E.B. White famously captured the tension of a meaningful life when he said:

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world.”

It is a beautiful sentiment, yet it feels strikingly distant from our modern reality. Today, the internal debate has shifted. We are no longer torn between saving the world and enjoying it; we are torn between enjoying the world and being efficient.

We have swapped the desire to “improve the collective” for the compulsion to “optimize the self.” In doing so, we have forgotten that we are a society first - trading our shared responsibility for a lonely toggle between personal consumption and personal productivity.