life, as just how things are, as nothing worth mentioning.

I think about what Skinner’s pigeons looked like, pecking continuously at a lever that dispensed grain on no predictable schedule. I think about how the researcher watching them must have felt, watching the birds degrade from creatures into mechanisms, watching the unpredictability do something to their behavior that predictability never could. I think about the man near me. I think about my own hands.

The woman at the counter just ordered something and paid by hovering her wrist near a reader, a motion so habituated now that I doubt she felt herself doing it, the same way you don’t feel yourself breathing until you think about breathing and then briefly can’t stop thinking about it. The transfer of data that accompanied that transaction, her location, the time, what she bought, all of it mapped against her purchase history going back years, happened in roughly 340 milliseconds and she was already walking toward the pickup counter before it finished. She will see a relevant advertisement within three hours. She will not connect the advertisement to the transaction because the connection is designed to be invisible, because invisible persuasion generates what feels like preference, and visible persuasion generates resistance, and they know the difference.

The receipt I got when I came in this morning is still on the table. I haven’t thrown it away because it gives me a reason to be here, the appearance of a task, the thin social fiction of having a purpose beyond just sitting and watching. Thermal paper. The bisphenol-A in it transfers to skin in under ten seconds, more if the hand is warm, which mine is because I’ve been holding a coffee cup for two hours. BPA is a synthetic estrogen, which means it finds estrogen receptors in human tissue and binds there, and the dose at which it causes measurable biological effect and the dose at which it causes measurable clinical harm are different doses, and almost every regulatory threshold in every country was set around the second one. The manufacturers knew this distinction long before the regulators did. The delay produces itself. Nobody has to coordinate.

I want to stop and stay with that last sentence for a moment, because I think it is one of the most important things I know, and also one of the most demoralizing. Nobody has to coordinate. The harm doesn’t require a meeting. It doesn’t require anyone to choose it. It emerges from the logic of the incentive, from the gap between what is profitable and what is safe, from the fact that the people who know what the product does and the people who decide what gets on the shelf are not the same people and are not in the same room and are often not even alive at the same time. The harm is the weather. Nobody made it. It’s just what happens when you let certain pressures blow for long enough in certain directions.

My shirt is polyester. Petroleum spun into fiber, woven into a shape that sits against my skin all day, that I sleep in some nights when I’m too tired to change, that goes through a wash cycle every few days and releases somewhere between 700,000 and 1.5 million synthetic microfibers into the water, depending on which study you read. Most municipal water treatment infrastructure was designed before synthetic textiles were ubiquitous, so the fibers pass through. They enter waterways. They bioaccumulate up food chains until they appear in fish brain tissue, in bird eggs, in the blood of healthy adults who have nothing clinically wrong with them. The 2022 Amsterdam study found microplastics in the blood of 17 of 22 healthy blood donors. By 2024 the number had expanded across 18 of 20 donors with 24 distinct polymer types, including compounds whose primary commercial use is automotive parts. There is no meaningful distance anymore between what is produced by industry and what is inside your body. The boundary dissolved sometime around 1970 and we’re still doing the accounting and the accounting is going badly.

There is something particularly unbearable about the microplastics specifically, though I’ve tried to think about why and I’m not entirely sure. It might be the intimacy of it. The idea that there are particles of the made world inside the unmade world of my blood, that the boundary between what I consume and what I am has been breached at a level below the visible, below the taste, below the smell, below any sensory warning the body could have used to refuse. There is no way to know it’s happening. There is nothing to do about it. You can’t stop eating. You can’t stop drinking water. The exposure is total, and the totalness of it produces a specific kind of nausea that I think is not entirely biological.

The cell tower outside the window is close enough that I can see the indicator lights on its equipment housing blink in a pattern that repeats every few seconds. Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields have been classified in Group 2B by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the same classification shared by lead and DDT, which means the evidence is sufficient to suspect carcinogenicity but the funding to confirm it competes with the funding of industries whose revenues depend on that question remaining open. The exposure limits that govern towers like this one were set in the early 1990s using research funded predominantly by the telecommunications industry, and those limits have not been materially updated since, despite the density of towers having increased by several orders of magnitude and 5G frequencies not existing when the limits were written. The limits are based on thermal effects, on how much the radiation heats tissue, and not on biological effects below the thermal threshold, and there is a growing body of research on biological effects below the thermal threshold that is not reflected in the limits.

This is the standard pattern. The standard pattern has been documented across tobacco, asbestos, leaded gasoline, PFAS compounds, and now electromagnetic radiation. The documentation accumulates. The pattern does not change. And I sit here in the field of the tower and drink the water with the pharmaceuticals in it and hold the thermal receipt and breathe the microfibers from my own shirt and I do not feel anything in particular from any of these things, which is perhaps the worst thing about them, that they are entirely imperceptible, that the harm is happening at a scale and in a register that the body was never designed to notice or resist.

What I’m describing is not conspiracy. Conspiracy implies a room, people in it, a coordinated agreement. What happens is simpler and harder to prosecute. Industries fund science oriented toward null findings, place scientists on advisory boards, cultivate relationships inside regulatory agencies over years, and the accumulated weight of those relationships distorts what questions get asked, which studies get published, which findings get amplified, and which studies get quietly shelved. The tobacco companies’ internal documents, released through litigation in the 1990s, showed that Philip Morris had confirmed the cancer link internally by 1953 and ran a forty-year campaign to manufacture public uncertainty while that was happening. The PFAS litigation documents show DuPont knew C8 was, in its own laboratory’s language, highly toxic when inhaled, that two pregnant employees gave birth to children with birth defects in 1980, and that a 1981 internal memo stated there was no evidence of birth defects caused by C8. Not evidence of doubt. An affirmative statement of no evidence, drafted by the company that had the evidence. That memo exists. The CDC currently estimates that PFAS compounds appear in the blood of 97 percent of Americans.

I keep trying to find the emotional equivalent of that statistic. 97 percent. The compound that DuPont described as highly toxic when inhaled, that produced birth defects that they then denied, is in the blood of 97 percent of people in this country. It is almost certainly in my blood. It is almost certainly in the blood of the woman touching her partner’s hand, in the blood of the barista, in the blood of the child drawing near the door. She will carry it her whole life and never feel it and never know where it came from and there is nobody to be angry at in a way that will accomplish anything.

The man whose thumb keeps going to his phone has just ordered another coffee. He did it without finishing the first one, which is still sitting at his elbow, and there’s something in that small move that tells me everything I need to know about what he’s managing, which is the same thing I’m managing, which is the same thing most of the people in this room are managing. The restlessness that has no name. The dread with no specific content. The boredom that cannot settle into the generative kind, that just sits there like an unclosed wound, and the reaching for the coffee or the phone or the thing to do is just the motion of someone trying to close something that won’t close.

I know this because I’ve done the same thing many times, ordered something to give myself a task at a moment when having no task feels unbearable. The unbearableness of having no task is itself a symptom of something, I think, though I can’t always say exactly what. It is not boredom in the old sense. It is something more like the feeling of a nervous system that has been trained over years to expect a constant supply of input, and when the supply drops, experiences the drop as danger rather than rest. The body has been calibrated to the level of stimulation the phone provides and now cannot easily function below that level, the way a person who has taken opioids for pain long enough cannot easily function below the opioid level, not because they are high but because the baseline has shifted.

His nervous system is running a calculation it has been running since before language. Where am I in the hierarchy, how secure is my position, who notices me, does the one across from me still choose me. These are not thoughts he has. They are operations running below the level of what he would call thinking, in the same circuitry that was processing these questions in social groups of fifty or eighty people in a world where the answer genuinely determined survival. The same circuitry is running in every person in this building. It did not evolve for this environment. It evolved for an environment where you knew everyone in your social world personally, could track their behavioral patterns across years, and where falling out of social favor had immediate material consequences. The circuitry doesn’t know we’re not there anymore.

The woman across from him adjusted her posture when he picked up the phone. Her shoulders dropped about a centimeter and she looked away toward the window. This is not a metaphor for anything. It is a body reading another body and updating its assessment, the old mammalian circuitry tracking social temperature in the space between two people, and the reading came back with a number that’s slightly worse than the number from a minute ago. She doesn’t know she’s doing this. He doesn’t know she did it. The transaction happened entirely below both of their awareness, in the layer of nervous system activity that runs faster and older than anything either of them would call consciousness, and it will shape what happens in the next ten minutes between them in ways neither of them will be able to explain or trace back to this moment.

The evolutionary mismatch running in this building is not limited to social tracking. Humans evolved in environments where the light spectrum shifted dramatically between day and night, where darkness meant rest, where the body used that shift to regulate cortisol, melatonin, core temperature, and a dozen other systems that are all wound around each other. The screens in this room emit wavelengths in the blue spectrum that the retinal ganglion cells containing melanopsin, the cells responsible for setting the circadian clock, are maximally sensitive to. When those cells receive blue-spectrum light at 11pm, the body cannot tell it from midday. The melatonin suppression is the same. The cortisol suppression doesn’t happen. The sleep architecture that follows is not the sleep architecture the body needs to produce. And the clinical category of sleep maintenance insomnia, which affects roughly 30 percent of adults in the industrialized world and which is described in medical literature as a disorder, describes something that looks more like a body trying to return to a natural biphasic sleep pattern that ambient light conditions have been disrupting for 150 years. We are calling the body’s attempt at normalcy a pathology.

The pharmaceutical prescribed for sleep maintenance insomnia suppresses REM sleep. REM sleep is the stage during which emotional memories are consolidated and contextualized, the stage that processes frightening or distressing experience from acute activation into something that can be held. Chronic REM suppression produces heightened emotional reactivity and reduced capacity to distinguish perceived threat from actual threat. The second pharmaceutical, often prescribed alongside the first, also suppresses REM sleep. The person in this loop is told they have two diagnoses. They have one situation. The two diagnoses generate two revenue streams. This is not a conspiracy. It is the ordinary logic of a medical system organized around the treatment of discrete conditions in discrete bodies rather than the treatment of bodies in conditions.

I have been awake since 4:47 this morning, which is not unusual for me now. I notice the exact time when I wake because the phone is on the nightstand and the screen lights when I reach for it, which is the first thing I do, which is also an instruction I give to my nervous system about the kind of morning we’re having. The reach is habitual and feels like choice but is not quite choice, the way a smoker’s hand moves toward a cigarette before the thought forms. The content I see in the first four minutes after waking, before my prefrontal cortex is fully online, before I’ve eaten or moved or made any decision that belongs to me, is content selected by an algorithm whose optimization target is engagement, not wellbeing. This is what I’ve decided I want. This is how I’ve built it. I am not sure I built it consciously.

The algorithm that curates what I see in the morning did not decide to serve me content that induces a low-grade anxiety I can’t locate the source of. It discovered, through measuring engagement across billions of users over years, that content provoking outrage or fear sustains attention better than content that resolves cleanly, and then it optimized toward that finding because that’s what optimization means in the absence of any constraint that says something else matters too. By the time I am sufficiently awake to notice what I’ve been fed, I’ve already been fed it, and the day starts from a position that my nervous system would describe as mild threat, if my nervous system had words, which it doesn’t, which is part of the problem.

The man near me is scrolling now. The infinite scroll interface was created by a product designer who later said publicly that he was not proud of it, that the reason it works is that there is no natural stopping point, the way a doorway or the bottom of a page provides a natural stopping point, and without a stopping point the behavior continues past the point the person would have chosen to stop if the choice had been made available. He said this in 2017 and the interface is still standard on every platform that uses it. The regret of the person who designed it does not appear to have affected its deployment, which tells you something about how much individual regret can do against the incentive to which the design is attached.

I think about him sometimes, the designer. I think about what it must feel like to have made something that you later understood as harmful and to be unable to unmake it, to watch it replicate across every surface of the culture while your regret sits in a podcast somewhere, a little monument to the gap between knowing and changing. I think most people who have done significant harm in the modern world feel something like this, not malice but a kind of helpless horror at the momentum of what they participated in, at the way the system took the thing they made and ran with it in directions they didn’t intend and now can’t stop. This is different from innocence. But it is also different from the villainy the story would be simpler with.

