David James Olney

31 August, 2026

A systems account of political economy, social connection, emotional maturity, health, and institutional problem solving

 

Executive Summary

How the hell did we get here? Not through one conspiracy, one election, one technology, or one generation losing its character. We arrived through an accumulation of changes that interacted for decades. Each change made sense to somebody, rewarded somebody, or solved part of a problem. Together, they produced a mess.

After the Second World War, much of the West experienced extraordinary improvements in income, health, education, security, and material comfort. Strong unions, expanding welfare states, public investment, regulated finance, and an industrial economy helped distribute the benefits of growth. This was never an innocent golden age. Women, racial minorities, migrants, colonised peoples, and many others were denied an equal share of its security and opportunity. Nonetheless, it established an important democratic bargain: people who lived by work could reasonably expect rising living standards, social status, and some influence over the institutions governing them.

From the 1970s, that bargain weakened. Neoliberal ideas elevated competition, privatisation, deregulation, and individual responsibility. Financialisation rewarded asset ownership, leverage, short-term returns, and the extraction of value. Monopoly and employer power grew in important markets. Union membership declined. Politics became more responsive to those who live by wealth and less anchored in the organised power of those who live by work. Economic growth continued, but its rewards and risks were distributed increasingly unevenly.

At the same time, consumer culture offered identity through acquisition, while digital platforms converted attention, emotion, and social comparison into revenue. Communities became thinner, work more insecure, attention more fragmented, and people more responsible for privately managing risks that were socially produced. The result has not been universal misery: Western societies remain wealthy, innovative, tolerant, and capable of reform. But loneliness, anxiety, distrust, and mental ill-health are widespread, while many citizens feel that institutions neither hear them nor solve problems that matter.

Chronic stress and adverse experience can affect the brain, immune system, cardiovascular system, behaviour, and perception of pain. Social conditions can create persistent threat, and persistent threat can become biologically embodied. This is how social and economic order enters the body, shaping how people feel and function from day to day.

Russell Ackoff gives us the right final concept. We are not facing a tidy collection of puzzles with correct answers. We are facing a mess: a system of interacting problems in which solving each part separately may worsen the whole. Recovery therefore requires more than resilience training, medical treatment, economic redistribution, regulation, or better politicians in isolation. It requires institutions that reconnect power with consequence, prosperity with contribution, freedom with belonging, and problem-solving with the lived experience of the people affected. In short, we need antifragility: the capacity to become stronger through stress and disorder.

The way forward is neither a return to the exclusions of the post-war order nor a demand that individuals adapt. It is the rebuilding of shared capability: economic security that enables agency, democratic institutions that distribute voice, communities that sustain belonging, technologies that complement judgment, and systems able to learn before accumulating failures become collapse.

This is an argument about a pattern, not every person or country

The phrase “the West” is both useful and dangerous. Australia is not the United States. Denmark is not Britain. Germany is not Canada. Western societies have different institutions, histories, political cultures, welfare states, media systems, and experiences of race, class, religion, and empire. Within every country, the lives of a secure professional, an indebted renter, a small-business owner, an Indigenous citizen, a recent migrant, and an unemployed industrial worker can be radically different.

I am therefore going to generalise, while acknowledging that I am generalising. I believe there are enough broadly similar developments and consequences to justify speaking about the West, provided we do not pretend that every cause operated everywhere with equal force, or that every person has experienced the same decline.

My argument is not that everything is worse. That would be absurd. People live longer than they did at the beginning of the twentieth century. Infant mortality has fallen, education has expanded, technology has transformed the possibilities available to disabled people, and many citizens enjoy rights and freedoms that their grandparents were denied. As a blind person, I know that technological and social progress are not abstractions. They shape what I can read, where I can go, how I can work, and how fully I can participate.

My argument is that several forms of progress have become detached from one another. Material abundance has not reliably produced security. Individual freedom has not reliably produced agency. Digital connection has not reliably produced community. Economic growth has not reliably produced shared prosperity. Medical sophistication has not reliably produced wellbeing. An enormous quantity of information has not reliably produced understanding. And managerial activity has not reliably produced institutions that solve problems.

That is why the word “mess” matters. A mess can contain genuine progress and serious deterioration at the same time. In fact, progress in one part of a system can create losses elsewhere. A convenient technology can fragment attention. Cheap credit can inflate the price of housing. An efficient global supply chain can become fragile. A policy designed to protect an individual from every immediate discomfort can inhibit the development of their capacity to tolerate uncertainty. A performance target can improve what is measured while degrading the purpose the measurement was meant to serve.

How the hell did we get here? One apparently rational step at a time.

The post-war bargain: a real achievement, but never an innocent golden age

The decades after the Second World War are often remembered as a golden age of Western capitalism. The description has some justification. Across much of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, growth was unusually strong, employment was high, productivity improved, public infrastructure expanded, and living standards rose. Governments built or enlarged health, education, housing, pension, and social-insurance systems. Finance was more constrained than it would later become. Collective bargaining gave workers institutional power rather than merely asking each worker to negotiate alone.

