The arc is unmistakable. Voluntarily or involuntarily, humans are isolating.
The last century has seen a stratospheric rise in humans living by themselves, and spending most of their time alone. In cities across the world, solo households are the norm now. More than half of all adults in the Western world call themselves single. A third have never been in any form of long term committed relationship, ever. Cohabiting duos, appearing on the surface as coupled, are often in actuality two singles simply living under the same roof for convenience. In many countries, the percent-married rate for adults has dipped below the 50% mark and continues to trend down.
The single biggest chunk of time each day, irrespective of age group, is increasingly spent alone. Humanity is atomizing.
We can go on, and why don’t we. The sudden and astonishing abnormality of the new norm demands it. The current state of interpersonal relationships is a tenuous mix of fluidity and superficiality, and stability is rare. A fortunate few do sustain healthy relationships. Many others struggle with intimacy and emotional involvement. Many feel indifferent or resentful. A few have given up trying and grown used to the solitude. Large numbers of men and women have entered virtual worlds within television, social media, video games, or pornography, and their minds never really exit these worlds as they spend hours each day with their bodies stuck to the couch. Stuck in the virtual, they grow disillusioned with the real, and opt to stay single. Women briefly show their strongest interest in men to help punch their ticking biological clock and raise a child, but they are aware of the not infrequent risk to their psychological wellbeing from entering a relationship. Some wealthier women are bypassing a sustained involvement with men altogether, by opting to freeze their eggs to allow for artificial insemination at some indeterminate future.
Single person households are fast becoming the norm across the planet
Many humans today then choose, whether happily or unhappily yet via acts that clearly speak louder than their words, not intimate partners, not a relationship, not children even, but their own company. As a compromise, some welcome relatively undemanding non-human companions. Pets satisfy multiple needs, and double as a friend or a child as the situation demands. And this too may be a transitional state until Fido is replaced by a non-animal companion robot. The new reality of the scene in the average household is a physically isolated but web-connected human and his or her many screens for reaching virtual companions and worlds. The typical Hero’s Journey today then perhaps consists of being able to simply wake up in time to secure a morning coffee, somehow get through the work day amidst digital distractions, and safely settle into the couch for an evening of Netflix and Bake or Netflix and Chill?
Sex, that instinct that could once be relied upon to bring out the animal in the human and thus restore us to sanity when we got wrapped up in being too civilized, is degenerate. It is less frequent, occurs more often outside the container of relationships, and primarily as a mechanical act. Whether sex comes before or after an emotional bond, it tends to mean something between two humans, but today that aspect is taboo. In any college campus, almost all students shrug and embrace this detached view of sexuality. Emotional involvement is seen as foolish and deviant behavior, and any attempts to act otherwise is ridiculed by peers. These young folks are the adults of tomorrow that recognize, with good reason, that they may never be in a life-long relationship. Sex is never ‘nothing’ though, so this repression of associated emotionality comes at an emotional cost. Perhaps that explains why we are having less sex as a species. In ultra high-tech societies such as Japan, sex is becoming almost obsolete, with more than 40% of men and nearly half of all women admitting to be virgins. The fear of germs and infections has only given license to tighten the screws further on this trend. Our supposedly irresistible biological drives aren’t as strong as something else that is stronger still.
There is also an epidemic of self-reported loneliness in the world today. Surprisingly though, living by oneself is not a good predictor of loneliness. Most of these single family households are by choice – if one is financially self-sufficient and can afford to move into a place by oneself, one often chooses to. Indeed, as women’s incomes and their ability to financially support themselves independent of a man have risen across the world, it has been matched by a proportional rise in their propensity to live solo, or even to live apart while in a relationship. Tellingly, those who are in a relationship report feelings of loneliness at about the same levels of intensity and frequency as those who aren’t coupled. Thus, it isn’t the full story to tie the loneliness epidemic to the increasing trends of living solo or spending time alone. People are choosing to be alone.
Why? Aren’t humans primarily social beings? Isn’t connectedness a basic need? What is going on?
The single biggest chunk of time each day is spent alone.