His partner reaches across the table and touches his hand. Just for a moment. Her fingertips on his knuckles. He puts the phone face-down without looking up, which tells me this has happened before, that they’ve worked out a vocabulary around it, a small language for managing the thing between them that neither of them has named out loud. She doesn’t withdraw her hand right away. There is something about watching two people manage each other with that kind of practiced care that I find difficult to hold. Not because it’s sad. Because the competence of it, the accumulated knowledge of what this particular person needs and how to deliver it without making it an event, is something I haven’t managed to build with another person, and I am not sure I know how to start.

The pair-bonding psychology that produced that gesture in her, the read she did on his state, the calibrated response, the timing, all of it evolved in environments where the pool of potential partners was small and the information about them was dense and accumulated over years of shared actual difficulty. You knew how someone behaved in scarcity, what they did when they were frightened or ashamed, who they became when resources got tight. The information was embodied and continuous, not curated and episodic. What a dating application does with the same underlying psychology is expand the pool to a size the brain cannot process, strip the information down to a brief self-presentation the person has optimized for appeal, hand the result to an algorithm that ranks candidates by engagement metrics rather than compatibility, and then keep the user in a state of sustained comparison because sustainable comparison is the product’s most valuable output. The anxiety of the irresolvable choice is not an unintended side effect. It generates platform opens.

There is a specific form of suffering in sustained optionality that I think doesn’t get named enough. The feeling of having too many choices, not in the trivial sense of too many brands of cereal, but in the deeper sense of a life in which every commitment forecloses other commitments that are visible on a screen somewhere, where the person you chose is always adjacent in your awareness to the people you didn’t choose and could still theoretically choose, where the relationship you’re in is never quite sealed off from the market of relationships you could be in instead. The person sitting across from you at dinner is competing in your attention with everyone you’ve ever matched with, and neither of you chose this but both of you are living inside it.

The sperm count data from the 2023 meta-analysis update is worth sitting with for a moment because it’s the kind of data that gets summarized and then filed away because there is nothing comfortable to do with it. A 62 percent decline in total sperm count among men in North America, Europe, and Australia between 1973 and 2018, with the rate of decline steepening measurably after 2000, and for the first time parallel declines documented across South America, Africa, and Asia. The lead author called it a canary in the coal mine, which is a phrase that means we should be watching this carefully, not a phrase that describes what we are doing. What we are doing is continuing the chemical exposures and stress conditions and dietary patterns that are most plausibly associated with the decline while conducting additional studies, because additional studies are what we do when we want to feel like we’re doing something without changing anything.

The endocrine disruptors in consumer products, the phthalates in polyester, the BPA in thermal paper and food packaging, the pesticide residues in conventionally grown produce that show up in urine samples of people with no agricultural exposure whatsoever, these compounds don’t arrive in the body separately and act separately. They arrive together and compound. The body has one endocrine system and it is running against all of them simultaneously, in a biological environment for which there is no evolutionary precedent, trying to maintain hormonal signaling in a chemical context that is undermining that signaling in ways that are individually subtle and collectively devastating. The research on each compound in isolation produces findings that industry can challenge. The research on what happens when they all land in the same body at once is far more difficult to fund and conduct.

I want to think about the word simultaneously. Every system I’ve been describing is operating simultaneously. The BPA is in my bloodstream at the same time the algorithm is feeding me threat signals at the same time the cortisol is suppressing my immune function at the same time the microplastics are in my tissue at the same time the PFAS compounds are wherever they are in my body at the same time the sleep deprivation is altering my prefrontal cortex at the same time I am trying to think clearly about all of this. These are not separate problems. They are one condition. The condition is me, or me is the condition, and I am sitting in a coffee shop trying to hold a cold cup and understand something that cannot be understood from inside itself.

Somewhere in this building right now there are people whose microbiome has been significantly altered by antibiotic exposure, whose gut sends signals their brains interpret as anxiety or depression, whose cortisol baseline is elevated from years of sleep disruption and information overload, whose inflammatory markers are higher than their grandparents’ at the same age, who have never been told these things are connected. They’ve been told instead that they have several separate conditions, each with its own pharmaceutical treatment, and the treatment for each condition will modulate one variable in a system that is dysregulated across thirty variables simultaneously. The system is not broken. This is what it was designed to produce.

The barista near the espresso machine has been on shift since what I’m guessing was 6am based on when the shop opens. She’s moving with the specific efficiency of someone who has mechanized her body to avoid spending energy on the parts of the job that don’t require thought, and the parts that do require thought, talking to a person, reading what they want, she still does with genuine attention. She smiled at the child by the door in a way that wasn’t a work smile. I noticed the difference. The work smile is an expression the muscles have memorized. The other one takes slightly longer to form and involves the muscles around the eyes. Paul Ekman spent thirty years mapping the difference. It’s readable if you know what to look for, and I suspect she knows exactly which one she’s deploying at any given moment and deploys them deliberately, which is its own form of labor that nobody is paying her for.

What she does for eight hours a day produces what economists call surplus value, the difference between what her labor generates and what she is paid for it, and that surplus is where profit comes from. This is not a political observation particularly. It’s just how the system is built, and pointing it out has always been treated as if it were an accusation rather than a description. The actual problem is not that the mechanism exists but that the mechanism is never visible to the people inside it. She goes home at the end of her shift and buys things that the wages she earned by generating surplus pay for, and those things were produced by other people generating surplus elsewhere, and the system is coherent and largely invisible to everyone participating in it.

Her phone is behind the counter face-down and she looks at it between orders. The unremarkability of a given behavior is not evidence of its neutrality. It’s evidence of how well it’s been integrated. Slot machines were once remarkable. Cigarettes were once remarkable. The unremarkable is just what we call a remarkable thing that has been sufficiently normalized, made invisible by repetition, folded into the texture of daily life so thoroughly that questioning it feels strange, like questioning the sky.

I keep thinking about what Shoshana Zuboff described as the logic of the behavioral futures market, because I think that phrase is specific enough to be useful in a way that more general phrases are not. What Google discovered in 2001 was that the data produced by user interactions that wasn’t necessary for running the service itself, the behavioral surplus, could be processed into probability estimates of future behavior and sold to advertisers who would pay handsomely for them. The product that changed the economic logic of the internet was not the search engine. It was the prediction. And a prediction is only valuable if it’s accurate, and it’s only accurate if the behavior it predicts can be influenced toward the predicted outcome, which means the business of selling predictions about behavior and the business of shaping behavior toward the predicted outcome are the same business. The communication platform is the interface that generates the behavioral data. The communication is incidental to the extraction.

Meta’s advertising revenue for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $46.78 billion, which was 97 percent of the company’s total income for that quarter. A company that derives 97 percent of its revenue from predicting and shaping user behavior for advertisers is not a communication platform in any meaningful functional sense. This is not an argument. It’s arithmetic. The description changes what you’re looking at. When you understand what the product is, you understand what you are, and what you are is the raw material.

The couple by the window is arguing now, quietly. I can tell from the quality of the silence between their sentences more than from the sentences themselves. The pauses have a different weight than they did an hour ago, something held in them rather than something resting. Whatever system they had for managing each other has run into something it wasn’t designed for, or was designed for but can’t hold right now, in this room, on this particular morning, with whatever they each brought to it. Watching people fail to reach each other in real time, even over something small, even when both of them clearly want to reach each other, is one of the more difficult things to sit across from. The distance between two people who are trying to close the distance is sometimes more heartbreaking than the distance between two people who have given up on closing it.

What I keep returning to is Robin Dunbar’s finding about the upper functional limit of stable social groups in primates, which converges on around 150 people, the number at which you can meaningfully track individual relationships, shared histories, mutual debts, behavioral patterns, all the accumulated information that constitutes knowing someone in the full sense. In a group of that scale, social competition operated inside genuine interdependence. You competed with people you also needed. You would see the person you wronged tomorrow, and every day after. The social signal you emitted reached perhaps a few hundred meters before it dissipated into irrelevance.

Social media took that signal, distributed it globally, archived it permanently, indexed it for retrieval, attached a quantified feedback mechanism that assigns real numbers to social approval in real time, and then placed all of it inside recommendation systems optimized for engagement. The result is that the in-group and out-group circuitry that evolved to manage coalition loyalty in small groups of people who would share a fire together is now being activated at scale, continuously, against people a given person will never meet, in informational environments selected to keep the activation high enough to sustain attention. The performance of political identity that saturates social media is not politics in any historically recognizable sense. It’s the body’s coalition-management circuitry running without a coalition, against caricatures rather than people, in a medium that has a financial interest in keeping the threat signal strong enough that people keep coming back.

I have not been on my phone much this morning, which is unusual, and the not-being-on-it has created a specific quality of discomfort that I would call withdrawal if that word weren’t attached to clinical connotations I don’t want to claim. It’s subtler than withdrawal. It’s the feeling of a loop not completing, like a sentence that stops before its verb, a small persistent incompleteness that nags somewhere below the level of articulation. The loop that completes when I check the phone is not pleasure exactly, not in the way a good meal is pleasurable. It’s the resolution of a tension that the device itself generates between checks. The reward doesn’t need to be good. It needs to arrive unpredictably.

The cognitive effect of running that low-grade readiness for years, as part of the background state of daily life, is something the research is still working through because you can’t fully study an effect while you’re inside it, and all of us are inside it. What you can measure is that sustained stress hormone elevation, specifically the chronic cortisol exposure that results from maintaining a physiological readiness posture over years rather than hours, produces specific changes in hippocampal volume, in prefrontal cortex gray matter density, in amygdala reactivity. The brain changes. It responds to what you ask it to do and I have been asking mine to be vigilant and it has complied and the compliance has costs.

The hippocampus study Eleanor Maguire published in 2000 documented measurably greater gray matter density in London taxi drivers compared to controls, and the difference correlated with years of active navigation experience. The hippocampus grew in response to sustained navigational demand. The same principle operates in reverse. Any cognitive function that is consistently externalized, handed to a tool that performs it more efficiently, atrophies in the human at the rate of disuse. The neural tissue does not maintain itself against its own purposes. A generation that navigates primarily by GPS from early adulthood develops a different spatial cognitive architecture than a generation that navigated by memory and attention, and spatial cognition is not merely a practical skill. It’s a cognitive architecture whose presence or absence shapes other functions including abstraction, working memory, and the capacity to hold complex information in mind without external scaffolding.

The broader implication, which nobody in the industry has any financial interest in examining, is that we are running a massive uncontrolled experiment on human cognitive architecture in real time, with no baseline, no control group, and no institutional body capable of assessing the results, because the institution that would be needed to assess them is itself embedded in the same technological environment. Every generation educates its children in the cognitive environment it finds. This is the first generation educating children in an environment whose cognitive demands are unlike any prior environment, and doing so without acknowledging that the demands are different or examining what that difference produces over a lifetime.

The child by the door has finished eating whatever she was eating and is now drawing something on a piece of paper with a red crayon. She draws with the same absolute concentration she ate with. Whatever she’s making, it’s serious to her, and the seriousness is uncomplicated by irony or self-consciousness. She glances up once, at nothing in particular, then back down. Her nervous system is not currently being managed by any algorithm. She is inside an experience without the meta-layer of monitoring that most adults have learned to maintain, that I am maintaining right now, that I have not been able to turn off for years. I notice I feel something watching her do this that I can’t quite name, which is unusual because I have names for most of what I feel.

The urbanization that moved populations from small communities into cities over the past two centuries was not driven by the preferences of the people who moved. It was driven by the organizational requirements of an economy that needed concentrated labor near production facilities. The extended family and village networks that historically distributed childcare, eldercare, financial emergency absorption, food production, and psychological support across networks of twenty to forty people were incompatible with the kind of mobility that industrial capital required of its workforce. They were dissolved, not violently, not all at once, but through the slow pressure of economic incentives that made staying impossible for enough people that the networks unraveled. The nuclear household that replaced them was then asked to perform all of those functions within a private domestic space of two or three adults, which it was never capable of doing, and the excess that can’t be absorbed generates market participation. Someone must pay, in money, for the childcare the village previously provided in obligation. Someone must pay for the eldercare the family previously absorbed. The therapy that addresses what the community previously held. The isolation is not a side effect. The isolated household whose every need must be individually purchased is the most economically productive unit of consumption that has ever existed.

