There is a certain image of the good life that now feels unreal.
The town square animated by a local market. Bells tolling in the distance as children weave between produce stalls — lollipops in one hand, change in the other. Neighbors pausing to talk and enjoy the serenity of an autumn afternoon. Elderly couples seated beneath trees, watching the same families they’ve watched for years. The air is filled not with notifications, traffic, or fluorescent overstimulation, but with footsteps, music, and the ordinary sounds of people sharing a world.
To modern eyes, this world feels sentimental, even naive. At best, it’s the aesthetic longings of some hopeless romantic — a pleasing image of rootedness and simplicity in an age too technologically advanced, too mobile, and too self-conscious to ever recover it. At worst, it seems like nostalgia for a past that was narrower, harsher, and less free than our own. History has moved on, we tell ourselves. The old forms of life are gone, and good riddance.
But what we call progress has not simply given us better tools or better technology. It has reshaped our desires. Progress has trained us to prioritize speed, choice, autonomy, mobility, and convenience. We have become so accustomed to this vocabulary that we rarely even question it. It’s truth. Self-evident. Just the way life works. Yet beneath our new language of liberation lies a darker, more radical claim: the highest human good is liberation from constraint — that a person becomes most fully himself when unbounded by any ties to family, faith, place, duty, or inherited obligation.
That claim has reordered every part of modern life. It has shaped our institutions, our markets, our technology, and even our idea of freedom itself. To be modern is to be self-defining, unattached, and mobile; to treat dependence as a weakness, permanence as a limitation, and unchosen responsibility as a threat to your personal fulfillment. The individual, once understood as a member of a family, a community, and a moral tradition, is now primarily envisioned as a sovereign chooser: free to construct a life by preference rather than inherit obligations that give life its shape.
This grammar of meaning that, for centuries, ordered lives around family, faith, and community has been methodically dismantled. Thus, the individual is simultaneously free and alone — powerful, yet purposeless. We are surrounded by everything but satisfied by nothing.
We’ve destroyed the institutions that once gave life purpose. In 1940, 7 percent of American adults lived alone; today it’s nearly 28 percent. Weekly religious service attendance has dropped from 44 percent in 1992 to 31 percent today. This signals not just a decline in religiosity but the loss of a shared experience that bound individuals to something larger than themselves. The percentage of Americans with more than 10 close friends has halved since 1990, while the number of Americans who report having no close friends has quadrupled in the same period. Membership in community-based organizations has collapsed by 50 percent since the middle of the 20th century. Marriage rates have declined significantly, while the number of single-parent households has increased substantially. These statistics aren’t even the most troubling indicator of our societal decay; reported rates of loneliness, anxiety, and social fragmentation are at their highest levels in history. Amid this unprecedented drift, humans have turned to consumption to pacify, if only temporarily, our ever-growing need for connection and belonging.
We are told this is freedom. To me, it feels like exhaustion. Every aspect of our lives is now mediated through markets or algorithms designed to exploit our desires for profit. Our very understanding of society is based on manipulation. And the self — seen throughout human history as something to cultivate — has become something to brand. The average person now spends more time curating an identity online than living one in the real world. We strive to build the popularity and reach of these online selves; we conflate their perceived importance with truth. But it’s not the truth. It’s brittle, momentary validation. All it does is leave us emptier than before.
This world has produced extraordinary material abundance. It has also produced a civilization that is visibly fraying. We are richer than any people in history and simultaneously less certain of what our lives are for. We are flooded with entertainment, conveniences, and digital affirmation, yet marked by loneliness, anxiety, social distrust, and spiritual fatigue. These are not incidental malfunctions inside an otherwise healthy order. They are the signature pathologies of modern life — of a world that let freedom be an end in itself and then left millions of people to construct meaning from the ruins of what it destroyed.
But the bargain makes sense. Every new technology offers the illusion of novelty. Something new and shiny that reduces friction, allowing us to float along in our carefree lives. But technology is not a substitute for real belonging. Novelty cannot nourish. Efficiency can’t love. And choice, beyond a certain point, does not liberate.