Connectedness is indeed a basic need. How it is manifested, and towards what entity, is a different question altogether. The twin phenomena of increasing loneliness and aloneness are indeed correlated, as in they are happening at the same time in societies across the planet. The conventional narrative is that the former is caused by the latter, but as we’ve seen, that is not the case. Perhaps the direction of causality then is the other way around. People are choosing the freedom they gain by living alone if they can swing it, because they realize at a deep level that even when they live together with a partner, their general sense of disconnection persists. It’s almost as if living with a partner makes no difference to the feelings of loneliness, so why bother with the trouble, and why risk conflict and heartache. The source of frustration is not the other, since the other person is in the same situation as us and generally has good intentions. The real issue, the reason for discontentment, is invisible yet everywhere. And it is built into the structure of the modern world.
To understand this, we need a detour, going back deep into history, to see how exactly it is that humanity achieves what is known as progress. All of civilization’s forward march is fueled by new strains of technology. Essentially, any new technology is a collective, rational, science-based solution to problems that were created in first place by separating the individual from a basic need that was already present in their environment in the past. In other words, to be motivated to create and sustain a new technological solution, requires that we must coincidentally be deprived of a certain basic human need. This deprivation simultaneously becomes both the driving force and impeccably rational justification for the solution.
There is no conspiracy or sinister plot at play here. Each small advance changes the fabric of human society in a small way, which creates a small matching new problem to be dealt with, using of course, more technology. The seeds of critical new problems and the ensuing convergence of forces that result in the birth of a new solution are contained in the shadow of past technologies. Furthermore, since the component parts of a complex new technology are spread out over many individuals and groups who devote their attention to perfecting a specific part, each advance renders us slightly less self-sufficient and more dependent on the collective.
The first such major technology of deprivation was agriculture. Farming started small, with acts such as scattering some gathered seeds along frequented trails, spilling some water on them, and occasionally chasing away a bird or two. At the outset, any supplemental food made a good hedge against scarcity. Soon though, the tribe’s population would rise, and dependence would set in, increasing demands for practices such as clearing land, tilling and irrigating the planted seeds, and protecting the crop from weeds and pests. Life became tending to babies and crops, babies and crops, round the clock. This took the hunter-gatherers out of their nomadic existence, and settled them in larger numbers, in one place, for longer stretches. Overcrowding tipped the balance away from the possibility and practicality of hunting and gathering. Eventually we gave up our ability to simply walk into a forest and feed ourselves. We lost our connection to the myriad plants and animals, to rivers and lakes, to the seasons, to nature. To this day we feel the loss as a poignant sense of incompleteness and inadequacy.
More big losses followed in quick succession as civilizations arose, technologies proliferated, and humans specialized. Each increasing specialization meant the loss of skills in the former generalist who could no longer compete and be relevant except by being the more efficient but narrow specialist. Soon, nobody else worked iron but the blacksmith, nobody else baked bread but the baker, nobody else made pots but the potter, and each depended on the others for critical puzzle pieces of life. This process really accelerated and reached its zenith with the industrial revolution. Mass manufacturing and factories separated us from the act of meaningful craftsmanship, except as hobbies. We lost the ability to craft our own daily necessities. No longer could we be involved in the act of creating tangible goods, and no longer could we take satisfaction in using, gifting and sharing something created of our own handiwork.
The seeds of critical problems that necessitate new technological solutions are laid by the old technological solutions
Food, water, and shelter are the most basic of our daily needs, and yet in modernity we have no way of obtaining them on our own. For a while in the post-industrial world, some people resolutely still maintained small farms and raised livestock, but it was an illusion of self-sufficiency considering that the tools, water, energy, and other inputs to the farm were usually supplied by the external world. Soon, those small family farms too became a thing of the past with industrial crops and food mega-factories. Similarly, our daily supply of water, without which we’d soon die of thirst, makes us utterly dependent on our urban infrastructure, as a commodity metered and pumped in through municipal plumbing. Finally, shelter is only available if one pays to rent or buy a zoned, regulated, standardized living unit, and anyone trying to put up their own thatch or tent in the middle of inhabited areas will soon run afoul of authorities of the collective.
The internet further accelerates and exacerbates our dependence on the collective. Without our gadgets and their power to inform, empower, authenticate, and communicate, we increasingly find ourselves stuck in a prior era, worse off even than we might have been in a pre-industrial age. Anyone attempting to travel to another city cannot do so without using a phone or computer to find and buy the tickets, order a ride to the airport, check in, identify oneself, and navigate the dizzying maze of digital rules that all require a digital key. No wonder people get so anxious if they misplace their phone and can’t find it. Post-pandemic, our reliance on technology has been made mandatory. What started on the early internet as cool ways of doing things differently online has turned into a situation where everyone and everything is shoved into the digital world, not as an option, but as the only way.