The man near me has put his phone away, finally. I don’t know why. Something shifted. He’s looking at his partner now with a quality of attention that is different from the looking he was doing before. She hasn’t noticed the shift yet, which is its own small thing, the way recovery from small disconnections is always slightly out of sync, the way you have to wait a little for the other person to catch up to where you’ve arrived. He reaches for his coffee. The cup is empty. He doesn’t seem to notice that either.

The Surgeon General of the United States issued an advisory in May 2023 declaring loneliness a public health epidemic, which is a phrase that means something specific in medical terms. The mortality risk associated with chronic loneliness, pooled across multiple longitudinal studies, is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The cardiovascular data is specific: a 29 percent increased probability of heart disease, 32 percent increased probability of stroke. The United Kingdom established a ministerial position for loneliness in 2018 because the health consequences had become measurable at a scale that justified policy response. The World Health Organization launched a commission on social connection in late 2023. None of this appears in the anthropological records of societies with dense physical community and intergenerational proximity at anything close to contemporary rates. The loneliness is not human nature. It is a product of particular arrangements.

Hyperindividualism is the philosophical framework that turned those arrangements into a moral claim. The idea that the individual is the primary social unit, that needing others is a weakness or failure of self-sufficiency, that dependence is a character flaw, was politically very useful to a system that required isolated consumers whose needs could be individually monetized. It is also physiologically nonsensical. Human beings are obligately social, which means their nervous systems require embeddedness in a group for normal function the way their bodies require food for normal function. The psychological research on social pain, the work showing that social exclusion activates the same neural circuitry as physical pain, is not metaphor. The circuits are the same circuits. The experience of losing belonging is processed by the same systems that process injury. Telling someone that needing others makes them weak is, in functional terms, telling them that being hungry shows poor character.

The philosophy underneath hyperindividualism is not ancient. It’s recent and specific. The version of liberal individualism that became economic common sense in the late twentieth century, in which the market is the primary mechanism for translating individual preferences into social outcomes, had a specific intellectual lineage and was promoted through specific institutions with specific interests in its acceptance. The idea that markets know best, that collective arrangements are inefficient, that individual choice is the highest expression of freedom, was enormously useful to entities that extracted value from market transactions. It was dressed in the language of freedom and dignity and human flourishing, and it produced population segments that were maximally isolated, maximally dependent on market provision, and minimally capable of organized collective response to the conditions of their isolation. That last part is not incidental.

The trust collapse that made this possible didn’t happen by accident. The gradual discrediting of collective institutions, labor unions, public media, government agencies, universities, was a multigenerational project, documented in the memos and strategies of organizations that had direct financial interest in weakening institutions capable of countervailing corporate power. The Powell Memorandum of 1971, written by Lewis Powell before his appointment to the Supreme Court, was explicit about the need to counter what it described as attacks on the enterprise system by funding think tanks, placing business perspectives in academic curricula, cultivating media relationships, and building political influence over a generation-long timeline. What followed was one of the most successful long-term campaigns in American history. The institutions Powell targeted now enjoy approximately the levels of public trust he wanted them to enjoy, which is very low.

I’m aware I’ve been sitting here for over two hours now and I have not produced any of the things I came here with the intention of producing. The list is on my phone. The phone is face-down on the table. The list is the same list it was when I arrived except that arriving and not working is technically a kind of work and I am trying to decide whether to count it as that, and the trying to decide is also a kind of not working, and by the time I have finished deciding I will have spent another twenty minutes on something that was not on the list.

The epistemic environment I woke up inside this morning was constructed before I was conscious enough to notice the construction. What the algorithm served me in the first twenty minutes after I woke was a selection of content that was not random, not representative, not chosen for accuracy, but chosen by a system that has learned what content this particular user’s behavioral data predicts will sustain attention. That system has several years of my behavioral data. It knows my responses to content better than I know my own responses to content, because it has measured them across thousands of instances and I have measured them across the ones I happened to notice. I am less opaque to the algorithm than I am to myself. This should be disturbing. Mostly it’s just true.

The CIA internal dispatch that became the documentary record of the phrase conspiracy theory is not a secret. It was released to the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act in 1976 and is now in the National Archives. Dispatch number 1035-960, circulated in April 1967 with the designation PSYCH for psychological operations, instructed agency field offices and media contacts to associate skepticism about the Warren Commission’s findings with psychological abnormality and bad faith. The phrase conspiracy theory carried a relatively neutral descriptive meaning before 1967. After the sustained application of the tactic the dispatch recommended, it became a conversation-ending classification. The mechanism the dispatch recommended was to discredit the source rather than address the evidence. The document is in the National Archives.

The Council on Foreign Relations membership lists have been public since 1921. Mapping them against the people who ran American foreign policy, directed intelligence agencies, led the largest financial institutions, and edited major newspapers across the past century produces a pattern of overlap too dense to be coincidental. This is also public information. The Trilateral Commission’s founding documents are available. The central concern they articulate is that democratic governance was becoming difficult to manage because populations were demanding more responsiveness than the institutional framework could provide. The preferred solution was explicitly technocratic: move consequential decisions into institutions insulated from democratic accountability.

Carroll Quigley was a Georgetown historian given access to the internal records of what he called the Round Table network, a self-reproducing international administrative network that grew from Cecil Rhodes’s explicitly stated vision, documented in his will and correspondence, to build cosmopolitan elite-educated administrators who would make decisions on behalf of populations they were not accountable to. Quigley’s 1966 book documented what he found. He was not a conspiracy theorist. He was a professor who was invited to examine primary sources. The people who showed him the records believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that their history properly told would serve their purposes. The Rhodes Scholarship has produced heads of state, supreme court justices, senators, and intelligence directors. What is less discussed is what Rhodes wrote he intended the scholarship to accomplish, which is in his will.

The MKULTRA program files are also not secret. The program ran from 1953 through at least the early 1970s across roughly 80 institutions including universities, hospitals, prisons, and research laboratories. Its operational logic, documented in the surviving records, was that trauma-based manipulation produces dissociative states and that a person whose identity has been fragmented through sustained trauma is more susceptible to behavioral conditioning than one whose sense of self is intact. The experiments used involuntary LSD administration, prolonged isolation, electroconvulsive shock without therapeutic indication, hypnosis, and sensory deprivation on subjects who had not consented and in most cases did not know they were subjects. CIA director Richard Helms ordered the program’s files destroyed in 1973. A cache of financial records survived because they had been filed incorrectly in a budget office and escaped the purge. The Senate hearings of 1977 concluded that intelligence agencies had undermined constitutional rights.

The behavioral insights units that now operate in over 200 governments globally use a framework formalized in a 2008 book called Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. The framework was adopted first by the British Cabinet Office in 2010, then by the Obama administration through executive order in 2015. The early applications publicized were benign: default organ donation enrollment, healthy food at cafeteria eye level, tax payment reminders phrased as social norm statements. The same techniques, the same exploitation of the same documented cognitive tendencies toward default preference and social proof and loss aversion, are available for any behavioral target any entity chooses to pursue. Control through choice architecture requires no disclosure. It works better unnamed.

The data Facebook and Instagram hold on the people in this building is more extensive than any dossier any intelligence agency in history has ever compiled on civilian populations at scale, and it was gathered voluntarily, and the people it describes signed terms of service they did not read authorizing its collection, and the authorization covers uses they were not informed of. An informed consent requires that the person understands what they’re consenting to. No one reads those documents. The documents are written to not be read.

The prediction products sold in those markets are not sold as advertisements exactly. They are sold as probability estimates of future behavior, which are useful to anyone who wants to influence future behavior, which includes, but is not limited to, advertisers. In the 2016 US election, behavioral prediction data and psychographic modeling built on social platform data were used by at least two campaigns to target political messaging to individual voters at a level of granularity that was new. The precision of the targeting has improved since. The disclosure requirements have not kept pace.

The man near me has started talking again. His voice has a quality I recognize from conversations I’ve been in, where you’re talking not because you have something to say but because the silence has become uncomfortable and filling it feels like action, like something is being done about the silence, even if what’s being done is just covering it with words that don’t quite say what you mean. She’s listening. She has the specific patience of someone who has learned that this is sometimes necessary before the actual thing gets said. That patience is a form of love, the specific kind that requires you to hold space for someone without rushing them to the version of themselves you prefer. It’s exhausting in a way that doesn’t get named.

Every person in this building is probably experiencing some version of loneliness, not the acute version of having no one, but the chronic version of feeling that no one knows the actual version of them. The gap between the self that exists in interactions and the self that exists when there’s no one to perform for, and the size of that gap and what it costs to maintain it. This is not a modern invention, the gap. But the conditions of modern life make it wider and harder to close than any prior arrangement. And then we build platforms that promise to close it and what they do is make the performance of closing it easier while making closing it harder.

The condition is not just estrangement from the products of labor, though that too. It’s estrangement from a meaningful framework for why you’re doing what you’re doing. Pre-industrial work, even brutal work, existed within contexts that gave it meaning beyond the transactional. The farmer understood the relationship between effort and sustenance in a way that was immediate and embodied. The craftsman made things that lasted and bore the mark of having been made by a specific person with specific hands. The industrial and post-industrial economy replaced those contexts with wages and efficiency metrics and then told people that efficiency is its own meaning. When efficiency fails to be its own meaning, as it does, as it must, you get what the clinical literature describes as burnout, which is less a pathology than an honest assessment.

The productivity obsession that saturates contemporary work culture is not a cultural preference. An economy built on continuous growth needs continuous increases in output, and when technological gains plateau, the increases must come from human output, which means more hours, more attention, more of the self brought to work. The assumption that your value as a person is related to your output as a worker is not a fringe belief. It structures how people think about their own rest, their relationships, their leisure, their aging. A person who feels guilty for resting is a person whose body has been captured for economic purposes even when the body is off the clock. The guilt is not irrational. It is the correct output of the system working as designed.

The debt data as of 2024 is worth stating plainly. Total American household debt at $18.04 trillion, an increase of roughly $3.9 trillion since 2019. Credit card balances at $1.21 trillion. Student loan debt at $1.62 trillion with delinquency rates rising sharply once the pandemic-era reporting pause ended. Debt is a standing claim on future labor. It forecloses the options that require the capacity to absorb transitional loss. The ability to leave a bad job, a bad relationship, a city that isn’t working, depends on having enough material buffer to survive the gap. Debt eliminates the buffer. The generation that entered the labor market during the 2008 contraction, accumulated debt during the slow recovery, and then encountered a second major disruption in 2020 is statistically less likely to own property, form stable households, or hold meaningful liquid savings than the previous cohort at equivalent life stages.

Planned obsolescence has a documented origin, which the existence of the Phoebus cartel establishes. The cartel, an international consortium of lightbulb manufacturers whose internal records are part of the historical archive, formalized agreements in the 1920s to engineer product lifetimes deliberately shorter than the available technology could produce, so as to generate replacement demand on a commercially beneficial schedule. The contemporary electronics industry accomplishes the same through proprietary fasteners, adhesive construction, software update policies that degrade performance on aging hardware, and the deliberate inaccessibility of repair documentation and parts. The raw materials for those goods are extracted at the rate the revenue model requires, not the rate the planetary system can sustain.

The Ogallala Aquifer spans eight states of the American Great Plains and supplies roughly 30 percent of the groundwater used in American irrigation. The water table in parts of western Kansas has dropped more than 28 feet from mid-twentieth-century baseline. Projections for the Texas Panhandle suggest 70 percent depletion within twenty years at current extraction rates. The water accumulated over millennia during the last ice age. It does not come back on any timescale relevant to any living person. The researchers who modeled these outcomes published their findings. The extraction continued. This is not a failure of information. The information was available. It’s a failure of the mechanism by which available information translates into changed behavior, and that mechanism failed because the financial incentive to continue extracting exceeded any institutional capacity to prevent the extraction.

