There are days when modern life looks completely reasonable because everybody is doing roughly the same thing.
Get up tired. Check the phone. Rush. Work. Reply. Scroll. Carry several unfinished conversations in your pocket. Eat while doing something else. Worry about money. Try to exercise. Feel guilty for not exercising. Keep up with people you rarely see by watching small fragments of their lives on a screen. Go to bed too late because the evening was the first bit of the day that felt like yours.
Then repeat it.
Do that for long enough and the extraordinary thing is not that people become anxious, flat, irritable or exhausted.
The extraordinary thing is that we still treat those reactions as surprising.
Normal is not the same as sane
Human beings are very good at normalising conditions.
We can get used to noise, stress, bad sleep, terrible relationships, absurd workplaces and a permanent level of low-grade emergency. Once something becomes familiar, the nervous system may stop announcing it as new, but that does not mean it stopped costing us anything.
A culture can do the same thing collectively.
If everybody is tired, tired becomes ordinary. If everybody answers messages in the evening, permanent availability becomes professional. If everybody compares themselves with hundreds of people a day, comparison becomes background. If everybody feels they are behind, being behind becomes the atmosphere.
Then somebody struggles and we ask what is wrong with them.
Sometimes that is the right question.
Sometimes a better question is: what on earth are they trying to adapt to?
We have removed a surprising amount of stopping
There used to be more natural edges in a day.
I am not romanticising the past. Plenty of it was awful. But many activities once ended because the place closed, the programme finished, the person went home or there was simply nothing else to do.
The modern world is less interested in stopping.
The shop is open. The inbox is open. The news is open. Entertainment is open. Other people's lives are open. Work can follow you home. Home can follow you to work. There is always another episode, message, update, opinion, opportunity or minor crisis available.
Attention does not run out because the world is finished with it. It runs out because we do.
Convenience has a strange bill attached
Many of these systems are genuinely convenient. I like being able to speak to somebody in another country instantly. I like maps that know where I am. I like ordering something without spending Saturday walking around shops hoping it exists.
The bill arrives elsewhere.
Convenience removes small efforts, but some of those efforts used to create boundaries, movement, waiting and contact with other people.
The bank in your pocket means the bank never closes. The office in your laptop means the office can live in the bedroom. The entire world's opinion arriving through one device means boredom has become optional, and therefore strangely difficult.
We solved many frictions without asking what the friction had been doing.
A person is not always the correct unit of diagnosis
This matters to me because I have spent a long time working with people.
Individual psychology matters. History matters. Biology matters. Trauma matters. Personality matters. There are plenty of problems that genuinely sit inside an individual and need individual attention.
But not every distress is evidence of an internal defect.
If a person is lonely in a life organised around weak social contact, loneliness is not mysterious. If somebody is exhausted by insecure work, debt and permanent childcare logistics, a breathing exercise may be useful without being an explanation. If a teenager is distressed after spending hours inside systems built around comparison, status and interruption, we should at least look at the environment as well as the teenager.
Sometimes the symptom is personal.
Sometimes it is a reasonable response to unreasonable conditions.
We should be careful what we train ourselves to tolerate
Resilience is fashionable. Again, useful thing.
But resilience can become a peculiar demand when it means becoming better at enduring what should have changed.
A person can learn to cope with almost anything. Humans have proved that repeatedly. The question is whether coping is always the victory.
There are situations where the healthiest development is not greater tolerance. It is refusal.
Turn the phone off. Leave the job. Have the conversation. Stop pretending the arrangement works. Decide that being permanently depleted is not the entrance fee for adulthood.
None of that is simple, and it is certainly not equally available to everyone. Circumstances matter. Money matters. Caring responsibilities matter. There is no useful philosophy that starts by pretending people have unlimited choices.
But even where immediate change is impossible, naming the thing accurately matters.
“I am failing to cope” and “this is a lot to cope with” are not the same sentence.
Ordinary life should contain some life
I do not think the answer is to reject modernity and grow turnips by candlelight.
I like central heating.
I think the more interesting task is smaller. To notice what we have accepted without deciding. To rebuild edges. To protect some attention. To see people in person. To do things that are not productive. To make parts of a day unavailable.
And occasionally to stop asking how to become better adapted to a ridiculous arrangement.
Sometimes the problem is not that you need fixing.
Sometimes the room is on fire.