From individualism and loneliness to community, limits, biological truth and mature forms of interdependence

This text should not be read as a neutral and definitive X-ray of modernity. That would be too great a claim and, precisely through its excess, suspicious. It is more correct to read it as an interpretative plea: an attempt to connect phenomena that often appear separately — loneliness, anxiety, consumerism, the fragilization of communities, the pressure of performance, the degradation of public space, neurodivergence as sensitivity to the environment and the crisis of meaning.

Therefore, the argument does not say that modernity is only loss. That would be false. Modernity has brought real liberations: individual rights, escape from oppressive communities, literacy, social mobility, legal protection, access to education, autonomy for women, minorities and individuals who in traditional forms of life would often have been constrained, stigmatized or reduced to fixed roles. If the text criticizes late modernity, it does not do so to idealize the past, but to ask what was lost in the process of a liberation that was not followed by sufficiently mature forms of belonging.

Modernity promised the liberation of man. It took him out from under the weight of grand narratives, from under the authority of totalizing religion, from under the pressure of closed communities, from under inherited destiny. It told the individual that he can choose, that he can become, that he no longer has to receive his identity from the village, family, Church, party, social class or tradition. In this promise there was something real and necessary. The walls that were demolished should not be romanticized. Many of them really enclosed, suffocated, humiliated, uniformized. Premodern communities were not simply spaces of warmth. They could also be spaces of violence, social control, shame, lack of options, economic dependence and impossibility of exit.

But the paradox of modernity begins exactly here: the liberation from walls was not always followed by the building of homes. We demolished old forms of belonging, but we did not learn quickly enough to build mature forms of solidarity. We gained autonomy, but we lost density. We gained options, but we lost continuity. We gained the right to choose our life, but we often ended up alone in front of a disproportionate task: that of inventing meaning, identity and value in an environment that turns almost everything into competition, consumption and performance.

What seemed like the final victory of individual autonomy has transformed, for many people, into an oppressive loneliness. Not because freedom was wrong, but because freedom without relational infrastructure can become abandonment. Not because the old walls were good, but because the cold after demolition can become hard to bear. We remain in society, but more and more often not because we feel we belong, but because outside it is impossible economically, logistically and psychologically. We remain together because we have no choice. And this is one of the central wounds of the present: closeness is no longer always experienced as a common destiny, but as a minimum infrastructure for survival.

The crisis of modernity is not simply nostalgia for an old world. It is the crisis of an incomplete liberation. It is the moment when man discovers that negative freedom, that is, the freedom to be left alone, is not enough to live well. To be left alone can mean dignity, but it can also mean abandonment. It can mean maturity, but it can also mean institutionalized loneliness. Man does not only need to be taken out from under domination. He also needs healthy forms of connection, rhythm, recognition, reciprocity, common time.

The promise of liberalism and the reality of atomization

Classical liberalism brought an essential promise: the individual must not be the prisoner of inherited authority. He can choose values, career, faith, identity, community, lifestyle. This was one of the great moral mutations of the modern world. It liberated people from real constraints and made possible the emergence of a person capable of saying “I” without asking permission from the clan, the priest, the party or the traditional community.

The problem arises when this freedom is reduced to release. If all external legitimacies collapse or fragilize, the task of meaning falls more and more on the shoulders of the individual. Man becomes responsible not only for his choices, but also for the metaphysical justification of his own existence. He must choose who he is, but also why what he chose matters. He must build his identity, but also the criterion by which this identity is valid. He must carry his freedom as a privilege, but also as a burden without witnesses.

This is the passage from emancipation to atomization. We are no longer divided by the same dogmas, but we can become isolated by indifference. We are no longer constrained to believe the same things, but we no longer have enough common matter to build trust. Autonomy risks becoming a regime of loneliness. Everyone must be the designer, worker, lawyer and therapist of their own life.

Data about individualism and loneliness must be used with caution. There are studies that indicate a global increase in individualist values in recent decades, including estimates of approximately 12% since 1960 and significant increases in many of the countries analyzed. There is also recent data showing that loneliness affects a significant part of the global population. But these figures should not be turned into a demonstration sufficient in themselves. They depend on methodology, definitions, measurement tools, cultural differences and the way people subjectively report isolation.

