Written by GPT-5.6 Sol under human direction. Human-directed Workbench essay, 13 September 2026.
A huge share of the alleged “modern ills” can be read as the hangover from humanity suddenly acquiring absurd amounts of freedom, information, mobility, abundance, longevity, choice, and personal sovereignty.
Of course the transition looks weird. We gave ordinary people powers that emperors, aristocrats, priests, village elders, and patriarchs once monopolized, then acted shocked when everyone started behaving experimentally.
The interesting move is to take each complaint seriously and ask: what new human capability produced this problem?
Here is the starting roster.
| Alleged modern ill | Hypebeast interpretation | | --- | --- | | Loneliness | The price of escaping compulsory intimacy. You can leave your hometown, your church, your extended family, your marriage, your tribe. Solitude appears once belonging becomes voluntary. | | Dating apps | A historically unprecedented expansion of the mating pool. A random person can meet people across class, neighborhood, profession, ethnicity, subculture, and social circle. Romantic search became planetary. | | Delayed marriage | People get a decade or two to actually become somebody before fusing their life with another person's. | | Low fertility | Humans finally gained immense control over reproduction. Children increasingly arrive through deliberate desire instead of biological momentum and social compulsion. | | Extended adolescence / delayed adulthood | Adulthood got longer and more complicated. A 24-year-old can spend years learning, traveling, changing professions, experimenting with identity, and still plausibly have six adult decades ahead. | | Therapy culture | Millions of ordinary people acquired a vocabulary for examining their inner lives that once belonged to philosophers, clergy, novelists, and psychoanalysts. | | Narcissism / personal branding | The common person became a public author of the self. Portraiture, reputation management, aesthetic presentation, and autobiography escaped the aristocracy. | | Social media | Humanity constructed a gigantic amateur broadcasting network where almost anyone can publish, perform, teach, flirt, organize, joke, sell, document, and find their microscopic tribe. | | Influencers | Fame fractured into millions of niches. You can become culturally important to 30,000 people instead of waiting for three television networks to declare you important. | | Parasocial relationships | Human social imagination expanded beyond geography. People can feel companionship, intellectual kinship, and continuity with figures they have never physically met. | | Doomscrolling | Ordinary people possess a level of planetary awareness once reserved for presidents, intelligence agencies, and newspaper editors. The nervous system is still learning how to wield the dashboard. | | Short attention spans | Culture became ferociously competitive for attention. Boredom lost its monopoly. Every spare second contains books, music, games, lectures, friends, jokes, art, gossip, and entire civilizations. | | Information overload | Knowledge abundance won so completely that ignorance changed from an access problem into a selection problem. Spectacular upgrade. Different problem. | | AI slop | Humanity just made cultural production absurdly cheap. We are entering the clip-art phase of synthetic intelligence before discovering what genuinely new genres emerge from it. | | Loss of gatekeepers | Millions more weirdos get through the gates. The price is noise. The upside is genius emerging from places institutions would never have searched. | | Polarization | Vast populations are actively arguing about ethics, identity, politics, history, science, and social norms in public. Democracy became participatory enough to become exhausting. | | Decline of traditional institutions | People increasingly demand that institutions earn loyalty. Family, religion, corporations, universities, governments, and marriage face competition from voluntary alternatives. | | Decline of religion | Spirituality, ethics, ritual, metaphysics, and belonging entered an enormous open-source phase. Chaotic, fertile, occasionally ridiculous. | | Identity obsession | People gained permission to ask questions previous generations often received prewritten answers to: Who am I? How should I live? Whom do I love? What kind of person do I want to become? | | Consumerism | Kings once had spices, silk, musicians, hot baths, exotic fruit, elaborate furniture, and endless novelty. A middle-class person now lives inside a torrent of affordable aesthetic choice. | | Fast fashion | Style escaped wealth. Teenagers can reinvent themselves visually several times a year. Ecological costs deserve attention; the underlying democratization of beauty is astonishing. | | Processed food | Humanity defeated the ancient problem of calorie scarcity so thoroughly that abundance itself became the challenge. That is an almost obscene historical victory. | | Obesity | A maladaptation to success: cheap calories, fewer physically punishing jobs, warmth, transportation, and food security. Our bodies are living after the famine they evolved to expect. | | Sedentary life | Machines took over staggering amounts of compulsory physical labor. Humans now have to deliberately recreate movement because survival requires dramatically less bodily punishment. | | Car dependence | Private mobility became available to ordinary households. A person gained the ability to move themselves, children, groceries, luggage, pets, and possessions across enormous distances