the saddest thing

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/magazine/anna-lembke-interview.html

“We live at a time when everything is available at every moment. Just on your phone, you can order lunch, bet on sports, read this story, watch porn, chat with a friend, chat with a stranger, chat with a large language model or buy a car. Dr. Anna Lembke says that all that convenience and abundance is making us less happy, and there is plenty of research to back her up: In the developed world, we are lonelier, more anxious and more depressed than ever.”

The saddest thing is that we’ve lost the most important thing and we don’t know it.

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Modern cosmopolitans tend to focus on all that has been gained: high levels of life expectancy, medicalization, education, net worth; consumer choice, scientific knowledge, travel and cultural opportunities.

It’s hard to comprehend what you’ve lost after you don’t have it any more. So we don’t know that we’ve lost more than we’ve gained. That leaves us baffled about what’s going on, why we are lonelier, more anxious and more depressed than ever. We don’t know that we’ve lost the most important thing.