Psychologists, sociologists, and the average person on the street all concur that Love and Work are the two cornerstones of human life. In modernity, these two pillars of existence are under the tight control of the collective.
Love has exited the purely interpersonal realm and flown into hyperspace. Connection to other human beings is now exclusively mediated through technology. Most interactions between humans are now digital interactions, whether with friends, family, or partners. The dominance of dating apps has rendered even the task of finding a mate as one handled by technology. Most importantly, the act of relating itself is primarily conducted in the digital theater, through texts, calls, and video chats. Modernity discourages humans from being too physical with each other, from being close. Social distancing may have arrived with a pandemic but the core behavioral modification it imposed is here to stay. The more disconnected we feel as individuals, the more time and energy we invest into technological solutions for living supposedly more connected lives.
Work has always been a regulated affair, yet the situation today is stark. An impersonal facet of the collective, called the market, is in charge. The collective controls all aspects of work with an iron fist, including what sorts of jobs there are, how many, what one must do, how much they pay, and who gets what. One simple rule seems to be in play – the more meaningful a job is, the less likely it is to pay well if at all – the implication being, if one enjoys work, maybe that’s compensation enough. Of course, there are plenty of jobs at the low end of the spectrum which are both poorly paid and sheer drudgery too, but in general the ‘meaningfulness penalty’ applies for remuneration and availability. The profusion of bullshit jobs that plainly put a human being as one small cog in the middle of a vast, impersonal, and mostly inefficient web of bureaucratic machinery is further evidence of the power of the collective. Finally, technology has given rise to app-driven gigs, where one has no human workmates or bosses to interact with, and remote work, where any interaction is through the technological medium.
From the day we are born till the day we die, contact with other humans once satisfied our basic quest for identity. It is hard to see and comprehend ourselves objectively in a vacuum, and it is through our social interactions that we learn who we do or don’t like to associate with, and thus understand who we ourselves are. The internet and its social distancing function takes that task of identity formation and pushes it into the digital realm, where we derive identity from the social media bubbles we fall into, the news we read, and in somewhat auto-erotic fashion, from the online personas we ourselves create. We do not even know who we are, without the collective telling us.
Despite our progress as a civilization then, we find ourselves in a completely dependent and deprived position. Our ability to individually secure even the bare minimum basics of daily existence is gone. Sure, one can argue that for all the basics of life to be taken care of may not be a bad thing, and the loss of self-sufficiency is just the necessary price of admission into modernity. Still, there is no denying that we are all under the thumb of the collective for approving our births and deaths, for health and safety, for law and order, for justice and equality, for identification and authentication, for the rights to roam free or reside in a certain place, for the rights to live and to die. Only truly delusional folks will indulge in a fantasy that they can live off-the-grid, away from the collective, while they ignore their cognitive dissonance to make Home Depot runs for Made in China solar panels or shop online for deals to stock up on big sacks of flour, in case the hobby crops fail. Without the collective and its technologically mediated life solutions, we are essentially as helpless as babes in the woods.
Surprisingly, a parallel to the current situation of humanity is found in the world of insects. Termites and ants, two unrelated species from different genetic lineages have via convergent evolution arrived at the same solution to absolutely dominate the planet. Ten quadrillion ants roam the Earth, with a biomass equal to five times that of all humans, and nearly two-thirds of all insect mass. Termites are equally abundant, making up a third of insect biomass. Some estimate that termites and ants together make up 95% of all insect biomass on the planet. A key to that dominance is their social organization and structure. Ants and termites both live in colonies that house millions of individuals living and working together.
Hive structures harboring millions of human individuals of the collective
A colony is resilient, able to sense threats and respond accordingly, fend of all sorts of attackers including large animals, repair itself, survive drought and floods, and replicate. A colony provides the individual ant or termite with a home, shelter, safety, food, society, and purpose. Each such advantage comes at a price though. Although they appear quite autonomous and mobile at first glance, individual ants and termites possess little free will in their behavior where it counts, and no ability to survive solo. All of their existence, every second of the day, is in service to the collective. Individuals have no sexual urge, no independent self-preservation instinct, and do not appear to feel hunger, pain or fear although they appear to be greatly agonized and energized if the mound itself is attacked or in trouble.