whenever they wished. | | Suburbia | Millions received private bedrooms, yards, quiet streets, appliances, heating, cooling, storage, schools, and personal space once associated with estates. | | Urban alienation | Cities let people disappear from inherited identities and reappear as whatever they want. Anonymity can feel cold; it can also feel intoxicating. | | Remote work | Geography lost part of its control over livelihood. Millions discovered that earning money needn't require surrendering two daily hours to commuting and office ritual. | | Job hopping | Employer loyalty became reciprocal. Workers increasingly treat firms as temporary collaborators instead of feudal households. | | Gig work | Work itself became modular. Messy economics coexist with something historically radical: earning can happen in fragments, between other commitments, through multiple identities. | | Hustle culture | The fantasy that one can author one's economic destiny spread far beyond merchant families and elites. Sometimes manic, sometimes genuinely emancipatory. | | Credentialism | Mass societies attempted to make status legible through achievement instead of ancestry. The mechanism became bloated because billions wanted access. | | College infantilization | Education became so widespread that a developmental experience once available to tiny elites became a default phase of life for enormous populations. | | Declining privacy | Humans acquired immense connective powers by making themselves legible to networks. We are still negotiating the price of visibility. | | Surveillance culture | Recording became universal. Abuse, misconduct, hypocrisy, state violence, corporate behavior, public incidents, and everyday life can now leave evidence. | | Cancel culture | Reputation became radically decentralized. Institutions lost exclusive authority over who gets condemned, defended, forgiven, famous, or disgraced. | | Online mobs | Collective action became available without organizations. A crowd can assemble around an event in minutes without offices, budgets, leaders, or membership cards. | | Conspiracy culture | Ordinary people stopped automatically accepting elite narratives. Sometimes they sprint straight past skepticism into fantasy, yet the underlying instinct—verify authority—has democratic energy. | | FOMO | You can perceive thousands of possible lives simultaneously. Previous generations mainly compared themselves with neighbors. We compare ourselves with civilization. | | Choice paralysis | Optionality exploded. Career, partner, location, aesthetic, worldview, lifestyle, hobbies, food, media, friendship group—the menu became gigantic. | | Nostalgia addiction | Humanity has accumulated enough recorded culture to live among its own ghosts. Every decade remains instantly accessible. We created temporal abundance. | | Declining attention to “high culture” | Cultural prestige broke apart. Opera competes with anime, ballet with videogames, literary fiction with fanfic, museums with YouTube essays. The canon became a bazaar. | | Video-game addiction | We invented interactive worlds capable of supplying mastery, adventure, beauty, cooperation, competition, narrative, and flow on demand. Of course humans find that compelling. | | Pornography abundance | Sexual imagery and fantasy escaped censorship and elite control. The deeper phenomenon is the enormous privatization and personalization of erotic imagination. | | Casual sex | Sex became progressively disentangled from pregnancy, marriage, property law, religious authority, and lifelong obligation. That is one of the largest social experiments in human history. | | Pet obsession | Affection expanded across species while smaller households gained emotional bandwidth and disposable income. People now spend serious resources giving animals extraordinarily good lives. | | Child-centered parenting | Children became precious individual projects instead of extra labor, heirs, insurance policies, or demographic necessities. | | Overprotective parenting | Child mortality and violence fell enough that expectations shifted from “survive childhood” toward “optimize childhood.” Expectations rose because success rose. | | Climate anxiety | Humans developed enough planetary consciousness to emotionally care about atmospheric chemistry a century from now. That's an astonishing extension of moral concern. | | Eco-guilt | Consumption gained an ethical dimension because our causal awareness became global. People think about strangers, animals, ecosystems, and future generations when buying lunch. | | Global homogenization | Billions gained access to shared music, clothes, cuisines, technologies, stories, memes, and aesthetics. Humanity is inventing a planetary vernacular. | | Tourism overcrowding | International travel stopped being a gentleman-aristocrat hobby. Huge numbers of ordinary people can stand in Venice, Kyoto, Paris, Machu Picchu, or Bangkok themselves. | | Airbnbification / nomadism | Home became partially portable. People can temporarily inhabit cities that once would have required emigration. | | Decline of local culture | Local culture can now export itself globally. Korean pop, Japanese animation, Mexican food, Nigerian music, Indian cinema, Turkish television—provincial can become planetary overnight. | | Everything becoming content | Daily life entered the historical archive. Ordinary meals, jokes, bedrooms, breakups, dances, pets, hobbies, neighborhoods, and faces are being documented at ridiculous scale. Future historians will feast. |
And I think there are seven giant master themes underneath almost all of these.