The achievement was not simply that more goods were produced. The important achievement was that economic production, democratic citizenship, and social membership were partially joined together. A person who lived by work could plausibly believe that work would provide income, dignity, a household, a future for their children, and a voice exercised through unions, parties, churches, professional associations, local organisations, and community life.

Daron Acemoglu’s What Happened to Liberal Democracy? provides a powerful way to understand this bargain. Liberal democracy flourished when it was associated with shared prosperity, self-government, and the free pursuit of knowledge. The industrial economy required large numbers of workers and brought them together in workplaces and cities. Repeated contact encouraged solidarity, unions amplified workers’ political power, and the benefits of productivity were distributed broadly enough to give ordinary citizens a stake in the system.

The bargain was incomplete and frequently hypocritical. Post-war welfare states often privileged a male breadwinner and treated women’s unpaid caring work as an invisible resource. Racial minorities, guest workers, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and residents of colonies were denied rights, wealth, services, or recognition enjoyed by dominant groups. Some Western prosperity depended on unequal terms of trade, cheap resources, and geopolitical power. Gay people were persecuted, disabled people were institutionalised or excluded, and domestic violence was hidden behind the sanctity of the household.

Consequently, the answer is not to recreate 1955. Nostalgia compresses a complicated past into a comfortable picture. We should preserve what was valuable in the post-war bargain – shared prosperity, public capacity, social insurance, organised worker power, affordable essentials, and institutions that joined contribution to dignity – while refusing its exclusions.

There is another reason not to romanticise the period. The post-war system generated tensions within itself. By the 1970s, productivity growth had slowed, profitability was under pressure, inflation and unemployment rose together, oil shocks exposed vulnerability, and the Bretton Woods monetary order had broken down. Governments were not irrational to search for new answers. Businesses were not irrational to seek flexibility. Consumers were not irrational to welcome lower prices and greater choice.

The mistake was not that change occurred. The mistake was allowing one family of ideas to define nearly every problem and pre-select nearly every solution.

When a useful tool became an organising ideology

Markets are extraordinarily useful. Prices condense information. Competition can discipline incumbents. Trade can enlarge choice and spread knowledge. Entrepreneurship can challenge complacent institutions. None of this requires us to believe that markets are moral beings, that every price is just, or that everything valuable should be organised as a market.

Neoliberalism became powerful when a useful set of economic tools was turned into a general theory of society. Its practical forms differed between countries, but the recurring themes are familiar: deregulation, privatisation, tax reductions, trade and capital liberalisation, independent central banks, weakened collective bargaining, competition in public services, and a growing expectation that individuals should privately manage retirement, education, employment, health, and housing risk.

John Ralston Saul anticipated much of the resulting culture in The Unconscious Civilization. He argued that the West remained democratic and individualistic in its self-description while becoming corporatist and conformist in practice. Decisions migrated towards managers, experts, and organised interests. Citizens were encouraged to understand themselves as consumers and clients. Public questions were translated into technical questions, which reduced the legitimate role of ordinary judgment.

This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of the mess. Neoliberalism spoke the language of individual freedom, but frequently left individuals negotiating alone with institutions far more powerful than themselves. It promised competition, yet important markets became more concentrated and less dynamic. It distrusted state planning, yet large corporations planned internally, shaped regulations, secured public contracts, and obtained rescue when their failure threatened the system.

Grace Blakeley calls this Vulture Capitalism. Her strongest point is not that governments and corporations secretly abolished markets. It is that the simple opposition between free markets and state planning is false. Modern capitalism is extensively planned, but much of the planning occurs inside corporations and in negotiations between corporate and state power. The question is therefore not whether an economy will be planned. The question is who participates in planning, whose interests count, who receives the gains, and who absorbs the losses.

Mark Blyth’s Austerity adds another part of the story. Following financial crises, governments often responded to public debt by reducing public spending, wages, employment, or services. Blyth’s memorable objection is distributive as much as technical: those who did not create the financial crisis were asked to pay for it. Fiscal restraint can be necessary, and consolidation undertaken during strong growth is not the same as simultaneous austerity during a recession. Nonetheless, cutting demand and public capacity when households and businesses are already retreating can deepen the damage and leave a political memory of unfairness.

Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel’s The Innovation Illusion attacks complacency from a different direction. Despite an endless stream of new devices, corporate announcements, and innovation theatre, business dynamism and breakthrough investment can weaken when incumbent firms become defensive, managerial, and skilled at protecting existing revenue. The OECD now finds that competition has weakened on average across member countries during the past two decades, with rising concentration, higher mark-ups, and less dynamism in important markets. Monopoly capitalism does not merely charge consumers more. It can narrow workers’ alternatives, inhibit experimentation, and redirect talent towards defending rents rather than creating value.

Neoliberal practice has therefore often contradicted neoliberal rhetoric. It has socialised some large risks while individualising many ordinary risks. It has celebrated entrepreneurs while allowing incumbents to consolidate. It has praised responsibility while separating decision-makers from consequences.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives us the cleanest ethical test: skin in the game. If an executive, investor, consultant, or politician receives the upside from a decision while somebody else absorbs the downside, incentives and morality become misaligned. The problem is not simply greed. It is asymmetry. Systems become reckless when those with the power to make consequential decisions are insulated from their consequences. His related idea of antifragility asks a further question: can a system learn from disruption and emerge more capable?