The insect data sits in the same uncomfortable category. The Hallmann study in 2017 documented a 76 percent seasonal decline in flying insect biomass across 63 protected nature areas in Germany over 27 years. Protected areas. The decline happened inside protected areas. The 2024 meta-analysis examined 923 insect assemblages across 106 longitudinal studies and found that the steepest declines were in previously common species, the ones that had been everywhere and ordinary and unremarkable, whose absence is now legible only in comparison to records that most living people have no experiential frame for because they weren’t there. A child who grew up after 2010 has no baseline for what a summer evening with insects sounds like. The absence is invisible to them because the presence was already gone before they arrived.

The freshwater systems downstream from water treatment facilities contain measurable concentrations of antidepressant residue, contraceptive hormones, and antibiotic compounds, because these pharmaceuticals are not fully metabolized before excretion and municipal treatment infrastructure was not designed to capture them. Fish in rivers downstream from treatment outfalls in Colorado and Iowa showed selective accumulation of multiple antidepressant compounds in brain tissue at levels well above water column concentrations. The 2024 study on fluoxetine found that even at nanogram-per-liter concentrations, the common antidepressant altered freshwater ecosystem community composition and inhibited recovery from predation pressure even after the drug source was removed. The aquatic systems are running on the pharmaceutical exhaust of human mental health treatment.

The arthropod biomass study in a Puerto Rico rainforest classified as relatively undisturbed found declines between tenfold and sixtyfold since the 1970s. The forest was not disturbed. The arthropods declined anyway, which means whatever is driving the decline operates at scales that protected status doesn’t touch. Arthropods are the base of several food chains. When the base contracts, everything above it contracts with it, on timescales that are visible only to people who are paying careful attention across decades, which is not a form of attention any market rewards.

I am sitting in a building that is climatically controlled to a temperature that probably no human environment maintained before about 1950, eating and drinking things that were produced by agricultural systems that use approximately 70 percent of the world’s fresh water, wearing clothes made of petroleum derivatives, using devices that required the extraction and processing of rare earth minerals from places I will never see, generating behavioral data that is being processed by systems I cannot inspect, in a city whose expansion has covered what was previously agricultural or natural land at a rate that has no precedent in human history, in a moment that is, by essentially every ecological measure, substantially worse than the moment fifty years before it, and the difficulty of holding all of this simultaneously is not a personal failing. It is genuinely difficult. The system is arranged so that the cost of each individual decision is invisible at the point of making it. This is not an accident.

The woman near the window has been reading something on her phone that is making her smile in a way she doesn’t know anyone is watching. Whatever it is, she’s absorbed. Whatever it is, it involves someone she knows or cares about, because you smile differently at content from a stranger than you do at content from someone in your life, and the difference is visible if you’re paying attention. The smile is the involuntary kind. The eyes are in it. I notice I’m relieved to see it, which tells me something about how much of what I’ve been watching this morning has not included that.

The meaning problem is the one I can’t get around. Not in an abstract philosophical sense, though it is that too, but in the specific sense of a person whose daily activities have no inherent meaning attached to them beyond the transactional, who has been told by the dominant cultural framework that meaning is a matter of personal preference and individual choice, who finds that this framework produces something that functions like meaning but has the texture of a placeholder, an answer in the shape of an answer that doesn’t actually answer the question. The market can tell you what you want. It cannot tell you what you’re for. Those are different questions and the conflation of them is producing consequences that clinical psychology is now trying to address with interventions designed for the individual rather than for the conditions that produced the individual’s condition.

Viktor Frankl’s observation, from the specific context of a concentration camp, was that the people most likely to survive extreme adversity were not those with the most physical strength but those with a reason to survive, a why. He was not describing an abstraction. He was describing a function, the function of meaning in the motivational architecture of a human being. What has been systematically dismantled in the contemporary industrialized world is exactly the architecture that historically produced meaning: community, shared narrative, relationship to something larger than individual preference, work connected to its context and consequence. What has been offered in their place is consumption, which can produce satisfaction but not orientation, and the satisfaction decays faster than the need returns.

The opioid crisis is a useful specific example because it has a documented corporate dimension that is now in the legal record. Purdue Pharma’s internal documents, released through litigation, showed that the company knew OxyContin’s addiction potential was substantially higher than it publicly represented, deployed a sales force specifically trained to target and cultivate prescribers who were likely to overprescribe, and ran a marketing strategy that explicitly described addicted patients as a revenue opportunity. The McKinsey consulting documents released in the settlement showed the company was advised on strategies to, in their language, turbocharge sales in high-overdose markets. These documents exist. This is the public record.

And then there is the specific cruelty of what happens to a community when the dominant industry leaves. The manufacturing collapse in the American midwest and rust belt was not natural, not the consequence of a law of economics, it was the consequence of specific policy decisions about trade that made the offshore movement of labor cheaper than the maintenance of domestic production, and the policy decisions served the interests of entities that could move capital more easily than the people whose livelihoods depended on the facilities the capital left. When a community’s economic coherence dissolves, what follows is not the adaptive restructuring that economic models predict. What follows is what the mortality data shows.

The couple by the window has reached a kind of equilibrium again. Not resolution, but equilibrium, which is different. The pauses between their sentences have the weight of understanding rather than withholding. I’ve been watching them for almost three hours now and I’ve seen them move through several different registers of being together, which is something you can only see if you sit in one place long enough with enough attention and the patience to follow a thing through its various states.

Human pair-bonding is an extraordinary piece of biological engineering. The reward system that produces the feeling of attachment, the interplay of oxytocin and vasopressin and dopamine and serotonin that produces what people experience as love, was calibrated for a specific purpose: to bind two organisms to each other and to their offspring long enough for the offspring to survive to reproductive age. The feeling is not less true for being functional. The fact that it’s functional doesn’t make it less true as an experience. The fact that it’s true as an experience doesn’t make it less functional. And the difficulty most people have in holding both of those things simultaneously is one of the more interesting properties of the contemporary mind, which was trained by a culture that presents mechanism and meaning as if they were opposites, as if knowing how something works were the same as disenchanting it.

I want to try to describe what I feel when I watch people manage each other with love. It is something close to grief, which surprises me every time. Not grief for something lost, not grief for myself, but grief in the way you feel grief when you see something beautiful that you know is fragile, when the beauty and the fragility are not separate qualities but the same quality, when what makes the thing beautiful is exactly what makes it capable of being lost. The woman touching her partner’s hand. The practiced vocabulary they’ve developed around the phone. The way he put it down without looking up. These are not grand gestures. They are very small. They are the size of the actual thing.

The reproductive anxiety that people experience in the age range where the question of whether to have children carries biological urgency is a specific form of suffering that doesn’t have a clean cultural name. It’s not loneliness exactly. It’s the more diffuse version of watching a threshold approach while holding a set of conditions that make crossing it genuinely difficult: financial instability, housing costs that have outpaced wages for a generation, the unavailability of the support networks that historically made child-rearing survivable, the normalization of relationship instability as a cultural pattern, and the ambient awareness that bringing a child into the current ecological trajectory requires a specific kind of optimism that some people find increasingly difficult to locate.

The fertility rate data and the sperm count data and the reproductive anxiety data are not separate phenomena. They are expressions of the same set of conditions landing in bodies that evolved for different conditions. Endocrine disruption from chemical exposure affects fertility. Chronic stress from economic precarity affects fertility. Sleep disruption affects fertility. Delayed partnerships due to economic instability affect fertility. These don’t add sequentially. They compound.

The cortisol response is designed for short acute exposures: predator encounter, social conflict, physical threat. The system mobilizes resources, resolves the situation, and then returns to baseline. The baseline state is where recovery happens, where immune function is maintained, where reproductive hormones operate, where the parasympathetic nervous system does its work. Chronic low-level stress keeps the system partially mobilized without the acute peaks and troughs that allow for recovery. The baseline shifts upward. The recovery state becomes less accessible. Over years, the cumulative effect on immune function, on cardiovascular health, on hormonal balance, on brain tissue, is substantial and well-documented and almost never discussed in relation to the environmental conditions that produce it.

The specific quality of modern emotional life that presents clinically as depression but doesn’t quite fit the classical picture, the flatness, the absence of positive affect while threat sensitivity remains fully operational, the feeling of executing the behaviors that should produce satisfaction while the satisfaction doesn’t arrive with anything like the expected force, is the predictable output of a nervous system running chronic stress on top of sleep disruption on top of social isolation on top of meaning deficit. Treat each of those variables individually and you get marginal improvements. The variables are not independent.

I keep coming back to a conversation I had last month with someone who was describing what had become a routine: waking at 4am, lying awake for two hours in a specific quality of dread that had no clear object, returning to sleep around 6, waking again at the alarm having not rested. They’d had this for three years. They’d been prescribed two different sleep medications. Neither helped. What they described when I pressed further was a financial situation that required continuous vigilance, a work environment that demanded emotional labor they had no infrastructure to process, a social life that was texturally there but felt thin, and a body that had given up on the regenerative states because the threat signal never went fully quiet. The clinician who saw them probably saw depression with comorbid insomnia and prescribed accordingly. I saw a person whose nervous system was accurately reading its environment.

The environmental reading is not always accurate in terms of the specific threats it identifies. The ancient threat-detection circuitry reads financial anxiety as predator proximity. It reads social exclusion as exile. It reads information overload as the approach of many threats simultaneously. The body responds accordingly, and the response is lived as suffering even when the threats are not what the body thinks they are. The result is a population where large numbers of people are in various states of physiological mobilization against situations their bodies cannot fight or flee from, which is the worst possible combination for the stress response system, because the whole point of the response is to prepare for action, and when action is unavailable, the preparation has nowhere to go.

The therapy industry that has grown to address this, now a substantial portion of the service economy in most developed countries, operates predominantly at the individual level: one person, one clinician, one set of presenting problems, one treatment plan. The conditions that produced the presenting problems exist outside the consulting room and are not within the scope of treatment. The therapy can help a person manage their response to their conditions more effectively, which has genuine value. But a person who has completed a successful course of cognitive behavioral therapy and returns to the job, the debt, the city, the relationship, the media environment, that produced the original presentation is not in a fundamentally different situation. They are in the same situation with somewhat better tools. The tools help. The situation remains.

The wellness industry that surrounds therapy and sometimes substitutes for it, the apps and supplements and retreats and practices and products organized around the concept of personal optimization, is worth examining as an economic phenomenon before examining it as a cultural one. The size of the global wellness market in 2024 was estimated at roughly $5.6 trillion, which is larger than the global pharmaceutical industry. It exists in the gap between what the healthcare system addresses, which is disease, and what people are experiencing, which is not disease exactly but a generalized failure of flourishing. The industry fills that gap with products and services that address the symptoms of conditions at the individual level, which is valuable enough that people pay for it at enormous scale, and which also perfectly complements the system that produced the gap by turning the response to the gap into another market.

Now I want to stay with a feeling that is harder to categorize, which is what it feels like to be a body in a room on a specific morning in a year that is not going particularly well for the planet. Not rhetorically. I mean what it feels like, the particular weight of the air in a climate-controlled space that smells faintly of roasted coffee and floor cleaner and something sweet I can’t isolate, the way the light from the windows cuts across the table at an angle that will shift in about twenty minutes as the sun moves, the specific physical sensation of having sat too long without shifting position, the slow dull ache across the lower back that I’ve been ignoring for the past hour and will continue to ignore because acknowledging it would require a decision about what to do about it.

The body is almost always ignored when I am in the middle of thinking. This is something I’ve noticed but cannot seem to change. The body produces signals continuously, hunger, thirst, cold, discomfort, fatigue, the need to move, and I override most of them most of the time with something that feels like priority but is the habit of treating the mind as if it were the self and the body as if it were a vehicle the self inhabits and can generally disregard until the vehicle breaks down. This is a relatively recent arrangement, historically speaking, and it is, according to the research on somatic awareness and chronic disease, a genuinely terrible idea being lived by an enormous number of people who have been trained to be terrible at it.

