We Live a Hard Life in an Easy World

A diagnosis of modern ease and its emotional consequences

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Being human hasn’t gotten any easier. If anything, it feels harder now, because everything else has gotten so absurdly easy.

We no longer break our backs in fields or factories. Most of us in the developed world work in services, in offices, in front of screens. We’re living inside a civilization built on unthinkable labor, but we don’t remember what it took to raise these cities. We are exhausted but it’s a different kind of fatigue that we endure. Spiritual and emotional.

We search for scapegoats to explain why we feel so frayed: phones, social media, algorithms… They play their part. A big part. But I think the deeper cause is simpler and worse.

We’ve become unable to cope with life in a world that’s too easy.

This pervasive easiness is why so many people, young and old, aren’t just distracted by their phones, they’re also unwilling to learn, to put up with the lightest jobs in history, to read, to cultivate their friendships, to have sex, to have kids, to get to know themselves, deeply and intimately.

Make no mistake. We are strong. If we had to hunt or harvest to survive, or plough the earth, or assemble machines, we would. No one would be glued to a…