Financialisation: when owning claims became more rewarding than building capability

Finance is essential. It allows savings to fund investment, households to purchase homes, businesses to manage cash flow, and societies to allocate capital across time. The question is not whether finance is good or bad. The question is when finance ceases to serve the productive economy and begins to reorganise the economy around itself.

Financialisation describes a shift in the scale, power, motives, and practices of finance. Corporate performance becomes increasingly judged through shareholder returns and short reporting cycles. Household security becomes tied to asset prices. Property is treated not only as shelter but as an investment vehicle. Public services and infrastructure become streams of future revenue. Debt expands, complex financial products proliferate, and the people who design and trade claims on wealth can earn much more than the people who create goods, care for others, maintain systems, or teach the next generation.

Nicholas Shaxson’s The Finance Curse argues that an oversized financial sector can resemble an oversized resource sector. It can draw skilled people away from government, science, engineering, and productive business; inflate prices and wages in ways that damage other sectors; encourage rent-seeking; increase inequality; and acquire the political influence required to preserve its privileges. The useful question is not how large finance is, but whether additional financial activity is improving the allocation of capital or extracting income from activity that would have occurred anyway.

Edward Chancellor’s The Price of Time focuses on interest. Persistently low interest rates following the global financial crisis supported demand and prevented deeper collapse, but they also raised the price of assets, encouraged leverage, reduced pressure on weak firms, and rewarded people who already owned property and securities. Chancellor sometimes makes the interest rate carry more explanatory weight than it can bear. Still, his central insight is valuable: the price placed on time changes behaviour throughout the economy. When money is extremely cheap for asset owners but housing remains inaccessible to wage earners, prosperity divides between those whose wealth compounds and those whose costs compound.

Yanis Varoufakis’s Global Minotaur places financialisation inside the international system. After the end of Bretton Woods, the United States could absorb global surpluses through its trade deficits and recycle capital through Wall Street. This arrangement supported global demand, but also produced imbalances and helped create the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Ian Bremmer’s G-Zero world describes the political counterpart: an international order in which no state or coalition is consistently able and willing to provide leadership and collective goods. Domestic insecurity and international disorder consequently feed one another.

The cumulative effect is precarity. A worker may be employed but unable to predict next month’s hours. A professional may earn a good salary but be one redundancy away from a mortgage crisis. A young adult may be educated but unable to form a household. A small-business owner may be nominally independent while negotiating with dominant platforms, banks, insurers, landlords, and suppliers. Precarity is not identical to poverty. It is the experience of having insufficient control over the conditions on which a reasonable life depends.

From people who live by work to people who live by wealth

Acemoglu offers a definition of the working class that is more useful than the fading image of an industrial worker in overalls. The working class consists of the large majority of people who primarily live by earning income in the labour market rather than from capital or inheritance. It includes tradespeople, office workers, professionals, carers, contractors, and many small-business owners.

Using that definition, Western politics has not run out of working-class citizens. It has run down institutions that convert their dispersed needs into durable power.

Across the OECD, union density fell from about 30 per cent in 1985 to 15 per cent in 2023-24. Collective-bargaining coverage has also declined, although national differences are substantial. Unions could be rigid, exclusionary, self-interested, or badly led. Nonetheless, they performed functions that no motivational slogan can replace: they pooled bargaining power, trained leaders, transmitted information between workplaces and politics, and forced employers and governments to negotiate with people who lived by work.

As organised labour weakened, organised wealth did not disappear. Corporations, industry bodies, professional lobbyists, major donors, think tanks, media proprietors, and wealthy individuals retained or enlarged their ability to shape agendas. The OECD describes policy capture as the repeated direction of public decisions away from the public interest towards a specific interest. In the United States, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that economic elites and business interest groups had substantial independent effects on policy, while average citizens had little or no independent influence after preferences were considered together. Their methods and strongest conclusion have been challenged, so the study should not be treated as the final word. It remains strong evidence of a broader problem: political equality at the ballot box can coexist with profound inequality in agenda-setting, access, expertise, time, and money.

This helps explain why people feel that politics happens to them rather than through them. In the OECD’s 2024 trust survey, more people reported low or no trust in national government than high or moderately high trust. Distrust is not proof that government is corrupt or incompetent. Citizens can distrust good institutions and trust bad leaders. Nonetheless, persistent distrust is information. It tells us that too many people do not experience institutions as responsive, fair, reliable, or open to their influence.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind helps explain what happens next. People do not reason their way into every political judgment from neutral facts. Moral intuitions come first, reasoning often follows, and groups bind themselves together around competing moral foundations. When material insecurity, status loss, and cultural change occur together, politics becomes an arena for defending identity and dignity. A citizen who feels ignored economically may respond to a leader who offers recognition, even if that leader’s economic program favours wealth. A professional who sees an opponent as morally contaminated may prefer symbolic victory to practical compromise.