There is something I keep noticing about the specific way I experience time, which is that I seem to experience almost none of it. The morning disappears. The hours since I woke are not accessible as duration. They are accessible as events, things that happened, coffee made, phone checked, route walked, seat taken, and the spaces between the events, the actual lived time, is almost completely blank. I’m not sure when this started. I suspect it started gradually and I suspect it is not unique to me.

The quality of boredom has changed. This is something I can say with some certainty because I remember what boredom felt like when I was nine or ten, the particular texture of a slow afternoon in summer with nothing to do and no ability to reach the devices that would now immediately eliminate that state. Boredom then felt like a kind of pressure, a slow swelling of something unnameable that eventually, if you left it alone and didn’t immediately try to escape it, resolved into something: an idea, a game, a story, an urge to make something or go somewhere. The boredom was generative in the way that hunger is generative. It pointed toward something. I almost never experience boredom that way now. What I experience now when there is no external input is not the swelling pressure of the old boredom but something flatter and more anxious, a low-grade discomfort that reaches immediately for a phone and doesn’t pause long enough to become anything.

What has been lost is not leisure. I have leisure. What has been lost is the particular cognitive state that follows from sustained unstructured time without available distraction, the state that contemporary neuroscience has associated with the default mode network, the activity that the brain engages in when it is not performing a task and is allowed to drift. The default mode network is not a resting state. It is the state in which the brain consolidates experience, makes narrative connections between memories, processes unresolved emotional material, and generates the kind of non-linear associative thinking that produces insight. It is, in a fairly literal sense, the state in which the self is maintained. When the default mode network is chronically suppressed by continuous external input, the self is not maintained in the same way. What that means over decades of life I don’t know exactly, but I suspect it is not neutral.

I am trying to think about what I was like at fifteen. This is harder than it should be. Not the events, those are retrievable with reasonable clarity, but the texture of being inside that specific consciousness, what it felt like to think at fifteen, what the world felt like from inside a body that had not yet accumulated the particular sediment of the past twenty years. The texture of thinking then was different in a way I can almost name. There was more tolerance for sitting with a question without needing it to resolve. There was less meta-monitoring. I was more inside the experience and less beside it watching myself have it.

I don’t know at what point the meta-monitoring started. I suspect it started in earnest with social media, the first time I understood that my life was also content, that experiences were also things that could be presented, that there was an audience and I was performing whether I liked it or not. This was not a decision. It was a gradual restructuring of how experience worked, the addition of a layer of observation that positioned me slightly outside whatever was happening, watching myself have it, narrating it, pre-editing it for possible presentation. That layer has not gone away since. I don’t know if it can go away, if the habit of a decade can be dismantled by simply deciding to stop, or if it has been incorporated at a level deeper than decision.

The thing about the meta-monitoring is that it also changes memory. What I remember about an experience is often not the experience itself but the narrative I produced of it at the time, the edited version, the version that went into a caption or a conversation or a journal entry. The raw footage, if there is such a thing, is mostly inaccessible. I don’t know if this is universally true or if it is especially true for people who have spent years turning their experiences into content. But I suspect the latter, and I suspect that what this means is that the record I have of my own life is less mine than I think it is.

Language does something strange when I try to describe internal states with precision. There are states I know I’m in that I cannot find words for, and the absence of words creates a particular kind of frustration that is itself hard to name. The word frustration is too mild. It’s more like the feeling of reaching for something in a dark room and finding only air, repeatedly, with a growing conviction that the thing you’re reaching for might not be where you thought it was. And then the word feeling is also not quite right, because it implies something softer and more pastel than what I mean. What I mean is more like a specific quality of awareness that exists briefly and then disperses, leaving only the memory that it was there and the inability to retrieve what it was.

I have always been interested in what happens at the edges of language. The places where language runs out and you are left with what Wittgenstein called the mystical, not the supernatural, but what simply cannot be said, what exceeds the capacity of propositions to capture. He thought the correct response to what cannot be said was silence. I’m not sure I agree but I understand the impulse. What I have found instead is that what cannot be said can sometimes be approached indirectly, through accumulation of the near-misses, the almost-said things, the descriptions of what surrounds the thing rather than the thing itself. This is roughly the method of poetry. It is also the method of attention itself. You orbit the thing you can’t say directly.

The city outside this window is making sounds I don’t consciously notice as individual sounds anymore. There is a low continuous murmur that is traffic, inside which I can, if I actively attend, pick out the single car, the bus, the horn from three blocks away, the sound a truck makes going over a seam in the pavement. But my nervous system has long ago flagged that murmur as background, as not requiring response, and so I don’t hear it unless I choose to. The same habituation applies to the smell of the city, to the specific quality of light through particulate air, to the ambient temperature slightly warmer than it should be for this time of year. The city becomes invisible through familiarity. This is how you can live in a place for years and be unable to describe it.

What strikes me when I try to actually see the city, to look at it rather than simply navigate it, is how much of it is the residue of decisions made by people who are dead, for reasons that no longer apply. The grid of the streets was laid out according to principles of urban planning that were already controversial when they were implemented and are now, in many cases, understood to have caused specific and measurable harm, the destruction of existing neighborhoods, the privileging of cars over bodies, the creation of zones whose character is determined by zoning codes no individual resident of those zones participated in writing. I walk on those streets every day. The dead planners made my daily movements, my mental geography, the felt distances between the places I go, without asking me.

The architecture of this building is doing something to my mood that I can’t fully separate from everything else doing something to my mood. The ceiling height, the light quality, the acoustic properties of the space, the proportions of the windows relative to the walls, all of this is affecting me continuously. I know this from the research on architecture and cognition, which is robust and largely ignored by the people who commission buildings. We build environments that make people feel worse and then we treat the people for feeling worse. The environment is assumed to be neutral. It is not neutral. Nothing in this room is neutral.

The table I’m sitting at is a specific height. The chair is a specific hardness. The surface of the table has a texture under my fingertips that I noticed when I sat down and have not thought about since. The coffee cup is the exact circumference that allows four fingers to wrap around it comfortably. Someone designed all of this. The failures of design are what make me aware that I have a body in space with specific dimensions and needs. The successes are what allow me to forget I have one.

I am trying to be precise about what I mean when I say I cannot get back to the way of experiencing the world that I had as a child. I don’t mean nostalgia. What I mean is something more specific: there was a quality of presence then, a quality of being entirely inside a moment without any simultaneous awareness of the moment as a moment, without the narrating voice, without the categorizing impulse, without the constant low-level management of how the experience was being interpreted and filed and evaluated. That quality seems to be gone, or at least extremely difficult to access, and I think the difficulty of accessing it is related to the same things that make meditation difficult for adults who didn’t grow up meditating: the narrating layer has become so habitual that it activates automatically, before any conscious decision to narrate has been made.

There is something else that is different about thinking now compared to thinking ten years ago. Ten years ago, when I was working on something difficult, there would be periods of genuine immersion, where the problem I was working on became the entire available world and I lost track of time and forgot to eat and looked up at some point to find that several hours had passed in what felt like twenty minutes. This still happens occasionally but much less often, and when it does happen, it’s almost always in conditions where external access is either unavailable or deliberately cut off. My ability to stay inside a problem seems to have shortened in a way that I can feel when I compare the present to the past, and I don’t think this is only aging.

The attention researcher Gloria Mark found that it takes an average of about 23 minutes to fully return to a task after being interrupted. That number was from 2005. Her more recent research suggests the number has shortened substantially, which could mean either that people are getting better at recovering attention or that people have adapted to a shallower level of engagement from which the cost of interruption is lower. I suspect the latter. Shallower engagement costs less to interrupt because there is less depth to lose. The adaptation is real but it is not progress.

What I want is to describe the specific quality of thinking that is available to me on the days when something is working, when I am inside a problem rather than circling its perimeter. There is a kind of thinking that only becomes available when other kinds of thinking stop. The deliberate, sequential, step-following kind has to quiet down before the other kind can start. The other kind does not follow steps. It does something more like orbiting, approaching the problem from multiple directions simultaneously, making connections that are not logical in the linear sense but that are somehow accurate, that feel true before they can be demonstrated to be true. This is what people mean when they talk about intuition, though that word has acquired unfortunate mystical connotations that suggest the process is not cognitive, when it is extremely cognitive, just not in the mode that can be articulated while it’s happening.

I had a conversation once with someone who studied mathematical intuition, specifically the question of how mathematicians arrive at conjectures before they have proofs. The usual description of mathematical work emphasizes the proof, the logical demonstration, the rigorous verification. But the conjecture comes first, and the conjecture is almost always, in the accounts of the mathematicians themselves, a matter of seeing something, having a felt sense of what must be true, before any of the machinery that will eventually verify it has been deployed. Ramanujan is the extreme case, pages of results delivered with almost no proofs, the results later verified and proved by mathematicians who described the experience as finding that the results were in fact correct but having no idea how anyone could have known they were correct before proving them.

I am trying to think about perception, about what it means to perceive something versus what it means to see something you’ve already categorized. When I look at the woman near the window, I see a woman. I see a woman reading on her phone in a coffee shop. I see a member of a demographic category in a social situation, and all of this seeing is so fast and so automatic that it feels like perception when it is actually recognition, pattern-matching, the brain finding the closest available category and filing the experience under that category before the experience has had time to be experienced. The actual woman, the specific woman, the one whose life is entirely unlike any category I might file her under, is mostly not available to me. I would have to slow down considerably to have any access to her, and slowing down that considerably is very difficult in a body that has been trained to process the world at the speed that contemporary life requires.

The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty spent his career trying to describe the relationship between the perceiving body and the perceived world, arguing that perception is not a mental act applied to sensory data but something that happens in the body itself, that the body is not an instrument of perception but the subject of perception, that seeing is a bodily act in the same way that reaching or walking are bodily acts. What this means, taken seriously, is that the body I have, the one shaped by years of sitting, by years of screen exposure, by years of chronic stress, by years of inadequate sleep, perceives differently than the body I would have had under different conditions. The perceptual world changes when the perceiving body changes. This is not a metaphor. It’s what the research on embodied cognition has been showing for thirty years and what the culture at large has almost entirely failed to absorb.

There is a specific pain that comes from knowing too much about the mechanisms of your own experience. I know, for example, that the low-grade sadness I have been carrying for most of this morning is at least partly explained by sleep deprivation affecting serotonin regulation, and that the hypervigilance I notice in my attention, the tendency to scan the room, to notice exits, to track the postures of the people around me, is at least partly explained by the low-level cortisol elevation that has become my baseline. I know these things. The knowing does not make the sadness lift or the vigilance quiet. It makes them worse, in a way, because now I have the additional layer of knowing that I’m experiencing them, watching myself experience them, explaining them to myself while I experience them, and the explanation floats above the experience like a caption on a photograph of someone drowning.

The philosophical tradition that treated this most seriously is not the one dominant in contemporary discourse. The existentialists were grappling with the aftermath of two world wars and the collapse of the metaphysical certainties that had previously grounded meaning in the West, but they were addressing a version of the problem that was, by today’s standards, relatively acute and visible. The suffering had names. It had faces. It had dates. What’s different now is that the conditions producing the suffering are diffuse and have been normalized to the point where they don’t look like conditions at all. They look like just how things are. They look like weather.

I want to say something about grief, something I’ve been circling for the whole of this morning. Grief is a word that requires a certain threshold before it feels appropriate to use. There is a social policing around it, a hierarchy of legitimate suffering in which your suffering is required to exceed some level of obvious and proximate cause before it earns the word. What I am trying to describe is a kind of suffering that does not have an obvious and proximate cause. It is distributed across conditions rather than concentrated in events. It is invisible in the clinical sense because it doesn’t present as acute distress but as a long mild drain on everything, a thinning of the texture of experience, a difficulty feeling things fully, a gap between what is happening and the depth at which it registers. This is not acute. It is chronic. And the chronic is harder to name and harder to treat and harder to justify calling suffering, even when that is exactly what it is.

