“It’s a strange moment in the culture, rootless and atomized, and we’ve stopped buying into a lot of the default older structures for making sense of the world—the family unit, large-scale religion, duties to some larger moral order. It does feel like the responsibility for meaning has been shifted onto the individual, so I think it makes sense that we are looking for ways to add meaning or order to our lives. I see this in a lot of different forms: the hyperfocus on psychological self-diagnoses, self-care rituals, productivity podcasts. We want to locate the source of our unhappiness in ourselves and apply ourselves to the solution.”
— Emma Cline