Consequently, the crisis of liberal democracy is not caused only by misinformation, populism, identity politics, or badly behaved voters. Those are parts of the mess. Acemoglu’s harder challenge is that liberalism helped create its vulnerability when educated elites withdrew from shared institutions, allowed prosperity to divide, and treated disagreement as a defect to be managed rather than a political reality requiring deliberation.

Consumer identity: freedom to choose without knowing what is worth wanting

The post-war expansion of consumption liberated people from drudgery and scarcity. Refrigerators, washing machines, safe cars, central heating, recorded music, affordable travel, and communication technology did not merely decorate life; they changed it. A critique of consumerism becomes silly when it forgets the human value of comfort, convenience, beauty, play, and choice.

The problem begins when consumption is asked to perform work it cannot do. Products can express identity, but they cannot provide a stable self. Brands can gather groups, but they do not necessarily create communities committed to their members’ wellbeing. Personalisation can make a service convenient, but it can also teach us that the world should continuously adapt to our preferences.

A market society needs consumers. A democratic society needs citizens. A healthy person must be able to be both, while also being a neighbour, friend, family member, worker, carer, learner, and contributor. When consumer identity becomes dominant, freedom is reduced to selection and dissatisfaction becomes economically useful. There must always be a newer object, a more exclusive experience, a more optimised body, or a more publicly impressive life.

This is the toxic form of individualism at the centre of the hypothesis. It is not individuality, autonomy, privacy, or the right to leave oppressive communities. Those are precious achievements. Toxic individualism is the demand that people create themselves, promote themselves, insure themselves, regulate themselves, and recover by themselves while institutions withdraw support and commercial systems cultivate dissatisfaction.

The evidence does not permit the simple claim that individualism inevitably produces loneliness. Collectivist cultures can be coercive, and people can be desperately lonely inside families or communities. However, a study of more than 46,000 participants across 237 countries and territories found that loneliness increased with cultural individualism, with younger men in individualistic cultures particularly vulnerable. The World Happiness Report found that in 2023, 19 per cent of young adults globally said they had nobody they could count on for social support, a 39 per cent increase from 2006.

The World Health Organization now estimates that one in six people globally experiences loneliness, which is associated with worse mental and physical health. Association is not identical to causation, and estimates of deaths attributable to loneliness require modelling assumptions. The basic conclusion is nevertheless hard to dispute: social connection is not a sentimental extra. It is part of the infrastructure of human health.

Community helps us discover who we are, how to behave, what others need, and what can reasonably be expected of us. It limits us as well as supporting us. This limitation is not automatically oppression. Being needed, having duties, negotiating difference, forgiving imperfection, and remaining present when an interaction is not optimised are how social relationships acquire depth.

Emotional maturity did not vanish; we stopped building enough of the conditions that support it

The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity, from The School of Life, describes maturity through capacities such as emotional responsibility, vulnerability, self-compassion, perspective, calm, resilience, generosity, and the ability to communicate and repair relationships. This is practical philosophy rather than a clinical diagnostic manual, which is part of its value. It gives ordinary language to capabilities that are easy to recognise and difficult to sustain.

An emotionally mature person can experience a feeling without treating the feeling as infallible evidence. They can tolerate ambiguity without demanding instant certainty. They can hear criticism without collapsing into shame or counter-attacking. They can recognise that other people have interior lives, mixed motives, limits, and needs. They can delay gratification, admit fault, repair harm, and distinguish discomfort from danger.

I initially wanted to argue that society moved from teaching emotional maturity to wondering why immaturity had become common. That claim is too neat. Earlier societies often demanded repression, obedience, silence, rigid gender performance, and endurance of abuse. A person who never complained might have been called mature while living in fear. Emotional vocabulary was narrower, mental illness was stigmatised, and private suffering disappeared from public records.

The defensible argument is different. Emotional maturity has always required development through relationships, modelling, responsibility, manageable adversity, reflection, and repair. Several modern environments make those experiences harder to obtain. Overprotective parenting can remove opportunities for children to assess risk and recover from failure. Performance-driven education can reward correct answers more than judgment. Work can become too precarious for safe experimentation. Digital communication can remove tone and context while making mistakes permanent and public. Consumer systems can promise frictionless satisfaction, while therapeutic language can be misused to label ordinary discomfort as harm.

Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call three related propositions the “Great Untruths”: what does not kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. Their account of campus culture relies too heavily at times on vivid cases and contested trend claims. Yet the psychological warning is useful. If people are taught that exposure creates damage, feelings settle facts, and opponents are malicious, they lose opportunities to develop courage, curiosity, and the ability to live with pluralism.

Jim Rendon’s Upside provides the necessary counterweight. Post-traumatic growth research shows that some people report deeper relationships, changed priorities, greater appreciation of life, spiritual development, or a new sense of strength following trauma. Growth does not mean the trauma was good, necessary, or secretly a gift. It does not mean everyone grows, or that a person who remains injured has failed. It means human beings are capable of reconstructing meaning after their assumptions have been shattered.

The distinction between adversity and trauma is critical. Manageable challenge can build capability. Overwhelming experience can injure. Protection is sometimes essential. Exposure is sometimes developmental. Mature institutions must make judgments about dose, context, support, age, power, and recovery rather than applying a slogan in either direction.