This is the central paradox of modernity: in freeing the self from external authority, we have also stripped away many of the structures that once made the self intelligible. For most of human history, people did not experience life primarily as a project of personal optimization or identity construction. They understood themselves as embedded within webs of obligation they had not chosen and could not easily discard — family, religion, neighborhood, ancestors, nation, covenant, history. These arrangements were not always gentle or benevolent. Often, they were restrictive, unjust, and burdened by hierarchy. But they accomplished something modern life struggles to do: locate the individual within a larger story.
Modern society rebelled against those older forms, and much of what it destroyed deserved to die. But modernity destroyed far more than oppression. It weakened the institutions that gave ordinary life moral gravity: hollowed out the local community, privatized moral judgment, desacralized public life, and taught people to regard nearly every binding obligation as an obstacle to self-expression. Then, when the resulting culture produced atomization and exhaustion, it offered consumption, therapy, and screen-mediated self-curation as substitutes for belonging.
At the heart of this is a simple truth: humans are not meant to simply float along. We are social creatures who become ourselves through relationships we didn’t choose. The liberal story — that we’re all autonomous individuals who came together through conscious choice to form society — has it exactly backwards. We emerge from communities, we’re shaped by them, and we need them to be fully human. The self buckles under the weight of constructing an entire moral system from scratch. What older societies understood — and what we must recover — is that a person became someone through participation in something larger than themselves. Strip that away, and you get exactly what we have now: a moral and spiritual sickness we all recognize, but feel powerless to solve.
The defenders of modern individualism would say: yes, we’ve lost communal meaning, but we’ve gained something invaluable — the freedom to define ourselves, to escape communities that would crush us, to marry whom we love, to pursue callings our parents never imagined. They’re not entirely wrong about what has been gained, but they refuse to count the costs.
The freedom to define yourself is the burden of having no definition at all. The freedom to escape your community is the loneliness of having nowhere you truly belong. The freedom to pursue any calling is the tyranny of endless choice with no guidance about which callings serve genuine flourishing.
This is where modern liberalism has failed most profoundly. It can protect procedural fairness, adjudicate between competing interests, and expand consumer choice or individual rights. But it cannot, by itself, tell a civilization what to value, what to sacrifice, or what bonds are needed if people want to remain more than a market of strangers. Liberalism assumes society can remain neutral between competing versions of a thick moral vision of the good life. In practice, neutrality is impossible. Liberalism simply smuggles in its own vision under the disguise of its most absolute good: freedom. But the autonomy it enshrines is not a neutral good — it is the particular preference of a particular kind of person, one who has already lost the attachments that make freedom worth having.
A society formed by that preference will, sooner or later, begin to dissolve. Families fracture because permanence is treated as a burden. Communities weaken because mobility is treated as a virtue. Public life thins because procedure and consumption replace common purpose. The economy ceases to serve us and instead demands we serve it and its insidious needs: move here, leave there, retrain, adapt, detach, optimize. Technology accelerates this vicious process, collapsing every remaining boundary between work and rest, and then makes us wonder why so many people feel exhausted, unmoored, and alone.
In simple terms, we have forgotten what a human being is. Humans do not flourish in conditions of limitlessness. We flourish when freedom is ordered toward something higher than itself — toward love, duty, sacrifice, and shared purpose. We flourish when life is structured by obligations that discipline desire and bind us to one another. We flourish when we understand ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as members of a people, inheritors of a tradition, and stewards of something that will outlast us.
And that is the deeper point. The choice before us is not between freedom and oppression, or between modernity and some embalmed version of the past. It is between two different understandings of freedom: one that treats human beings as sovereign wills, most themselves when least bound; and another that understands freedom as the capacity to fulfill obligations worthy of devotion. The former gives us endless choice and little direction. The latter imposes discipline, but in doing so makes possible a life of weight, shape, and meaning. A civilization built on the first form will eventually consume itself. Only the second can endure.
The task ahead isn’t to trade freedom for belonging or return to arrangements that failed for good reason. It’s to recognize the liberal experiment — the attempt to construct a civilization on nothing more than rights and fairness, with no shared conception of the good life — has failed. We are less happy, less connected, less purposeful, and less free in any meaningful sense than we were when life had more structure and less choice. We can acknowledge that without claiming the old arrangements were perfect or that only one path forward exists.