There is a specific quality of contemporary suffering that I am trying to name and keep circling. It is the quality of being too aware. Not too aware in the sense of knowing too many facts, though that is part of it, but too aware in the sense of having too many layers of awareness active simultaneously. I am aware of what I am doing. I am aware of why I am doing it according to several different explanatory frameworks. I am aware of the social context in which I am doing it. I am aware of the mechanisms that produced the context. I am aware of the biological substrates of my awareness. And all of this layered awareness, which was supposed to be an achievement, produces not wisdom but something more like a permanent nausea, a constant background hum of over-interpretation that makes it genuinely difficult to simply be in a room and feel what is happening in the room without simultaneously generating a commentary on what is happening in the room.

I don’t know what the solution to this is. I’m not sure there is one in the sense of a procedure that resolves it. What I have found, on the mornings when something like relief is available, is that it has to do with attention paid to very small and very specific things. Not the systems. Not the history. Not the mechanisms. The specific quality of this light at this moment. The exact temperature of the air against my forearm. The way the sound of the city changes when a bus passes and then returns to what it was before. These are not insights. They don’t add to the analysis. They are just what is here, in the room, right now, which is also what I am most consistently failing to be present to.

The man near me and his partner are putting on their coats. She laughs at something he says while her scarf is still half-wrapped around her neck, and the laugh is the involuntary kind, the kind that comes before you decide to laugh. He sees it. Something in his upper back releases, almost imperceptibly. They’re leaving. Whatever they came in carrying, whatever the silences were about, they’re leaving in a different configuration than they arrived. I don’t know if that’s resolution or just the mercy of moving to a different room. Both things happen. Both of them are a kind of grace.

Now I want to try to describe what it feels like to carry all of this on a regular morning. Not dramatically. Just the weight of it, the specific weight, the way it sits in the body. There is a tightness across my upper chest that I usually associate with something I’m not saying. There is a weight that sits just below the sternum and has no clear content. There is the specific flatness that follows from having eaten too little and slept inadequately, which is most mornings now. There is the hypervigilance that presents as ordinary alertness unless you know what alertness feels like when it’s not tinged with it. And there is the hunger for something I cannot name, which is not food and not sex and not company exactly, which is more like the hunger for a particular quality of contact with the world that I can remember having and cannot reproduce at will.

The hunger for that quality of contact is, I think, one of the most common and least discussed forms of suffering in the contemporary world. It is the suffering of a creature whose capacity for connection is intact but whose environment does not support the conditions under which that capacity can be expressed. It is not the absence of connection. It is connection happening at a depth insufficient to satisfy the need for connection, and the insufficiency is not personal, not a failing of the people involved, but a consequence of the conditions in which the connection is attempted. You can be surrounded by people and be hungry in this way. You can be in a relationship and be hungry in this way. You can be online and connected to hundreds of people and be more hungry in this way than you were before you got online.

I want to think about what happens in the body when it is deprived of the specific kind of contact it needs. The research on skin hunger, the need for physical touch, shows that touch deprivation produces measurable physiological changes: elevated cortisol, suppressed immune function, increased inflammatory markers, altered pain sensitivity. The research on prolonged social isolation, going back to Harry Harlow’s experiments with infant macaques and the wire mothers, shows that deprivation of social contact at critical periods produces lasting changes in brain development, in social behavior, in the capacity for attachment. The research on loneliness, the chronic kind, shows brain activity patterns that look like sustained pain, like the body treating the absence of connection the way it treats injury. The body is designed to need other bodies. When the need is not met, the body suffers in the way bodies suffer when their needs are not met.

I am trying to hold a specific memory that I come back to more often than I can explain. It is a memory from a summer in my mid-twenties that does not seem, from the outside, to be exceptional. I was in a specific place with a specific quality of late afternoon light, the amber kind that comes through old windows, and there was a feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be in the world. Not going anywhere. Not needing to be anywhere else. The feeling of a life that had a texture and a weight and a rightness to it. I did not then know enough to be grateful. I have been trying to get back to that light ever since and what I’ve come to understand is that the light was not what I was trying to get back to. The light was just the occasion. What I was trying to get back to was a quality of being inside my own life rather than watching it from slightly outside it, and I have not found a reliable way back to that, and I think this is because the watching became habitual and the habit became the default and defaults are very difficult to override.

There is a specific form of contemporary loneliness that presents as the loneliness of the person who has many things to say and no one to say them to. Not in the sense of having no friends or no conversations. But in the sense of having a quality of thought, a specific register of concern, a way of seeing things that doesn’t fit the available conversations. The conversations about the news. The conversations about work. The conversations about other people. The conversations that stay on the surface because going below the surface requires a willingness from both parties that is hard to establish and easy to lose, and the conditions of contemporary social life, the time pressure, the distraction, the ambient performance anxiety of social interaction, make sustained depth difficult to sustain.

The intimacy researcher John Gottman, after thirty years of filming couples and following them longitudinally, found that the couples who stayed together and were happy shared a specific quality of interaction around what he called bids for connection. A bid for connection is a small gesture, a comment, a look, a touch, a reaching toward the other person. The response to a bid for connection, the choice to turn toward the bid or turn away from it, predicted the quality and longevity of the relationship more reliably than almost any other variable. The bids are small. They are almost invisible. But they are how the thing is maintained or lost, and they are happening hundreds of times a day in relationships that are not thinking about them at all, and they succeed or fail based on whether the other person is present enough to notice them.

The family structure that is supposed to contain all of this, two adults and their children in a private household, is an extremely recent invention and is performing extremely poorly by almost every measure except its usefulness as a unit of consumption. The extended family and community structures that preceded it were not idyllic. They were often restrictive, hierarchical, and oppressive in ways that fell hardest on women. But they distributed the labor of sustaining life across enough people that the failure of any individual node didn’t collapse the whole thing. What the nuclear household does, by concentrating all of those functions in two adults, is create a system where the failure of any one relationship is catastrophic to everyone inside it, and where the relationship is expected to provide everything, economic partnership, romantic partnership, parenting partnership, social life, emotional processing, domestic management, all within a system that contains no redundancy and no external accountability.

The child by the door is putting on her coat now, assisted by the adult with her, and she’s being patient about it in the way children are patient about processes that adults control. The coat gets buttoned one button at a time. She looks out the window while it’s being done, tracking something I can’t see from where I’m sitting. A pigeon, probably. Children pay attention to pigeons in a way adults have stopped doing. The pigeon doesn’t do anything particularly interesting by adult standards. It does whatever pigeons do, which is enough.

The cultural transmission question is worth staying with because it gets at something that the current moment has disrupted more profoundly than most people have noticed. Prior to mass media and then digital media, culture transmitted primarily through face-to-face interaction, story, ritual, and the accumulated practice of communities. What this produced was local variation, the specific character that a particular community of particular people in a particular place developed over time, and that variation was the medium through which people understood themselves as embedded in something specific and located rather than interchangeable and abstract. What mass media and then digital media produced was homogenization: the replacement of local cultural production with globally distributed content, which optimized for the widest possible audience rather than the deepest possible resonance with any particular community.

The belonging crisis is not experienced as philosophical. It’s experienced as a specific recurring quality of social interaction, the sense that the interaction is happening but not landing, that you’re present but not received, that the distance between you and the other person doesn’t close no matter how much time you spend in proximity. This is the texture of the loneliness epidemic. Not the absence of people but the presence of people across whom genuine contact fails to happen, repeatedly, in a way that eventually stops feeling like failure and starts feeling like just how things are.

The tech industry’s response to loneliness has been to produce connection platforms, which is the same impulse that produced the notification architecture and the variable ratio reinforcement schedule and the behavioral data extraction, applied to the specific problem of people not feeling connected enough. The result is predictable: platforms that generate the experience of social contact without the conditions that make social contact meaningful, that optimize for engagement rather than depth, that produce quantified social metrics as a proxy for belonging, and that make the gap between performed connection and genuine connection wider rather than narrower for most people who use them extensively.

Now let me try to think about memory. Not memory as a topic but the specific activity of remembering, what it actually is to remember something. I am remembering right now, continuously, in the sense that everything I perceive is being interpreted in the context of everything I have previously perceived, that the man across the room triggers a hundred previous men, the coffee triggers a thousand previous coffees, the light triggers years of mornings. But the past itself is unstable. Memory is not a recording. Every time I retrieve a memory I am also altering it, incorporating new information, recontextualizing it within the current state of my understanding, so that what I retrieve is never quite what was encoded and is always at least partially a reconstruction. The me that remembers things is not the same as the me that experienced them, and the memories reflect both selves in a way that makes it impossible to cleanly separate what happened from what I have since made of what happened.

This matters because it means the past is not fixed in the way we usually speak of it. The past is what I currently remember, which is a continuously revised document rather than an archive. The story of my life is a story I am always in the middle of writing, which means it is always subject to revision, and the revisions are not neutral. They are shaped by the present, by what I currently need the past to mean, by what serves the purposes of the self I am currently constructing or defending or revising. This should be liberating in some sense, and sometimes it is. But mostly what it produces is a specific kind of vertigo, the feeling that nothing is as solid as it appeared, that even what seems most certain might be an artifact of the most recent revision rather than something that genuinely occurred.

I want to think about the specific experience of being a body that thinks. Not the mind-body problem in the philosophical sense, the abstract question of whether consciousness is identical to or distinct from physical processes, but the ordinary lived experience of having both a body and a mind and of these two things being somehow both the same thing and not quite the same thing simultaneously. I have a body and the body has needs and the needs are often incompatible with what the mind wants to be doing. The body wants to move and the mind wants to stay still. The body wants to eat and the mind wants to lose weight. The body wants to rest and the mind wants to produce. The body wants to be touched and the mind wants to be alone. This is the condition. Not a malfunction. The condition itself, and the misery it produces is not something that can be resolved by choosing one side of it.

There is a pain that lives in the upper left quadrant of my back, somewhere between the shoulder blade and the spine, that has been present in varying intensities for about four years. I know its history, I know the incident that preceded its onset, I know the various treatments I have tried, I know the research on chronic pain and the role of central sensitization and the relationship between emotional state and pain intensity. I know all of this and the pain continues, and the continued presence of the pain in the context of all the knowing produces a specific kind of exhaustion that is different from the exhaustion of not knowing. The knowing doesn’t help. What helps is either drugs or forgetting, neither of which I can maintain indefinitely.

The relationship between what I know and how I feel is a relationship that consistently fails to be what I expect. I expect that knowing something clearly would produce some corresponding adjustment in how I feel about it. I know that the phone produces anxiety. I still reach for it. I know that the processed food is making the inflammation worse. I still eat it. I know that the sleep debt is compounding. I still stay up. The gap between knowing and changing is something that behavior change researchers study extensively and have mostly found to be very large and very stable. Information does not produce behavior change reliably. This is a problem for a culture that has bet heavily on information as the primary mechanism of improvement.

There is something I experience that I think of as the weight of all the things I have not done. Not regret exactly, or not only regret, but something more continuous than regret, a kind of drag that is always present, a background awareness of the accumulated distance between where I am and where I intended to be, between what I have made and what I meant to make, between who I am in this chair on this morning and who I was going to become. I suspect this is common. I suspect it is what the phrase quiet desperation is pointing at, though that phrase has become so familiar that it no longer points at anything. What it points at is not dramatic. It is ordinary and constant and mostly not spoken about because speaking about it requires admitting that the gap is visible and the gap is visible.

I want to try to say something about the experience of trying to write about experience. There is a problem at the center of this project, which is that the experience of trying to articulate an experience changes the experience, that the act of looking at a thing carefully is also an act of doing something to the thing, and that what comes out the other side of careful articulation is not the thing itself but a version of the thing that has been shaped by the act of articulation. This is not a reason to stop trying. But it is a reason to hold what comes out with some uncertainty, to remember that the map is not the territory and that the territory is always slightly different from what the map suggests.