Emotional maturity is therefore not a personality trait possessed by admirable individuals and absent from defective ones. It is a set of capacities that can be strengthened or weakened, and societies participate in that process.

The anxious generation and the commercialisation of attention

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation argues that childhood was rapidly rewired after the early 2010s as smartphones, social media, and online life displaced play-based childhood. He identifies social deprivation, sleep loss, attention fragmentation, and addiction as central mechanisms, with social comparison and reputational dynamics affecting girls particularly strongly and gaming, pornography, and withdrawal affecting many boys.

The timing is compelling. In several countries, adolescent anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related indicators worsened as smartphones and social media became ubiquitous. Some quasi-experimental and longitudinal evidence supports causal harm, particularly from certain uses, platforms, experiences, and high exposure. The business model also matters. A product optimised to maximise engagement is not neutral merely because the user can close the application.

Nonetheless, Haidt’s strongest population-level causal claim remains contested. Systematic reviews often find modest associations, substantial heterogeneity, bidirectional effects, and difficulty separating time online from what happens online. A large 2026 longitudinal study of young adolescents found that time spent on social media or gaming did not predict later mental-health problems. Vulnerable people may use platforms differently; harmful content and disrupted sleep may matter more than raw screen time; and digital life can provide friendship, identity, education, and support.

The right conclusion is not that smartphones explain the entire youth mental-health crisis, nor that uncertainty requires us to do nothing. OECD analysis in 2026 emphasised multiple intersecting drivers, including economic insecurity, family conditions, school pressure, pandemic disruption, social media, sleep, discrimination, and reduced opportunity. Haidt’s practical proposals – phone-free schools, later smartphone and social-media adoption, more independent play, and collective norms among parents – remain reasonable because they are reversible, developmentally plausible, and do not require proving that one technology caused every trend.

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and The Glass Cage broaden the question beyond children. Carr argues that tools train attention and automation changes the skills we exercise. Hyperlinks, notifications, rapid scanning, and constant switching reward breadth, speed, and responsiveness while making sustained reading and reflection more difficult. Automation can remove drudgery, increase safety, and make difficult tasks accessible. It can also place people outside the activity, leaving them less practised and less able to intervene when the system fails.

Carr sometimes moves too quickly from evidence that the brain changes with practice to the conclusion that digital change is necessarily intellectual decline. Neuroplasticity describes adaptation, not whether an adaptation is good. Still, his moral question survives: what human capacities do we want our tools to exercise, and which are we willing to allow them to erode?

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus makes the systemic point clearly. Attention is not merely a private possession that weak individuals fail to protect. It is contested by business models, workplace expectations, environmental stress, sleep deprivation, information overload, and technologies designed to interrupt. Hari can simplify complex research, and his rhetoric sometimes outruns the evidence. Yet telling people to become more disciplined while surrounding them with systems engineered to defeat discipline is inadequate.

Attention is a prerequisite for emotional maturity and democratic problem solving. Without sustained attention, we struggle to notice our reactions before acting on them, understand a position we dislike, hold several interacting causes in mind, or remain with a problem that does not immediately reward us. A society that continuously fragments attention should not be surprised when citizens, managers, and politicians prefer emotionally satisfying puzzles to difficult messes.

Lost connections, chronic threat, and the body

Johann Hari’s Lost Connections argues that depression and anxiety can arise from disconnection from meaningful work, other people, values, status, nature, a secure future, and the effects of childhood trauma. He is right to reject the crude popular story that depression is simply a chemical imbalance corrected by medication. He goes too far if social explanation is treated as a replacement for individual vulnerability or clinical treatment. Depression is heterogeneous. Different people can arrive at similar symptoms through different pathways, and helpful treatment can include medication, psychotherapy, social change, exercise, sleep, purpose, connection, or combinations of these.

Gabor and Daniel Maté make a broader cultural argument in The Myth of Normal. They ask us to stop treating mind, body, biography, and society as separate systems. Trauma is not only what happened; it is also what happened inside a person when experience overwhelmed their capacity and support. Aimie Apigian’s The Biology of Trauma similarly emphasises nervous-system responses that persist after danger, while Vincent Deary’s How We Break describes the wear and tear produced when demands repeatedly exceed capacity. Georgie Dent’s Breaking Badly gives this process a human story: a person can continue functioning, worrying, striving, and appearing competent until the body and mind can no longer maintain the performance.

There is a strong evidence-based core here. Chronic stress contributes to allostatic load: cumulative wear across stress-response systems. Adverse childhood experiences are associated with later mental illness, substance misuse, and chronic disease. Loneliness is associated with depression, anxiety, cardiovascular illness, diabetes, and premature mortality. Stress can alter sleep, inflammation, behaviour, muscle tension, threat perception, and recovery.

Even so, “it is in your brain” must never be allowed to mean “it is imaginary.” Equally, “stress affects illness” does not mean that a person can think their way out of cancer, infection, autoimmune disease, or structural injury.

Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear helps explain why this area is difficult. Human beings are not neutral risk calculators. Vivid stories, repeated warnings, unfamiliar threats, and a sense of lost control can make rare dangers feel immediate, while familiar chronic risks fade into the background. Commercial media and political campaigns have incentives to keep threat available. A nervous system repeatedly told that the world is dangerous may remain watchful even when no immediate danger is present. Persistent threat can become embodied in ways medicine is only beginning to integrate consistently.

Neuroplastic pain: an important mechanism to consider

Pain is always real. It is an experience produced by the brain from sensory information, expectation, context, memory, and perceived threat. Sometimes pain primarily signals tissue damage. Sometimes it arises from injury or disease in the nervous system. Sometimes altered nociception sustains pain without clear evidence of ongoing tissue damage or a lesion of the somatosensory system. The International Association for the Study of Pain calls this third category nociplastic pain.

Nicole Sachs’s Mind Your Body and Howard Schubiner’s Unlearn Your Pain argue that fear, attention, learned neural pathways, and unexpressed emotion can sustain chronic pain and related symptoms. Their practical methods encourage people to understand the symptoms as non-dangerous where appropriate, reduce fear, attend to sensation differently, and express emotions that have been avoided.

These ideas have more empirical support than many people realise. In a randomised trial of 151 adults with primary chronic back pain of low to moderate severity, 66 per cent of participants receiving four weeks of pain reprocessing therapy were pain-free or nearly pain-free immediately after treatment, compared with 20 per cent receiving placebo and 10 per cent receiving usual care. Much of the benefit remained one year later, and a five-year follow-up found durable improvement for some participants. Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy also has supportive trials for several chronic pain populations.

The social significance remains profound. If persistent threat can train a brain to produce pain, then a society saturated with insecurity, isolation, comparison, and alarm may increase the conditions in which symptoms persist. But the arrow also runs back: pain reduces sleep, movement, income, connection, and hope, creating more threat. Once again, we are dealing with a loop inside a mess.

Why we are no longer solving enough of our problems

Russell Ackoff distinguished puzzles, problems, and messes. A puzzle has a correct answer if we possess enough information and remove false constraints. A problem has several possible answers, and choosing among them requires judgment about ends, trade-offs, and uncertainty. A mess is a system of interacting problems and opportunities. Pull one part and other parts move.

Modern institutions prefer puzzles. Puzzles can be assigned to a department, measured against a target, purchased from a supplier, displayed on a dashboard, and declared complete. Messes resist ownership. They cross organisational boundaries, contain conflicting values, change while we are acting, and cannot be optimised one component at a time.

Housing is a mess. It involves shelter, wealth, credit, retirement, planning, construction, taxation, infrastructure, migration, intergenerational equity, and local identity. Mental health is a mess involving experience, family, work, education, housing, media, community, healthcare, and meaning. Climate change is entangled with energy, industry, consumption, security, inequality, finance, and international coordination. Treating any of these as a single puzzle produces interventions that solve one metric while exporting costs elsewhere.

Rebecca Costa’s The Watchman’s Rattle describes cognitive gridlock: complexity grows faster than a society’s problem-solving capability, so facts are displaced by entrenched beliefs and institutions become unable to respond. Her evolutionary explanation is more speculative than Ackoff’s systems account, but the warning is useful. Civilisations do not necessarily fail because they cannot see a threat. They can fail while naming the threat repeatedly, because their institutions cannot integrate knowledge, legitimate trade-offs, coordinate action, or sustain effort.

Michael Button’s video Why Do Empires Always Collapse? uses the Western Roman Empire as a cautionary analogy. The exact causes of Rome’s collapse remain contested, and no responsible historian reduces them to one sentence. Fiscal weakness, political instability, civil war, military pressure, disease, demographic change, administrative division, and loss of territory interacted over a long period. The useful lesson is not that the modern West is Rome. It is that a system becomes vulnerable when it accumulates problems faster than it can resolve them, and when attempted solutions weaken the capabilities needed for the next crisis.

My concept of Marginal Losses describes the everyday institutional version. Most people are trying to get something useful done, but small disruptions, duplicated processes, inaccessible systems, broken handovers, excessive notifications, unclear responsibility, and repeated work consume time and concentration. Each loss looks too small to justify reform. Together they degrade performance, commitment, ownership, and trust.

Marginal losses are how a capable institution can feel incapable. Financialisation, understaffing, automation, and managerial measurement can make them worse. A cost is removed from one budget and transferred into the time of thousands of users. A self-service system reduces staff numbers while requiring every citizen to become an occasional, frustrated amateur. A transformation program adds new tools before resolving old failures. Nobody intended the aggregate outcome, and nobody owns it.

When people are economically precarious, socially isolated, emotionally exhausted, physically unwell, and attention-poor, their capacity to manage institutional friction declines. When institutions are distrusted and overloaded, their capacity to reduce citizens’ precarity declines. The feedback loop tightens.

This is the mess.

What might change my mind?

Although I did not begin this report with Alexander’s Question, a defensible argument should still say what would weaken it.

