What the Fuck to Do Next
The world as we know it is crumbling. Now what?
Last month, I wrote an article called “What the Fuck is Going On” that a lot of people seemed to resonate with. You can read it, if you like, but here’s the gist of it:
Western civilization, especially in the United States, is in an existential crisis that runs deeper than post-Covid economics or post-Trump politics. We’ve built our entire social order on people playing certain roles, and our identities have been defined by the roles we play. Who we are is what we are, by birth or by title, and that determines what we’ll do. Now, the roles are blurrier, more mixed together, and less deterministic than they once were. We don’t identify with them in the same ways. We see our social positions more as costumes than selves. We’re in crisis because we don’t want to go back to a world of defined social roles, and our social order can’t accommodate the shift.
Well, our social order can’t accommodate the shift yet — and that’s where this essay begins.
I use a vague term like “social order” because what I’m talking about isn’t any one industry or set of institutions. It’s more, the combined effect of our economy, political structures, cultural touchstones and relationship norms that I’m discussing. Currently, all of these orders are built on people being…
