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Well before smartphones, new inventions shaped our culture and our emotions, and changed how we feel about vanity, loneliness and boredom. Today, Silicon Valley is the latest to exploit these feelings in an effort to keep us harnessed to our screens.

For centuries, moralists preached that pride and vanity were deadly sins. Humans shouldn’t boast or think too much of themselves because they were fallible. Likewise, Americans were taught to regard their accomplishments as hollow and fleeting because life was short.

popular technologies of the 19th century challenged these mores and helped inculcate new ones.

It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us

I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust

On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.

we have slipped into some bad values. We're too individualistic, when we should be a little more communal. We're too cognitive, up in our head, and analytical, when we should be more emotional and relational. We steer our kids toward career success, and not toward moral joy.

But joy is when the self disappears, when you transcend yourself. There's a woman in the book who I interviewed in Ohio who the worst thing happened to her that could happen. She came home one Sunday, and her husband had killed their kids and himself.

I found people who realized the core truth, you can't solve your problems on the level of consciousness at which you created them. They went deeper into themselves. And they discovered a level of ability for care. And they lead marvelous lives.

What I’ve learned is that interacting with A.I. voice agents will change how we interact with one another: who we trust, what we expect and what we need in our communications. A.I. voice agents are already infiltrating our world: calling us as telemarketers, taking our orders at fast-food drive-throughs, listening to our problems as A.I. therapists or — and this one really hits home, given my occupation — being employed as A.I. podcast hosts.

Voice agents have also been touted as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. But when I called a friend of mine and unleashed the A.I. version of me, he later offered the most succinct description of what the whole experience felt like: “It’s so lonely,” he lamented. That sense of loneliness — the base reality that, fundamentally, you are only talking to yourself — may be the most lasting result of all these A.I. conversations.

A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.

It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China, should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confucianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s greatest record-keepers.

he wrote that it is precisely because life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power to move us.

The turbulent centuries of the medieval age produced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet, coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabi, reflected in a fundamental preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and the subtly suggestive.

connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.

Today, a battle over the face of American masculinity is underway. Popular music, action movies and leaders like former president Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), author of the recent book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” push for a more aggressive model.

A major reason older people are still at risk is that vaccines can’t entirely compensate for their immune systems. A study recently published in the journal Vaccines showed that for vaccinated adults ages 60 and over, the risk of dying from COVID versus other natural causes jumped from 11 percent to 34 percent within a year of completing their primary shot series

A booster dose brings the risk back down, but other research shows that it wears off too. A booster is a basic precaution, but “not one that everyone is taking,”

Unlike younger people, most of whom fully recover from a bout with COVID, a return to baseline health is less guaranteed for older adults. In one study, 32 percent of adults over 65 were diagnosed with symptoms that lasted well beyond their COVID infection

By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.

I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness

About one in 11 Americans age 50 and older lacks a spouse, partner or living child, census figures and other research show. That amounts to about eight million people in the U.S. without close ki

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, which has tracked American attitudes since 1972, asked respondents four years ago how often they lacked companionship, felt left out and felt isolated from others. Baby boomers said they experienced these feelings with greater frequency than any other generation, including the older “silent generation.”

More senior women than men are kinless because women’s life expectancies are nearly five years longer, at 81 years. Of Americans age 50 and over in 2016, 27% of women were widowed or never married, compared with 16% of men. Women are also less likely to cohabitate and date later in life, research shows

Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.

Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as wel

the CDC finally started telling vaccinated people that they can have normal interactions with other vaccinated people—but only in highly limited circumstances. Given the impressive effectiveness of the vaccine, that should have been immediately obvious by applying scientific inference and common sense.

Parts of the new guidelines are absurdly restrictive.

the CDC didn’t withdraw its advice to avoid air travel after vaccination. A year of prevaccine experience has demonstrated that airplanes aren’t a source of spread. A study conducted for the defense department found that commercial planes have HEPA filtration and airflow that exceed the standards of a hospital operating room.

Residents and caregivers at senior living facilities write about life during the pandemic — and trying to stay safe while facing the challenges of long-term isolation.

A former special education teacher, she told me she found the isolation and loneliness of lockdown “so heartbreaking.”

My mom isn’t able to write or read after suffering from two strokes. In addition to early-stage dementia, she has expressive aphasia, which means she has difficulty talking. In early November, we received an email from her residential care facility saying that four staff members had tested positive. Mom tested negative. But soon after, she called telling me her next-door neighbor was sick with the virus. I started planning how I could remove my mom from the facility.

Divorce spiked in the 1970s and 1980s among all groups but the “funny thing” that happened was that social learning took place among the better-educated third of the population. So while divorce and single parenting continued to rise for those with less education, it plunged in the 1990s and after among the educated. Their failure, I would argue, was not so much experimenting with other lifestyles as failing to share what they had learned—that kids desperately need the stability of two parents. It’s not that elites were failing to practice what they preached; it was instead, as Charles Murray put it, their failure to preach what they practiced.

None of the organs of popular culture—entertainment, teen magazines, books, or movies, which are overwhelmingly produced by elites—stress the importance of marriage

That said, it isn’t fair to hold elites entirely responsible for the life decisions of the rest of society. Average people have agency too, and if you’ve fathered three kids out of wedlock and hardly make your child support payments, it’s no excuse to say elites made the rules.

The toxic nationalism and open racism of Nazi Germany, only recently defeated; the Soviet Union’s ongoing, cynical attacks on liberal values and what it called “bourgeois democracy”; the division of the world into warring camps; the large influx of refugees; the rise of new forms of broadcast media capable of pumping out disinformation and propaganda on a mass scale; the emergence of an uninterested, apathetic majority, easily placated with simple bromides and outright lies; and above all the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which she described as an “entirely new form of government”—all of these things led Arendt to believe that a darker era was about to begin.

Once again, we are living in a world that Arendt would recognize, a world in which it seems “as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives”

In the totalitarian world, trust has dissolved. The masses “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

“The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”

The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.

America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.

In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.

There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.

If families do not guarantee happiness, the relationships they create and cultivate nonetheless tend to be richer, more primal, and more permanent than purely voluntary forms of human community.

He explains the illusory appeal of nostalgia-driven politics in the United States, the kind that Trump stokes in coarse, simplistic terms.

he offers a path forward for the American right after this campaign, whether it is adjusting to life in Trump’s America or coping again with another electoral setback.

Levin wants a humbler, more local conservatism, one less concerned with tearing down Washington or promoting hyper-individualism than with creating space for America’s “mediating institutions” of family and community to blossom

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Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.

The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.

I study race and the Greek-letter system on North American campuses. I have interviewed hundreds of members of historically white fraternities and sororities, at big state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, on the East Coast and in the South. My research indicates that nonwhite students who successfully pledge those groups — roughly 3 to 4 percent of fraternity or sorority members — live a harsh existence of loneliness and isolation.

Without attention to the internal power dynamics and racism inside these organizations, we place an inordinate burden on the few students of color in them to carry our torch of idealism while we ignore the banal hostility they face.

Nearly all the nonwhite members told me of their white fraternity and sorority brothers’ and sisters’ expectation that they conform to demeaning racial stereotypes. If they failed, they were seen as not fully belonging; if they succeeded, they were understood to be “too” black, Latino or Asian to fit in. This, known as the paradox of participation, governed their acceptance. But to outsiders, the color line was broken.