I would revise the political-economy argument if countries that preserved strong collective bargaining, universal public services, competitive markets, affordable essentials, and limits on financial extraction showed no better outcomes in security, trust, health, or life satisfaction than otherwise similar countries that did not. In practice, the continued strength of Nordic wellbeing and trust suggests that institutions matter, although culture, history, and selection effects prevent simple copying.

I would revise the social-connection argument if good longitudinal and experimental research showed that loneliness and isolation were primarily changes in language or reporting, with little independent effect on health and wellbeing. Current evidence points in the opposite direction, but causal pathways and historical trends remain less certain than headlines imply.

I would revise the digital argument if better studies consistently showed that platform design, sleep disruption, social comparison, attention fragmentation, and the displacement of in-person activity had negligible effects once prior vulnerability was considered. Current evidence already tells us to reject “screen time” as a universal dose of poison. It does not tell us that commercial digital environments are harmless.

Most importantly, I would reject the whole synthesis if the links only worked rhetorically. A collection of authors who sound compatible is not evidence of a causal system. That is why this analysis has qualified its strongest claims. Neoliberal reform did not cause every anxious child. Social media did not cause every depression. Emotional avoidance did not cause every adverse health condition. Monopoly did not cause every failure of government. The argument is about interacting pressures, mediating institutions, feedback loops, and cumulative effects.

What would getting out of the mess require?

There is no master lever. Anyone offering one has mistaken the mess for a puzzle. Nonetheless, a systems account can identify directions that improve several parts of the system at once.

First, rebuild the political and economic power of people who live by work. This does not require restoring every twentieth-century union structure. It requires sectoral bargaining where appropriate, portable benefits, fair rules for contractors, worker voice in technological change, serious competition policy, and forms of organisation suited to care, services, small business, and distributed work. Acemoglu’s pro-worker technology agenda asks whether innovation complements human capability or merely substitutes for labour and concentrates control.

Second, make essential life less precarious. Affordable housing, accessible healthcare, reliable education, social insurance, childcare, transport, and retirement security are not only transfers. They are foundations of agency. A person with a stable floor can take productive risks, leave an abusive employer, retrain, care for a family member, start a business, and participate in public life.

Third, reconnect reward with contribution and risk with decision. Taleb’s skin-in-the-game principle should guide executive incentives, financial regulation, procurement, consulting, and political accountability. If a decision creates long-tail costs for workers, citizens, customers, or the environment, those costs should remain visible to the decision-maker rather than being exported.

Fourth, protect competition without worshipping markets. Some goods require public provision, some require regulated markets, some require cooperatives or mutuals, and some require combinations. The test should be which institutional form serves the purpose, distributes voice, learns from failure, and preserves capability. Privatisation and nationalisation are not conclusions; they are design choices.

Fifth, rebuild community as social infrastructure. Libraries, parks, sporting clubs, neighbourhood organisations, adult education, religious communities, arts groups, unions, volunteering, local media, and hospitable public places create repeated contact and shared responsibility. Community cannot be delivered like a parcel, but public policy can make it easier or harder to form.

Sixth, treat attention as a human and civic resource. Schools should protect time for concentration, reading, conversation, play, and device-free interaction. Workplaces should reduce needless interruption and reward outcomes rather than visible responsiveness. Digital regulation should address manipulative design, children’s vulnerability, transparency, and data extraction while preserving the genuine benefits of connection and expression.

Seventh, teach emotional maturity without turning life into therapy. Children and adults need language for feelings, opportunities for manageable challenge, models of apology and repair, and permission to be vulnerable without making vulnerability an identity. Emotional education should increase agency and mutual responsibility, not encourage people to interpret every discomfort as injury.

Finally, design institutions to manage messes. Bring affected people, frontline workers, technical experts, and decision-makers into the same problem-framing process. Look for interactions before optimising parts. Track burdens transferred outside the budget. Reduce marginal losses before launching transformations. Experiment at a scale where failure teaches rather than destroys. Maintain capacity and redundancy for conditions that cannot be predicted.

None of these directions is glamorous. That may be a strength. The West did not enter this mess through one dramatic mistake, and it will not leave through one heroic announcement.

Conclusion: from private coping to shared capability

The Western mess is not proof that liberal democracy, markets, technology, medicine, or individual freedom have failed. It is evidence that none of them can sustain a good society alone.

Markets need democratic limits and public purposes. Democracy needs citizens with material security, attention, and opportunities to exercise power. Individual freedom needs relationships and institutions that make agency real. Technology needs human ends. Medicine needs an integrated understanding of bodies, minds, biographies, and environments. Emotional maturity needs families, schools, workplaces, and communities that allow people to practise it. Problem solving needs institutions capable of seeing interactions rather than merely completing tasks.

We should resist two emotionally satisfying conclusions. The first is that everything was better in the past and must be restored. The past contained security and solidarity worth recovering, but also exclusion and silence that must remain behind us. The second is that the system is so corrupt or complex that individual action is meaningless. Systems are created and maintained through decisions, habits, rules, organisations, and relationships. They can be changed, although not by pretending that private virtue can substitute for public reform.