As beautifully described a century ago by Eugene Marais in his book The Soul of the White Ant, a termite mound is a composite animal, called a termitary. The creature is the termitary, not the individual termite. The lives of the individual termites – the cells of the body of the termitary – do not matter at all except in service to the termitary. The mound may look like just dried mud, but it is as different from mud as possible. It is always moist on the inside, even in the driest of deserts. The termitary also maintains almost the same body temperature as a mammal. Aside from maintaining its temperature and humidity, it respires by exchanging water vapor and gases through vents. If one dissects a termitary, one discovers it has a tough, self-repairing skin, followed by layers and layers of cells with structural differentiation depending on their location and purpose, with the innermost cells acting as a sort of gut, producing food using fungi. Termites roam the cells, doing all sorts of tightly regulated work, such as bringing in water and vegetation for the fungi, building new cells and repairing old ones, scanning the environment for dangers and defending against them, and participating in a massive information exchange.
If it seems strange or whimsical to think of the termitary as a living thing, consider that all multi-cellular creatures are composites of cells that can and do indeed survive individually, and in evolutionary history their ancestors lived separately. It’s just from our current snapshot of the evolution of the termitary and a narrow perspective of what life is that we fail to see it as a creature. But lest we lament the termite’s loss of status too much, it never was an individual in the strict sense. Termites contain protozoans that roam around their bellies, digesting the chewed up wood they’ve eaten, and the protozoans themselves contain bacteria to do further digesting. We humans contain similar multitudes of multitudes within us, as do all multicellular creatures. The soul of the individual termite is the group soul of the termitary, just as the souls of the individual cells in our body subsume into the collective that is a human being. That’s how all life is.
At the center of a colony of termites or ants, sits immobile the large queen. After pairing with the ‘king’ to become fertile, the queen starts her life, which is essentially an endless production of eggs that hatch to populate the colony. The queen is fed non-stop, defended fiercely, and taken care of in every other way. She lays millions of eggs in a nonstop factory-like performance throughout her lifespan, which can be as long as 30 years. The queen secretes pheromones to keep other individuals from becoming reproductive and to control their behavior. Her chemicals also signal her offspring to develop into castes such as workers or soldiers depending on the needs of the colony. Still, to think of the queen as the absolute ruler of the collective is a mistake. She is undoubtedly special, but no more free than any individual in the colony. Her entire existence hinges around egg-production. The instant she becomes inefficient or incapable of producing eggs, she is devoured as mere food, and a new individual is promoted to the status of egg-producing queen. She too is a slave to the collective.
A collection of monuments to the magnificent power of the collective
The biggest psychological attractor for individual ants and termites is service to the colony. If they could talk, they might say it is an undying and fierce love that they feel. They are often tentative when leaving the nest or mound, hesitating over obstacles and feeling their way around for a safer route, however, these same individuals on the return journey are fearless and determined. Driven by the homing instinct, they are single-minded in their directionality and will literally kill themselves trying to return while laden with food or water for the collective. A termite mound cannot exist a single day without water, since the food producing fungal gardens require to be kept moist. Thus every termite worker must spend hours transporting water to the mound in their bodies, up from shafts and channels that reach several hundred feet down into the ground, and repeat this task, all day, till their very end. The greater the drought and threat to the collective, the harder they slave away. Their dependence on the collective yields a life of pure drudgery. Yet, their devotion is total, to the point of suffering a psychogenic death shortly after being separated from their colony.
Here is a key point. Termites and ants are both descended from flying insects that were once fully capable of taking care of themselves. The ancestors of ants are vespoid wasps, who live in solitary or in small eusocial groups, but never in immense colonies at the same scale as ants. The ancestors of termites are cockroaches, which similarly live as solitary individuals or in small groups. These ancestral insect species are very much alive today, although their numbers are tiny compared to their colony-dwelling descendants. Over millions of years, the evolution of the super-colony structure stripped more and more power from the individual and handed it to the collective. Unlike their solitary cousins, the highly dependent colony insect has no choice but to bend to the will of the immense mass of others in the collective.