The solution isn’t nostalgia or retreat. It’s not to pretend that the old world can simply be restored, as if history were reversible and injustices that once accompanied these rooted forms of life were incidental enough to ignore. Yet, the failures of the past do not justify the failures of the present. The fact that older structures of family, faith, and community could be oppressive does not mean that their dissolution came without a cost. The task of rebuilding is not to recreate the exact moral worlds our ancestors inhabited, but to recover the truths about human nature that those worlds, however imperfectly, embodied. First, that belonging is not the enemy of freedom. Second, that obligation is not the opposite of dignity. And finally, that a good society cannot be built on rights and preferences alone; a good society must also cultivate loyalties, habits, and institutions that teach people what their freedom is for.
Our answer begins close to home. The family is the first school of obligation, and therefore, a decent society should be structured to make family life more stable. That means refusing the lie that every adult life should be organized primarily around labor market demands. It means building an economy where parents are not forced to choose, at an impossible cost, between family formation and survival. It means treating child-rearing not as a lifestyle choice, but as a civilizational good worthy of real support. Certain policy changes, like paid leave, may make a difference here, but more fundamentally, we must catalyze a change in social attitudes. No welfare state, no app, no therapeutic culture can fully replace the dense network of love, duty, memory, and formation that a healthy family provides.
But the home cannot carry the burden alone. Human flourishing also requires a local world — a visible, inhabited social order where people encounter one another not as abstract equals or market actors but as neighbors, shopkeepers, fellow parents, parishioners, regulars, and citizens. This is one reason why the physical environment matters morally, not just aesthetically. A society of highways, atomized suburbs, and screens trains people into isolation just as surely as a walkable town or dense neighborhood can train them into recognition and mutual dependence. We should want to live in places where daily life naturally produces familiarity; where errands are encounters with friends, where the park, the market, the school, and the cafe are not isolated destinations but parts of a shared civic fabric.
Policy matters here, but it is downstream of our moral imaginations. The real task is to restore the legitimacy of words that modern life distrusts: duty, fidelity, sacrifice, restraint, inheritance, piety, and honor. These things are civic necessities. We need to recover the confidence to say that some ways of life are better than others, not because every life must look the same, but because societies that refuse to distinguish between forms of flourishing and disintegration eventually lose the ability to defend anything at all.
Yes, these solutions require some candor about tradeoffs. A more rooted society would not maximize optionality. It would ask more of people. It would narrow some choices to deepen others. Mobility might become harder. Endless reinvention might become less socially admirable. Some ambitions would have to yield to obligations that do not flatter the ego. For the modern human, trained to regard every limit as oppression, this might seem intolerable. But limits are not always forms of domination. Often, they are preconditions for love, loyalty, memory, and trust. A marriage is a limit. Parenthood is a limit. Citizenship is a limit. The modern fantasy of complete liberation does not free us from these truths; it only leaves us too weak to bear them well.
The world of the opening scene — a market square, familiar faces, generations folded into one another, a sense that life is shared and therefore intelligible — will not reappear because we romanticize it. It will require sacrifice. It will require institutions strong enough to resist the dissolving pressures of the market, to restrain the technologies that seek our endless worship, and it will require citizens to accept that not every desire deserves social validation.
The world we forgot to want is still possible. But it will not return because we reason our way back to it. It will return, if it returns at all, because enough people felt its absence as a wound worth healing. Because enough people felt human life becomes meaningful not when it remains endlessly open, but when it is given — with love and discipline — to things that endure.
There is a moment, if you are lucky, where you feel it. Maybe it comes when you’re home for the holidays, sitting around a table with people you didn’t choose, but couldn’t imagine living without. Maybe it comes when you drive through a town with an indescribable sense of character: people who wave to strangers, farmers’ markets that are more about the people than the goods, and family businesses that have survived generations. Or maybe it comes in the middle of your perfectly optimized life — nice apartment, great career, a thousand followers, zero obligations — when you realize, alone with the glow of a screen, that you are profoundly, inexplicably hungry for something more.
The world that could satisfy that hunger has not completely vanished. It lives wherever a human being decides that one person, one place, and one tradition is worth defending.
Begin there. Begin anywhere. Begin with the neighbor you’ve never met, the table you keep meaning to set, the commitment you keep postponing until the conditions are better and the calendar is clearer and the self is finally, fully formed.
The self you are waiting to become is waiting to be claimed.
Let something claim you.
Featured Image Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art