Member-only story
The Age of the Fractured Soul
We were promised freedom. And we got it. The freedom to scroll endlessly. To share anything. To curate, to filter, to block, to ghost. The freedom to express ourselves in high definition, 4K, live, all the time. The modern soul is on display — but no longer rooted.
Loneliness, we’re told, is a problem of screen time. Blame the phone. Blame the algorithm. Blame the For You Page. But that’s a shallow diagnosis; because this kind of loneliness isn’t about disconnection from others. It’s about disconnection from ourselves. Not the shallow self of avatars and bios, but the deeper self, the one shaped by friction, restraint, responsibility, duty. That self used to be found, forged even, in communities, churches, unions, neighborhoods, messy conversations, and long-standing commitments. Now? It’s floating.
The old moral ecology gave us constraints. Not always comfortable. Not always fair. But they offered something screens can’t: scaffolding. Expectations. Norms. A sense that character was something built, not streamed. Tocqueville saw it in the town meeting. The voluntary association. The hard work of compromise. The civic ritual of give-and-take. It was loud, flawed, imperfect — and deeply social. The soul wasn’t sovereign. It was embedded.
Now the self is atomized and hyper-legible. It performs. It displays. But it rarely commits. Commitment is…
