Pain of loneliness and unbridled desires
Lessons from Sebastian Junger & Tara Henley
If you’re new around here, welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays - where I share wisdom from history’s greatest minds.
My friend, Father Alan, lent me a book, ‘Lean Out’ by Tara Henley, a journalist. Henley recounts how at the height of her career as one of the leading journalists in Canada she’s struck with mysterious chest pains, skin issues, and persistent fatigue. But she had no tumours or anything of that sort. But through multiple appointments and tests, she found out that the main culprit was her constant stress - her lifestyle.
So it’s the story of how Henley left the rat race and leaned out of the relentless chasing after vanity. She travels the world, realizes the importance of strong community and friendships, and sees that she’s spent most of her adulthood crammed in office buildings. And in so doing, she finds serenity and joy in spending time in nature, with friends, and taking the slow road.
Henley is not alone here in how she feels. Many of us are caught in the same perpetual rat race, thinking that getting that next promotion, the end-of-quarter bonus, or the recognition will satiate our endless longing. I’m very well aware of those feelings too. I was swimming in that water for many years.
But Confucius reminds us that:
Filling to fullness is not as good as stopping at the right moment. Over-sharpening a blade causes its edge to be lost. Line your home with treasures and you won’t be able to defend it.
Lessons from Henley and Junger
Intrinsic values are the most important. Human beings have three basic things in order to be content: (1) they need to feel competent at what they do (2) they need to feel authentic in their lives; (3) and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered “intrinsic” to human happiness and far outweigh “extrinsic” values such as beauty, money, and status.
We live in crowded cities but feel more alone than ever. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.
The more obsessed we are with accumulation, the more anxiety we have. The question for Western society isn’t so much why tribal life might be so appealing—it seems obvious on the face of it—but why Western society is so unappealing. On a material level, it is clearly more comfortable and protected from the hardships of the natural world. But as societies become more affluent they tend to require more, rather than less, time and commitment by the individual, and it’s possible that many people feel that affluence and safety simply aren’t a good trade for freedom.
Our individualistic consumerism is killing us and our environment. We’ve grown mo The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.
Loneliness and depression go hand in hand. And sadly new tech companies will exploit this - just as big pharma exploited depression with SSRIs - by creating AI companions and lovers. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in society seems to foster it.
Perhaps the pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness is decaying our lives, enslaving us to lust, and making us depressed. The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of ethnicity.
Two essays I enjoyed this week:
wrote another great essay on why conventional explanations for declining fertility rates don’t account for the continued collapse. He argues instead that social status influences procreation decisions. And, right now, procreation is not considered high status.In our modern day having more than one or two children is looked down upon because we think of ourselves as “educated”. Yet amongst the highest status individuals in our day - think “ultra rich”- those who are “status secure” (Elon Musk type, the royal families etc) tend to have more children. They also tend towards marriage vs. cohabitation. But the general population is more influenced by popular celebrities.
Kurtz’s makes a passing comment on the interest surrounding Taylor Swift's pregnancy status. For anyone who doesn’t know: Swift is the female icon for Millennials and Gen-Z women. Winner of multiple Grammys. She’s the girl-boss. 34 years old. Living life on her terms. Not married. No kids. Dated multiple high-profile celebs. And only recently started dating again - this time a gentleman who plays in the NFL. Life is great.
As we know, more and more women are delaying having children preferring instead to pursue their careers. The median age at which women are having children is now 30 years. In the 1990s it was 23.
The questions the arose while reading this essay are: what will happen if Swift gets married or gets pregnant - will this signal a change in how Millennials and Gen Zs women perceive the status of childbearing? Will we see an increase in marriage come the summer after? Will there be a Swift-baby-boom 9 months after the news breaks of Swift’s pregnancy? Because Kurtz suggests that fertility is subject to strong mimetic effects. And Swift is considered high-status among many women.
’s excellent essay captures how I feel about technological progress, namely, that it’s making things worse for human flourishing. Gioia rightly suggests that tech companies exploit their users for profit-maximization. People are merely resources to extract energy and data. These companies have zero problems with whether what they are doing is hurting or harming the individuals. What they care about is increasing daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU), and retention rates - even if it means destroying people’s attention capabilities.
Individuals who are trying to regain true freedom from digital enslavement face a team of highly skilled engineers, product designers, and powerful algorithms. Good luck trying to win this battle… unless you have a strong community grounded in the real world, not the virtual world, who’ll pull you out like Trinity did to Neo in The Matrix.
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Till next week!