form, the sufferer just keeps trudging along. She has been hit by some blow, or suffers from some deep ennui, but she doesn’t know what she wants or how she should change her life, so she just keeps on doing what she was doing—same job, same place, and same life. She is living with the psychological awareness that she is settling. I had a friend named Casey Gerald who was being interviewed for a job. At the end of the interview he turned the tables on the interviewer and asked her a question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The interviewer burst out crying. If she wasn’t afraid, she wouldn’t be doing HR for that company. That’s a walking telos crisis.
The second kind of telos crisis is the sleeping kind. In this version, the sufferer is just laid low, crawls into bed, and watches Netflix. His confidence is shot. He is paralyzed by self-focus. He has this weird and unwarranted conviction that it’s too late for him; life has passed him by. Other people’s accomplishments begin to bring real pain, as the distance between their (apparent) swift ascent and his pathetic stasis begins to seem hopelessly wide.
David Foster Wallace noticed it in a lot of his friends: “Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” Beneath the psychological manifestations, Wallace noticed that the fundamental cause was moral directionlessness. “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”
And it’s hard to know how many people are suffering in this sort of crisis because people have become so good at masking it. As the young writer Veronica Rae Saron put it, “Conversation after conversation, it has become more and more clear: those among us with flashy Instagram accounts, perfectly manufactured LinkedIn profiles, and confident exteriors (yours truly) are probably those who are feeling the most confused, anxious, and stuck when it comes to the future. The millennial 20-something stuck-ness sensation is everywhere, and there is a direct correlation between those who feel it and those who put off a vibe of feeling extremely secure.” Eventually there’s no escaping the big questions. What’s my best life? What do I believe in? Where do I belong?
THE SOCIAL VALLEY
Individuals can fall into the valley, and whole societies can, too. In the early 1960s our culture began to embrace a hyper-individualistic way of life to help it address the problems of that moment. But after a few decades, that culture, taken to the extreme, produced its own crisis.
The grand narrative of individual emancipation left us with what some have called “the great disembedding.” Whereas before people tended to be enmeshed in tight communities with prescribed social norms that sometimes seemed stifling, now they are cut loose. Whereas once they served in hierarchical institutions, now they have trouble thinking institutionally at all—how to live within an institution, steward an institution, and reform an institution—so the quality of our social organizations that make up our common life decays.
Most of all, hyper-individualism has led to a society where people live further and further apart from one another—socially, emotionally, even physically. The English philosopher Simon May said that love is “ontological rootedness.” Love gives you a feeling of being grounded. Many people, even within families, don’t have that. Many people in romantic relationships don’t have that. It used to be that people complained that young adults were having sex without love; now they are increasingly not even having sex at all. A half century of emancipation has made individualism, which was the heaven for our grandparents, into our hell. It has produced four interrelated social crises.
1. THE LONELINESS CRISIS
Thirty-five percent of Americans over forty-five are chronically lonely. Only 8 percent of Americans report having important conversations with their neighbors in a given year. In 1950, less than 10 percent of households were single-person households; now nearly 30 percent are. The majority of children born to women under thirty are born into single-parent households. These are symptoms of a general detachment. The fastest growing political group is unaffiliated. The fastest growing religious group is unaffiliated. Researchers in Britain asked pastors to describe the most common issue they have to address with their parishioners. Seventy-six percent said loneliness and