I was browsing my YouTube feed this morning, then my Substack, then the endless scroll of commentary and confession that constitutes our digital town square. And I saw it everywhere—the fear, the outrage, the pain. A man explaining why he is fleeing Britain because no one can look him in the eye anymore. A woman describing the loneliness of conversations where no one truly listens. Testimonies of exhaustion, of burnout, of lives lived on autopilot. The comments sections overflowing with recognition: “This is me. This is my life. This is what I feel but could not name.” And somewhere between the third video and the fourth essay, it dawned on me with the force of revelation.
We have been robbed.
A Culture of Urgency
In my academic work, I have called our neoliberal capitalist societies “cultures of urgency”—systems designed to …