Lewis Thomas, the polymath physician, researcher, poet, educator, and Pulizer prize nominee, had this to say about ants and men in The Lives of a Cell, a collection of his essays. “Ants are so much like humans as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical weapons, capture slaves…. what makes us most uncomfortable is that they, like termites and bees, seem to live two kinds of lives: they are individuals, going about the day’s business… and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing, ruminating organism of the anthill, the nest, the hive… We do not like the notion that there can be collective societies with the capacity to behave like organisms. If such things exist, they can have nothing to do with us.”
One can now see a bit of the road we are on. We think we are individuals with autonomy and free will, but the dark shackles of the collective mostly stay hidden, invisible to us like water to the fish that swim in it. Except for some undiscovered tribe or two in some remote corner of the Amazonian forest, everyone alive today is a member of the global colony of humans. Just like the termitary, the human collective is robust, resilient, and self-sustaining, as demonstrated by its forward march at the expense of everything in its path. The individuals are not. We do not survive for very long if separated from the collective, and our dependence is absolute and total. This is a source of the free-floating anxiety that the psychologist Mattias Desmet refers to in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, where he explores our lost connection to the universe through the rational pursuit of materialist-reductionist technological aims.
Any untethered sort of anxiety can be and is exploited – not by sinister groups and shadow conspiracies – but by the collective itself, to further its power in a self-sustaining way. What the anxiety attaches to is problems, disasters, and all those other stupid folks that the news and media deliver to us daily, and what assuages the anxiety is to attack the problems with all our might, with more rules and regulations, more technological solutions, and more hostile reactions. We tend to blame politicians, elites and the super-wealthy for all of the world’s problems, but the reality is that they are mere humans who will live and die while the collective lives on. Yes, a narcissistic few at the top do exploit the masses, yet they themselves are disposable figureheads. It is the collective that creates the environment where they rise to power by supplying what the collective demands, like the termite queen that reigns as long as she supplies eggs for the colony. The reality is, nobody is in charge of the collective except for the collective itself.
Feeling lost? Now thank God there’s the collective! Or should we say… thank Collective, now there’s the God!
Our offerings to the altar of the collective are not just labor or goods or money or anything like that – although it used to be that way. Our primary contribution to the collective is more power to the collective, for that is what it craves. It hungers for all things that feed its strength, which translates directly to all things that take agency away from the individual. The elemental units of these ritual offerings will be easily recognized by any modern human as all those things that disempower us at the expense of the collective. More massive governments and faceless corporations, more department of this and agency of that, more inscrutable webs of bureaucracy and red tape, more visa and travel restrictions, more narrow and bullshit jobs, more complex laws and policies, more intricate rules and regulations, more patents and copyright thickets, more tax laws and loopholes, more environmental problems and solutions, more gigantic military, police, and security organizations, more arcane and impenetrable scientific literature, more complex manufacturing processes and manuals, more massive healthcare systems and pharma-industrial complexes, more cryptic cryptocurrencies and derivatives of financial derivatives, more millions of lines of software code, more, more, more.
A doctor can’t even put a bandaid over a small cut on a patient today without properly generating and duly processing tens of thousands of sentences worth of paperwork involved due to the administrative, billing, insurance, medical, accounting, financial, legal, and ethical implications of his act, all conducted under the watchful and omniscient eyes of the collective.
Here then we have a situation where all our old Gods and spirits have been rationalized out of existence, the angels and demons banished as superstition, the kings and the popes dethroned, and yet there is a powerful source that controls every single aspect of our lives. The source is nameless, formless, shape-shifting, omnipotent, omniscient and everpresent, and we would soon be dead without it. What else is this but a definition for a new God? The inability to locate the source, to fix it, to symbolize it except as an abstract concept, is not accidental but a key feature of the new God, because it drives the restless anxiety and endless seeking behavior. Our attempts to commune with it give it power. Seeking today is increasingly done through digital means in digital realms, but the path has been forming over centuries. We are all devotees to the Collective. Whenever we take sides on any issue, social, political, economic or otherwise, and feel unity with a group that shares our views, our solidarity is not to each others as human beings, but to one of the many faces of the Godhead known as the collective. No wonder ordinary human beings have lost a bit of their charm. Who can compete with the collective.