I am thinking about what it means to pay attention to something. Not the casual attention of ordinary perception, which is mostly pattern-matching and prediction, but the sustained attention of actually looking, actually listening, actually allowing the thing in front of you to be what it is rather than immediately assimilating it to what you already know. Simone Weil wrote about this kind of attention as a form of love. She meant it as a spiritual practice but the description also holds as something true about the phenomenology of caring: to care about something is to be willing to see it clearly, to not look away from what it is, to not project onto it what you want or fear it to be. This is extremely difficult and requires a quality of presence that most of the conditions I have been describing in this essay are precisely arranged to prevent.

The information environment I woke up inside this morning was constructed before I was conscious enough to notice the construction. What the algorithm served me in the first twenty minutes after I woke was a selection of content that was not random, not representative, not chosen for accuracy, but chosen by a system that has learned what content this particular user’s behavioral data predicts will sustain attention. When a system mediates what a population understands to be true, and that system’s operation is governed by optimization targets set by entities with particular commercial interests, and the optimization targets have nothing to do with accuracy, the information environment that results gradually becomes the only environment in which claims can be evaluated. Including claims about the system.

The tobacco playbook, as it’s become known in public health literature, is the original documented model for manufacturing uncertainty around established findings. The tobacco companies’ internal research confirmed the cancer link by the early 1950s. They then ran a forty-year campaign to maintain public uncertainty, fund studies designed toward null findings, cultivate relationships with regulatory officials, and frame the scientific consensus as contested. The strategy worked until the litigation documents made it public. The same strategy, applied by DuPont and 3M to PFAS compounds, by the lead industry to leaded gasoline, by the sugar industry to the relationship between sugar consumption and metabolic disease, by the fossil fuel industry to climate science, produces similar results on similar timescales. An unresolved question forecloses regulatory response. The question only becomes resolved when the financial cost of the litigation exceeds the financial benefit of the uncertainty.

There is no good epistemic position available. This is worth saying plainly. Some things can be known. The aquifer is being depleted. The insect biomass is declining. The microplastics are in the blood. The endocrine-disrupting compounds are in the food chain. These are not contested. What is contested, always, is what to do about it, and the contestation is organized by entities that have a financial interest in doing nothing. And the person trying to reason carefully about what to believe about their world is navigating an information environment that has been deliberately and systematically corrupted by entities with financial interest in specific outcomes. This is not paranoia. It is the documented conclusion of multiple major litigations whose records are public.

The language used to frame these questions is itself a site of contest in ways that are not obvious to most people encountering the discourse. The phrase conspiracy theory was deployed deliberately to remove a category of inquiry from legitimate discourse. The phrase junk science was developed and funded by the tobacco industry specifically to discredit research that threatened its commercial interests. The phrase culture war was developed by political operatives to frame substantive policy disagreements about the distribution of resources and power as matters of lifestyle and identity. The frames determine what can be said inside them. The frames are not neutral. The frames were made by someone who benefited from them.

The man near me has started talking again. His voice has a quality I recognize from conversations I’ve been in, where you’re talking not because you have something to say but because the silence has become uncomfortable and filling it feels like something is being done. She’s listening with the specific patience of someone who has learned that this is sometimes necessary before the actual thing gets said. That patience is a form of love.

The loneliness data that the WHO commission and the Surgeon General advisory are responding to represents something that sounds absurd when you say it out loud in a room full of people. Every person in this building is probably experiencing some version of loneliness, not the acute version of having no one, but the chronic version of feeling that no one knows the version of them that matters most, which is subtler and harder to address and maybe more common than any number can capture.

The stress physiology research is worth understanding in some detail because it explains so much of the texture of daily life that people experience as personal without knowing it’s environmental. The cortisol response was designed for short acute exposures. Chronic low-level stress keeps the system partially mobilized without the acute peaks and troughs that allow for recovery. The baseline shifts upward. The recovery state becomes less accessible. Over years, the cumulative effect on immune function, on cardiovascular health, on hormonal balance, on brain architecture, is substantial and well-documented and almost never discussed in relation to the environmental conditions that produce it.

The pharmaceutical interventions available for the resulting condition are not without value. The evidence base for SSRIs in moderate to severe depression is strong, however contested some of the framing around effect sizes has been in recent years. The problem is that the intervention is targeted at a specific neurotransmitter system while leaving the environmental inputs unchanged, which means it addresses a downstream consequence of upstream conditions. This is clinically defensible and produces relief for many people. It is not the same thing as addressing what’s happening.

I keep coming back to the conversation with the person waking at 4am into dread with no clear object. Three years. Two sleep medications. Neither helping. A financial situation requiring continuous vigilance. A work environment demanding emotional labor with no infrastructure to process it. A social life texturally present but feeling thin. A body that had given up on the regenerative states because the threat signal never went fully quiet. The clinician who saw them probably saw depression with comorbid insomnia and prescribed accordingly. I saw a person whose nervous system was accurately reading its environment.

The diffusion of responsibility across large organizations produces ethical outcomes that no one inside the organization would endorse if they saw them directly. The person who designed the targeting algorithm for the payday loan company did not intend to trap single mothers in debt spirals. The person who approved the marketing strategy for the opioid company did not intend to create hundreds of thousands of addicts. What they did intend, each of them, was to do their job well, to meet the targets they were given, to not be the person who didn’t hit the numbers. The intention at the individual level is not malign. The outcome at the aggregate level is catastrophic. And the gap between those two statements is where most of the damage in the modern world lives.

The virtue ethics tradition, which asks what kind of person you are cultivating through your choices, has an obvious problem in the contemporary context: it requires that the person making choices can see and feel the consequences of those choices. You cannot cultivate virtue toward an aquifer you’ve never seen, toward insects you no longer notice are missing, toward people in places you’ve never been whose groundwater the products you buy have contaminated. The virtuous agent traditionally existed in a context where the moral weight of their actions was immediately visible. The contemporary agent exists in a context where the moral weight of their actions is systematically hidden.

What I keep failing to resolve is the question of what a person is supposed to do with knowing all of this. Not in the grand political sense, though that too, but in the small daily sense of how you move through a world you understand to be arranged against the possibility of human flourishing without either collapsing under that understanding or becoming so well-adapted to it that you can no longer see it. Both of those positions seem like defeats. I haven’t found the third one. I’ve been looking for it for years and I don’t think I’m close.

The equifinality problem in complex systems theory is that systems tend to arrive at the same stable state via multiple different pathways. Applied to social systems, it means that the arrangement of incentives and forces that produces the current set of outcomes tends to regenerate itself even when individual components change, because the incentive that produced the components also shapes their replacements. You can replace a captured regulatory official and the replacement gets captured by the same mechanisms that captured their predecessor. You can elect a reform candidate and the reform candidate operates within an institutional environment that shapes what reform is possible, which is typically less than what was promised, which is why reform candidates tend to disappoint, not because politicians are uniformly corrupt but because the institutional environment exerts continuous pressure in certain directions, and opposing that pressure requires sustained organized collective effort that the conditions of contemporary life are precisely arranged to make difficult to sustain.

The atomization of the population into isolated consumer households, the hollowing of civil society and collective institutions, the replacement of community with market participation, the normalization of political cynicism as the sophisticated position, the fragmentation of information environments so that no shared factual basis for collective action exists, all of these serve the same functional purpose, which is the reduction of the capacity for organized collective response to the conditions producing them. You don’t need a conspiracy to produce this. You need a consistent set of incentives, operating over a long enough time, through institutions with enough resources, to produce the landscape. The landscape regenerates itself.

The ecological collapse data sits outside most of these frameworks because its timescale and scale don’t fit neatly into political or economic categories. The decline of flying insect biomass across protected areas is not a problem that can be addressed by voting for the right candidate. The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer is not a problem that market mechanisms will correct. The accumulation of microplastics in human blood and breast milk and placenta is not a problem that a public health infrastructure designed for infectious diseases can address. These are problems that fall between the categories designed to address them, and the falling between categories is not an accident.

Let me try to describe what it feels like to know all of this and to sit in this coffee shop and to watch the ceiling fan and to hold the cold cup. It feels, some of the time, like having a kind of double vision, where you see the surface of things and simultaneously the machinery behind the surface, and the machinery is interesting but also exhausting, and you can’t unsee it once you’ve seen it, and seeing it doesn’t make you any more capable of changing it than not seeing it would, and so what you are left with is the seeing itself, which is a kind of work that nobody asked you to do and that nobody is paying you to do and that doesn’t produce anything you can point to.

And simultaneously, or maybe alternately, it feels like sitting in a room with people in it, which is not nothing. The people in the room are not abstractions. The woman who touched her partner’s hand is not an abstraction. The child drawing the sun is not an abstraction. The barista with two different smiles is not an abstraction. The way the morning light is doing what it’s doing to the surface of the table right now is not an abstraction. These things are true in a way that the analysis of them is not, or is less, or is differently.

I have a complicated relationship with beauty. I want to say something true about it and I keep failing. What I can say is that it still arrives, even now, even inside everything I know about the mechanisms that produce it and the contexts that have been destroyed and the futures that are being foreclosed. It arrives in the form of a smile that reaches the eyes. In the form of a child with absolute concentration. In the form of two people finding their way back to each other through some practiced vocabulary of care. In the form of light at an angle on a table. These are not consolations. They don’t make anything better or less true. But they are what I’m experiencing right now, which is not the analysis of them. The analysis is what I do to the experience afterward. The experience itself is just this: light, coffee, a fan making its slightly wrong sound, people being people in a room.

I want to try to hold something that I find almost impossible to hold, which is that the suffering and the beauty are not in separate categories. The woman touching her partner’s hand is touching it inside a world that has been described in these pages with some accuracy, a world of endocrine disruption and behavioral surveillance and loneliness epidemics and aquifer depletion and manufactured pharmaceutical crises and deliberate epistemic corruption. She is touching his hand inside that world. The touch is not uncontaminated by that world. But it is also not simply a product of it. It is something that happens in excess of the conditions, something that the conditions do not fully determine, and I find that I cannot explain exactly why that’s the case but that it matters to me enormously that it is.

The deep ecology tradition proposed that the root of ecological crisis was a philosophical error, the idea of the self as bounded and separate from its environment rather than constituted by relationship with it. The philosophical error is true. But it’s also embedded in specific social arrangements, and changing the philosophical error requires changing the arrangements, which the arrangements are specifically designed to resist. The pre-industrial populations that anthropologists describe as having an embedded sense of self, a sense of self as continuous with its context rather than prior to it, did not develop that through individual philosophical cultivation. They were embedded in communities and relationships and practices and stories that continuously reproduced it. When those things dissolve, the embedded self is not available as an option through individual spiritual effort.

The spiritual traditions that attempt to address this within the current arrangement, the meditation apps and mindfulness programs and wellness retreats, are sincere and sometimes useful and are also perfectly compatible with the system they’re supposedly providing refuge from, which is why they’ve been so successfully integrated into corporate wellness programs and productivity optimization frameworks. Mindfulness that makes you more effective at work is not refuge from anything. It is recalibration of a stressed instrument for continued deployment. This is not a criticism of meditation. It is a criticism of what meditation has been converted into.

His phone is in his coat pocket now and they’re at the door and she’s already outside and he’s holding it open and looking after her for a moment in the way you look at a thing you’ve decided is worth looking at, the specific quality of attention that is not taking inventory but simply present to what’s there. It’s the same thing I noticed when they arrived, the small gesture of having chosen each other, and it doesn’t fit neatly into any of the frameworks I’ve been running this whole morning.

Both things are what they are. The neurochemistry and the warmth. The algorithm and the laugh. The microplastic in the blood and the hand on the other hand across the table. The cell tower outside and the child drawing a sun in the way children have always drawn a sun. These things are not in different categories. They’re the same moment, the same civilization, the same bodies, the same morning, and I don’t know how to hold them together and I don’t know how to let either one go.