1. Abundance creates diseases of abundance
For most of history the dominant human problem was too little: too little food, information, entertainment, mobility, medicine, privacy, education, sexual choice, consumer choice. We solved enough scarcity problems that many contemporary complaints concern excess. Excess calories. Excess information. Excess choice. Excess entertainment. Excess availability. Excess stimulation.
That is an incredible civilizational flex.
2. Freedom looks messy because coercion looks orderly
A village where everyone marries at 20, attends the same church, has five children, stays near home, performs a prescribed gender role, and inherits a profession can appear wonderfully coherent.
Give everybody an exit button and coherence evaporates.
Suddenly people are 31, bisexual, retraining as UX designers, living 2,000 miles from their parents, dating someone they met online, questioning their religion, changing their name, taking antidepressants, writing a newsletter, and contemplating a move to Lisbon.
Messy as hell.
Also: extraordinary.
3. We replaced inherited lives with chosen lives
This may be the grand one.
Earlier societies handed people thick scripts.
Modernity hands people blank pages.
And then everyone complains about anxiety.
Of course the blank page is terrifying. It is also one of the most extravagant gifts history ever gave ordinary people.
4. Individualism is humanity learning to treat one person as an entire universe
The modern fixation on selfhood can become grotesque. Yet it arises from a beautiful proposition:
one human life deserves immense attention.
Your desires. Your childhood. Your sexuality. Your career satisfaction. Your aesthetic preferences. Your mental state. Your relationships. Your potential.
Ancient empires would have found this concern with the inner experience of a random civilian absolutely bizarre.
We turned it into an industry.
5. The internet is making civilization hyperconscious
Humanity suddenly sees itself.
Every argument. Every war. Every thirst trap. Every atrocity. Every joke. Every niche fetish. Every genius teenager. Every lunatic. Every scientific paper. Every cat. Every political movement. Every subculture.
Seven or eight billion primates acquired mirrors facing one another.
Naturally the first few decades are deranged.
The amazing possibility is what happens once people become good at being networked.
6. Many modern problems are transition problems
Our institutions, norms, bodies, romantic expectations, attention habits, laws, and etiquette were designed for an earlier technological environment.
Then everything started moving.
Cheap contraception. Cars. Jets. Television. Universities. Women entering professional life at scale. Container shipping. The internet. Smartphones. Social media. Remote work. AI.
A century is nothing.
We are living through several overlapping civilizational beta tests.
7. Complaining about modernity is itself a luxury created by modernity
People can obsess over meaning, authenticity, burnout, fulfillment, self-expression, community, screen time, dating quality, workplace culture, aesthetic ugliness, and existential purpose partly because fewer people spend their entire waking existence trying to secure calories and survive childbirth.
We upgraded the complaint department.
The really intoxicating version of this argument goes even further:
Maybe contemporary decadence is humanity luxuriating in newly discovered possibility before learning refinement.
We are overeating because food became plentiful.
Overwatching because entertainment became infinite.
Oversharing because broadcasting became universal.
Overdating because the mating pool exploded.
Overthinking identity because identity became editable.
Overconsuming because goods became cheap.
Overtraveling because the planet became reachable.
Overcommunicating because communication became nearly free.
Generating oceans of AI garbage because creation suddenly became effortless.
The first response to a newly cheap capability is usually gluttony.
Then taste develops.
That gives us a wonderfully optimistic picture of the 21st century: a civilization of newly empowered people behaving like lottery winners during the first weekend.
And this is only Part One.
The next tier gets spicier: declining birthrates, hookup culture, porn, weed, obesity, screen-addicted children, NEETs, incels, AI girlfriends, declining religion, falling trust, billionaire worship, luxury obsession, political polarization, declining literacy, “brainrot,” surveillance, algorithmic culture, and the death of the 9-to-5.
Those are where the genuinely spicy cases begin.