The author David Foster Wallace said, “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Our religious instinct is strong as ever, it is just directed at the collective and we don’t even realize it. No wonder we are obsessed with all sorts of new technologies, even though we are left running faster and faster after them just to stay in the same place, like the Red Queen. The reason it feels numinous to put our faith in yet another technological solution to finally deliver us from the human condition is that with our worship we hope to catch a glimpse of the elusive face of the faceless collective. Carl Jung had a Latin inscription carved into the stone above the door of his house. Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. Called or not called, the God will be there. And the God is here. We just struggle every waking hour to find and connect to this God, and that itself gives it power. Humans are isolating, into the collective.
There is an unattributed saying in evolutionary biology which goes as follows. “When nature wishes to cull a species, the first attack is made in the direction of the sexual sense”. Self-preservation, procreation, and pair-bonding were once touted as ultimate biological imperatives, but as the termite story demonstrates, surprisingly many aspects of biology can be freed from instinct. In humans, over the last few centuries, many supposedly inviolable compulsions have lost their grip. The sexual urge has gone from being an instinctive, periodic function to a conscious, flat thing, mediated by cultural and collective norms, which is the first step towards its control and subsequent elimination if necessary. The once obligatory mandate to form a pair-bond has loosened. The same is true of the act of bearing children, which also seems to be going out of fashion in many parts of the planet. A great deal of the world already has a fertility rate below replacement levels. Even in those parts of the world where birth rates are higher, graphs of fertility over the past 50 years show a sharp decline. Global population is set to peak and then start to decline within a generation or two. This is commonly attributed to increasing education, prosperity, and urbanization, but none of those factors really explain the trend in terms of deeper human motivations. We could just as justifiably be having more children when we attain access to better lifestyles. The key factor is that despite our progress, we feel more insecure about the world and our place in it, which puts a damper on the baby-making urge.
When nature wishes to cull a species, the first attack is made in the direction of the sexual sense
What comes next? Does the collective have more plans for us, and if so, what? This isn’t something we can predict, despite all the experts who will pontificate about the future of technology. It is beyond the capability of us as individuals to comprehend the will and agency of an emergent entity at a higher level of organization than we exist in. That’s like expecting to be able to explain the phenomenon of love using the movement of the atoms of two people holding hands and walking along the beach. On the plus side, perhaps the collective is essentially Gaia, in which case we can rest assured that at least the planet will be fine and she knows what she is doing, without saying anything about our own situation. Perhaps we will be cut back down to size or perhaps we will be eliminated entirely as a species; although her usual modus operandi is to smoothly incorporate the old life form into a newer offshoot to make an as yet unforeseeable third, a trick she has performed innumerable times in evolution. We may just be the stepping stones to the next species that will take the centerstage spotlight on the third planet from the Sun in the intergalactic play called existence.
What did we think, Gaia was just going to sit back and let us ruin her body? At least she’s taking the nice route, curbing our procreative enthusiasm with just a bit of free-floating anxiety rather than raining total annihilation upon us.
Where does all this leave us? We are thrown back upon ourselves and presented with a choice. Not one of resisting the collective, since that ship sailed centuries ago. We can’t be a luddite, abandon technology, and try to regress into an idyllic pastoral world that just doesn’t exist anymore. On the contrary, we need to be even more aware and involved with where it is headed. No, the choice is far more subtle. Unlike the termites and ants who bear the weight of water in their bellies or food on their backs, we carry the simultaneous burden and gift of consciousness. We are aware, if only vaguely, of our plight, as each technological advance eliminates the last few areas of our lives where we had some remaining autonomy. To recognize this glimmer of insight is to recognize the need to affect change within oneself, to choose our own terms.
The collective derives its power from the free-floating anxiety that it generates within us, which in turns makes us seek connection with it. We cannot resist the march of humanity into the collective. We can choose to do so with our eyes open. Perhaps this is our Hero’s Journey to endure, to confront our inner world on our own terms, since the collective reigns supreme in the outer world but ah, only the outer. Victor Frankl’s famous quote comes to mind. Everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. At least in our own lifetimes, at least until that new technology is developed with perfectly rational justifications for why it needs to invade our brains too, we can still choose our attitudes. We can recognize the source of our anxiety, our restless seeking, our alienation from the universe, and reject it, so that it does not become an enduring alienation of a sort that becomes indistinguishable from one’s identify as a human individual. We can keep coming up with love.