There is a kind of poverty that has no income threshold. It’s cognitive. The person who is perpetually managing multiple sources of low-level anxiety, whose attention is continuously fractured across multiple simultaneous demands, whose decision-making is impaired by the cortisol load of chronic stress, has fewer effective cognitive resources available for the things that require presence: forming genuine relationships, attending to their own needs, making decisions that require holding complex information in mind, doing creative work that needs sustained concentration. The research on decision fatigue and the cognitive costs of poverty and financial stress points consistently to the same finding: the conditions of life under sustained material or psychological pressure are the conditions under which the faculties required to address those conditions are most degraded. The system requires the most from the people with the least available to give.

There is a word I’ve been avoiding, which is despair. I’ve been avoiding it because despair implies a kind of finality, a conclusion reached, a door closed, and what I’m describing is not that. What I’m describing is something more like the daily experience of having enough information to understand how bad things are and not enough power to change them significantly, and of having to keep living inside that gap without either going numb to it or being destroyed by it. This is not despair exactly. It’s something more like the emotional labor of remaining awake. It costs something that doesn’t get replenished, and the cost accumulates, and the accumulation is the texture of a life lived at this particular moment in this particular civilization.

I am thinking about what it would mean to grieve properly for the things that are being lost. Not the dramatic losses, the ones that have funerals and memorials and official acknowledgment, but the slow losses, the kinds of losses that don’t have ceremonies because nobody could agree on when they started or what exactly was lost or whether the loss is complete yet or still ongoing. The loss of the insects. The loss of the aquifer. The loss of the cognitive environment in which certain kinds of thinking are possible. The loss of the social fabric in which certain kinds of belonging are possible. The loss of the future that the present is foreclosing on. There are no rituals for these losses. There are no designated mourners. The loss happens in the background, at a rate and in a way that the culture has not developed a vocabulary for acknowledging, and so it is not acknowledged, and so it continues, and so we keep going.

The environmental grief that some therapists and researchers are beginning to document is new as a clinical category but old as an experience. Indigenous communities whose relationship to specific places extended across generations, and whose cultural identity was bound to specific ecosystems, have been experiencing versions of it for centuries. What’s new is that people with no particular cultural relationship to specific places are now experiencing something like it, a grief with no clear object, a sense of loss that can’t be fully articulated because it’s not the loss of something they had but the loss of something they never got to have, the baseline that existed before the baseline they grew up in.

The ecological anxiety that particularly affects younger people has a clinical name now, eco-anxiety, which turns a reasonable response to a situation into a condition to be managed. The therapeutic framing that asks individuals to manage their eco-anxiety more effectively so they can function within the system that produced the ecological crisis is doing the same thing the worker wellness programs do. Turning a collective problem into a personal challenge and asking the person to address their response rather than the conditions.

The child and her adult have left. The drawing she was working on is still on the table. I can see from here that she drew what looks like several people, different sizes, standing in a field. There’s the sun she added, large and yellow with lines radiating out. There are what might be flowers, or possibly trees. Whoever she drew standing in the field is standing close together. One of the smaller figures appears to be holding the hand of one of the larger ones.

I haven’t found the way to hold the cell tower and the drawing at the same time without one erasing the other. Knowing too much about the mechanisms behind something doesn’t make the something disappear. It makes it double, the thing and the thing’s explanation simultaneously present, and they don’t resolve into each other, and I’m not sure they should, and I’m not sure what to do with the not resolving except to keep sitting with it and to notice that the not resolving is itself a kind of information about the situation.

I want to stay with the drawing for a moment. The convention for the sun, the large yellow circle with lines radiating outward, is older than any living person and younger than the actual sun by approximately 4.6 billion years, and children learn it and use it without instruction, which tells you something about how efficiently cultural information transfers between people who don’t know they’re transferring it. The child didn’t learn to draw the sun this way from a book or a lesson. She absorbed it from being in a world where the convention exists, the way she absorbed language, the way she absorbed the basic social behaviors that allow her to exist in a room with other people without it becoming chaos. The convention is not hers. But she uses it as if it were. This is what culture is: the accumulated solutions of the dead, passed to the living, who use them without knowing where they came from.

The cultural transmission question is worth staying with because the current moment has disrupted it more profoundly than most people have noticed. Prior to mass media and then digital media, culture transmitted primarily through face-to-face interaction, story, ritual, and the accumulated practice of communities. What this produced was local variation, the specific character that a particular community developed over time, and that variation was the medium through which people understood themselves as embedded in something specific and located rather than interchangeable and abstract. What mass media and then digital media produced was homogenization.

And yet the homogenization is not uniform. What it produces is not a single global culture but the simultaneous proliferation of niche subcultures that exist online, each with its own vocabulary, references, and internal social relations, and no shared public culture that contains and connects them. The fragmentation produces people who are deeply embedded in their specific online communities and culturally invisible outside them, who share references and values with people they’ve never met across the world while being culturally incomprehensible to their geographic neighbors. The old question of belonging, of being a member of a place and a people, has been replaced by the new question of which community you can find online that will recognize you, and the answer to the new question does not produce the same thing as the answer to the old one.

I want to say something about what it feels like to be a person whose intellectual life is primarily interior, primarily private, primarily conducted alone in rooms, and who struggles to find the conversations in which that interior life can be met and matched by another interior life. This is not a complaint. It is a description of a condition I think many people share and that almost nobody talks about, because to talk about it would be to admit a form of loneliness that sounds self-pitying, a loneliness of the mind, the loneliness of a creature whose inner life outpaces or diverges from the available conversations, and to admit that loneliness would be to admit that the inner life is not finding the companions it needs, and that sounds like arrogance or failure or both.

But I think it’s neither. I think it’s a consequence of living in a culture whose dominant modes of communication are optimized for brevity and surface and emotional simplicity, in which the deep slow conversation, the kind that takes hours and circles back on itself and goes somewhere neither participant could have predicted, is not a form of communication that the infrastructure supports. The infrastructure supports tweets and posts and messages and the quick exchange, the clever comeback, the emotional shorthand. The slow conversation requires time and privacy and a willingness to not know where you’re going, and those conditions are increasingly rare.

The wellness industry’s $5.6 trillion market is, at its root, trying to sell back to people the conditions for human flourishing that the economic system has taken away from them. Rest, sold as a premium product, because the system has made adequate rest impossible for most people. Community, sold as a subscription service, because the system has dissolved the communities that used to exist for free. Meaning, sold as a purpose-driven career pivot, because the system has stripped meaning from most of the work it requires people to do. The industry is enormous because the need is enormous. The need is enormous because the damage is enormous. The damage is being caused by the same system that is generating the revenue. This is a closed loop and the people inside the loop are paying for both the damage and the repair.

I want to try to think carefully about hope, which is a word I’m suspicious of but can’t fully abandon. The version of hope I’m suspicious of is the version that says things will get better because they tend to get better, the version that confuses the direction of historical progress with a law of nature, the version that allows people to feel hopeful without having any specific account of how the things they hope will improve will actually improve. That kind of hope is a form of not looking, a way of keeping your eyes above the waterline so you don’t have to see what’s below it. I understand why people need it. I don’t think it’s adequate.

The version of hope I’m not willing to abandon is smaller and harder to maintain. It’s the hope embedded in noticing that the woman touching her partner’s hand is touching it. That the child is drawing with full concentration. That the barista has a real smile that she deploys selectively. That there are people, in this room and outside it and across the world, who are paying attention, who are thinking carefully, who are not looking away, who are trying to make things better with full knowledge of how bad things are and how hard the making better is. That people keep doing this, keep trying to reach each other, keep insisting on the possibility of genuine contact, under conditions specifically arranged to prevent it. This is not nothing. This is not enough. Both of those are true.

The systems theory literature has a concept called leverage points, from the work of Donella Meadows, the systems thinker who wrote the most lucid book I’ve ever read about how complex systems work. A leverage point is a place in a system where a small change can produce large effects. The least effective leverage points are the ones people usually focus on, numbers and flows, the size of this policy or the rate of that process. The most effective leverage points are the ones almost nobody talks about, the goals of the system, the rules of the system, the power to change the rules of the system, the information flows in the system, and most powerfully, the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. The paradigm is the source of the system. Change the paradigm and everything downstream changes. But paradigms are the hardest things to change, because they are so deeply embedded that they are invisible, because they look like reality rather than a way of interpreting reality, because questioning them requires questioning everything you know.

The mindset or paradigm out of which the current system arises includes the idea that growth is progress, that individual preference is the highest value, that market mechanisms are the best way to allocate resources, that the natural world is a resource rather than a context, that the self is a bounded individual rather than a node in a web of relationships, and that the purpose of a human life is the accumulation of experiences and objects and outcomes rather than the depth and quality of presence to the life you’re living. These are not facts. They are a paradigm. They were different at other times in other places and they could be different again.

I am not optimistic about the timescale on which the paradigm changes, because the timescale on which paradigms change is typically longer than the timescale on which the consequences of the current paradigm will arrive. The aquifer will be depleted before the paradigm that supports the agricultural system depleting it has shifted. The insect populations will be gone before the paradigm that supports the pesticide regimes eliminating them has shifted. This is a specific form of suffering, the suffering of someone who can see the problem clearly enough to understand that the solution will arrive too late. It is not a comfortable place to stand. It is where I am standing.

I want to think about what it means to be fully present to a situation that you cannot change. This is essentially the problem of suffering, not in the clinical sense but in the older sense, the sense in which the word suffering means to bear something, to endure it without either denying it or being destroyed by it. The Buddhist tradition has thought about this more carefully than most, not because Buddhism has all the answers but because it has spent more time than most traditions asking the question of how to live inside conditions you cannot change without going numb or going mad. The answer the tradition gives, roughly, is that the path runs through the acceptance of what is, not as resignation but as clear-seeing, and that clear-seeing is different from the clouded seeing produced by the continuous effort to make things be different from what they are.

I find this both compelling and insufficient. Compelling because I think it’s pointing at something true about the relationship between suffering and the denial of suffering, about the way the effort to not feel what you’re feeling costs more than the feeling itself. Insufficient because it seems to me that there are conditions in which clear-seeing demands a response, in which seeing clearly that something is wrong means trying to make it less wrong, in which acceptance and action are not opposites but the same thing, in which you can only act effectively in the world if you are clear about what the world is rather than what you want it to be.

The man near me and his partner have been gone for about ten minutes now. The table they were sitting at has been cleared. Someone new is sitting there, a young man with headphones around his neck and a laptop open, already absorbed, already somewhere else. The rhythm of the room continues. People come and go. The coffee machine makes its sounds. The ceiling fan makes its slightly wrong sound on every third rotation. I have been here for almost three hours. I have not produced the things I came here to produce.

The list on my phone remains the list. The cold cup remains the cold cup. The drawing the child left behind is still on the table near the door, and I find that I keep looking at it, at the figures standing close together in the field under the large yellow sun, and I find that I don’t want to analyze it anymore, that I want to just look at it, that the looking is enough, that the looking is, right now, the only thing I am capable of doing that feels adequate to what the morning has been.

I want to say something about what it feels like to be at the end of this, to have spent a morning thinking about the mechanisms of harm and the conditions of suffering and the specific ways in which contemporary life is organized against the possibility of human flourishing, and to find myself still here, still in the room, still holding the cup, still looking at the drawing, still feeling something I can’t quite name that is not despair and not hope exactly but something between them, some state that has not been adequately named yet in the tradition of states that have been adequately named.

The couple by the window reached an equilibrium before they left. The child drew her people holding hands. The barista is still behind the counter deploying her two smiles with the precision of someone who has learned to use them as tools. The man with the phone managed, for a while, to put it down. The woman with the scarf managed, for a while, to reach across. These are small things. They are much smaller than the problems I’ve been describing. They don’t solve anything. They don’t change anything. But they are what is here, in the room, right now, which is also where I am, right now, which is also the only place where anything has ever happened or will ever happen, and I think that is worth noticing even if I don’t know what to do with the noticing.

The coffee is still in my hand. It has been cold for almost two hours and I’m still not going to drink it.

Nobody in this building is crying.

Not yet.