Perhaps the deepest damage produced by the last half-century is the conversion of shared failures into private burdens. If you cannot afford a home, optimise your finances. If work has no meaning, practise gratitude. If you are lonely, build your personal brand. If technology fragments your attention, become more disciplined. If your body remains in threat, regulate yourself. Every suggestion may contain something useful, but together they tell people to adapt to conditions no individual created and no individual can resolve.

We need to move from private coping to shared capability.

That means giving people enough security to act, enough power to matter, enough connection to belong, enough emotional capacity to tolerate difficulty, enough attention to understand complexity, and institutions competent enough to turn understanding into action.

How the hell did we get here? Through an aggregation of ideas, incentives, asymmetries, technologies, exclusions, and marginal losses that gradually weakened the connections between wealth and work, freedom and belonging, feeling and judgment, knowledge and action.

How do we begin to get out? By accepting that we are not looking for the answer to a puzzle. We are learning, once again, how to manage a mess together.

References and Further Reading

Books central to this report

Ackoff, R. L. (1978). The Art of Problem Solving, Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables. John Wiley & Sons.

Acemoglu, Daron (2026). What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity. Profile Books.

Apigian, Aimie (2025). The Biology of Trauma: How the Body Holds Fear, Pain, and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It. Brilliance Publishing.

Blakeley, Grace (2024). Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Blyth, Mark (2013/2014). Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press/Audible Studios.

Bremmer, Ian (2012). Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. Penguin.

Carr, Nicholas (2010/2011). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W. W. Norton/Audible.

Carr, Nicholas (2014). The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. W. W. Norton/Brilliance Audio.

Chancellor, Edward (2022). The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest. Allen Lane.

Costa, Rebecca D. (2010). The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction. Vanguard Press.

Deary, Vincent (2024). How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living. Penguin.

Dent, Georgie (2019). Breaking Badly: How I Worried Myself Sick. Affirm Press/W. F. Howes.

Erixon, Fredrik and Bjorn Weigel (2016/2017). The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard. Yale University Press.

Gardner, Daniel (2008/2009). The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Should Not – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger. Dutton/Gildan Media.

Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Penguin.

Haidt, Jonathan (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin.

Hari, Johann (2018). Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions. Bloomsbury.

Hari, Johann (2022). Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. Bloomsbury.

Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin.

Maté, Gabor and Daniel Maté (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Penguin.

Olney, David (2022). Marginal Losses: An Explanation of Suboptimal Institutional and System Performance. DavidOlney.com.au.

Ralston Saul, John (1995/1997). The Unconscious Civilization. House of Anansi/Free Press.

Rendon, Jim (2015). Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth. Touchstone.

Sachs, Nicole J. (2025). Mind Your Body. Penguin.

Schubiner, Howard (2026). Unlearn Your Pain: The Science of Recovering from Chronic Pain, Fatigue, Anxiety, and Depression. Penguin.

Shaxson, Nicholas (2018/2019). The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer. Bodley Head/Brilliance Publishing.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2018). Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.

The School of Life (2026). The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity. The School of Life Press.

Varoufakis, Yanis (2011/2015). The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy. Zed Books.

Selected research, data, interviews and analysis

Acemoglu, Daron (12 August, 2026). “Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite.” Conversations with Tyler.

Ashar, Y. K., Gordon, A., Schubiner, H., et al. (2022). “Effect of Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Patients With Chronic Back Pain.” JAMA Psychiatry, 79(1), 13-23.

Ashar, Y. K., et al. (2025). “Pain Reprocessing Therapy vs Placebo and Usual Care for Chronic Back Pain: Five-Year Follow-up.” JAMA Psychiatry.

Ashiagbor, Diamond (2021). “Race and Colonialism in the Construction of Labour Markets and Precarity.” Industrial Law Journal, 50(4), 506-531.

Barreto, M., Victor, C., Hammond, C., Eccles, A., Richins, M. T., and Qualter, P. (2021). “Loneliness Around the World: Age, Gender, and Cultural Differences in Loneliness.” Personality and Individual Differences, 169.

Button, Michael (2026). Why Do Empires Always Collapse? Patterns of History, YouTube.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2026). “About Adverse Childhood Experiences.”

Gilens, Martin and Benjamin I. Page (2014). “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581.

International Association for the Study of Pain (2017 onward). Terminology and clinical literature concerning nociplastic pain.

OECD (2024). OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions: 2024 Results.

OECD (2024). Society at a Glance 2024: Income and Wealth Inequalities.

OECD (2025). Membership of Unions and Employers’ Organisations, and Bargaining Coverage.

OECD (2025). Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries.

OECD (2026). The Economic Case for Preventing Mental Ill Health.

OECD (2026). Child, Adolescent and Youth Mental Health in the 21st Century.

Olney, David (2022). “Marginal Losses: An Explanation of Suboptimal Institutional and System Performance.” Read the article on DavidOlney.com.au

Pei, R., et al. (2025). “Connecting with Others: How Social Connections Improve the Happiness of Young Adults.” World Happiness Report 2025.

V-Dem Institute (2026). Democracy Report 2026: Unravelling the Democratic Era?

World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection (2025). From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies.

World Inequality Database (2024-2026). Income and wealth inequality datasets and regional summaries.