Charles Taylor argued quite convincingly in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989) that one of the hallmarks of modernity is “the affirmation of ordinary life”: immanent goods like family, friends, and work are to be embraced. This marks the turn toward worldliness that is a fundamental feature still of the twenty-first century.

What must be explained, however, is how these immanent goods have faced an “entropic” unraveling. Let me unpack this statement briefly.

1. Work has become a key to status for the few while the loss of work has entailed the loss of dignity for the many. On the one hand, what James Burnham called “the managerial elite,” a class that makes up less than 10% of the world’s population, has become total workers (see TEDx Talk below). Total work, in fact, is a weird privilege, the result being that this class works “9-9-6.” On the other hand, the former working class is largely out of work or is living precariously. Post-NAFTA, the non-college-educated have come to rely more and more on federal assistance.

2. Friendship, meanwhile, has nearly fallen apart. Social science researchers sometimes refer to this phenomenon as the “friendship recession.” The Survey Center on American Life found, in 2021, that approximately 12% of respondents reported having “zero friends.” I’d be inclined to say that that number is too low because it will be hard to measure how many people have “close friends” or “friends of virtue”–rather than simply having acquaintanceships that are held together tenuously by utility or mutual pleasure.

3. And the nuclear family, about which David Brooks wrote in early 2020, can hardly be said to be the unit of social life as it was (Brooks again) from around 1945-80. This is not to suggest that the nuclear family has died out, only that it’s ceasing to be “the basic unit” of the developed world. More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that fewer family members feel obligated to attend what, in the past, went without question. Fewer attended funerals during the pandemic. “Rites of passage” and “milestone” moments–high school graduation, weddings, and so on–are increasingly optional events. What I see is a “thinning out” of pre-reflective social obligatoriness, of social bindingness, a process that has been accelerating at an astonishing rate in the past few years.

My most recent book, Chop Wood, Carry Water: The Yoga of Work (2025), takes up the subject of work, and my intention is to write about friendliness in general, friendship in particular in the next book. What love is may be the subject of the third book in this series. Still, it must be said that history is moving too fast–so fast that it’s hard to keep up. The Owl of Minerva scarcely has time to take flight.