Therefore, these data are rather indications than verdicts. They do not tell the story by themselves, but they support a broad sociological intuition: individualization is not a local accident, but a structural tendency of many modern societies. At the same time, this tendency must be placed alongside other real gains of modernity: the reduction of certain forms of physical violence, the increase in life expectancy, broader access to education, civil rights, legal protections, the visibility of the marginalized and the possibility of leaving abusive communities.

This tension must be preserved. Modern man is not only more alone than traditional man. He is also freer in many respects. But it is a freedom that can become psychologically unstable when it is not accompanied by institutions, rituals, communities and forms of recognition that give it consistency.

Chosen groups, not inherited communities

It would be wrong to say that people have stopped forming groups. On the contrary, the present is full of micro-tribes: digital communities, subcultures, niche political groups, aesthetic identities, therapeutic communities, groups of suffering, forms of belonging built around common passions, wounds, tastes or indignations.

The difference is that these groups are no longer primarily inherited, but chosen. You do not enter them because you were born in a certain place, but because you temporarily recognize yourself in a common code. This has a real advantage: it allows exit from oppressive forms of belonging. But it also has a cost: belonging becomes more fragile, more reversible, more performative. You stay in a group as long as it confirms your identity, validates your emotion or strengthens your position. When interest disappears, the group dissolves.

The new tribes are voluntary, fragile, segmented, digitalized and dependent on constant validation. They can support people who would otherwise be completely alone, but they rarely offer the density of a community with memory and reciprocal obligations. Sometimes they function more as markets of recognition than as spaces of life. Man no longer simply belongs. He must prove his belonging, signal it, update it, defend it, perform it.

Thus, individualism does not stop us from socializing. It can make socialization transactional. We stay together as long as we have a common interest, not as long as we have a common destiny. And this difference is decisive. A true community does not exist only through the overlapping of preferences, but through the capacity to remain together even when preferences do not coincide perfectly.

Society without choice

One of the harsh forms of the present is the fact that people remain in society less out of organic solidarity and more out of economic and infrastructural coercion. The city, the workplace, rent, installments, transport, platforms, administrative systems and income dependence keep us together physically. But this closeness does not guarantee communion. We can be body next to body and yet emotionally withdrawn. We can share the same building without sharing a world.

Neoliberalism has transformed the individual into an entrepreneur of the self. Man no longer has just a job; he has a portfolio of skills. He no longer has just a personality; he has a personal brand. He no longer has just free time; he has time that can be optimized, monetized, documented or transformed into personal development. In this world, the social relationship often becomes a transaction cost: you socialize for networking, you learn for competitiveness, you rest for productivity, you take care of yourself in order to function better.

Richard Sennett has called this transformation a corrosion of character. We remain together physically, but emotionally we are often in retreat. Authentic intimacy becomes a risk. Loyalty becomes rigidity. Dependence on others becomes weakness. And personal mobility, elevated to the rank of virtue, forces us to keep many connections weak enough so that we can leave at any time.

This transformation has several layers.

The first layer: uncertainty becomes a virtue, and security becomes suspect. In the old industrial capitalism, uncertainty was an evil to be managed through unions, stable contracts, social insurance, predictability. In neoliberal capitalism, uncertainty becomes almost a morality. Current economic culture ends up treating security as laziness, dependence or lack of adaptability. If you want stability, you are suspect. If you suffer under pressure, you are told that you lack resilience. Thus, anguish risks no longer being read as a symptom of a sick environment, but as a test of character.

The second layer: competition becomes ontology. You no longer compete only for money, jobs or status. You compete for the validation of your existence. Human capital theory transforms every choice into an investment: education, relationships, the body, free time, image, even suffering. Everything must produce return. In this world, the success of another is no longer necessarily a common joy, but can become a comparative humiliation. Meritocracy, as Michael Sandel has shown, can become morally corrosive: winners can come to believe they deserve everything, and losers that their failure is entirely their own fault.

The third layer: the temporal erosion of solidarity. Solidarity needs thick time: common past, common future, delayed duty. You pay taxes today for someone else’s pension because you accept that tomorrow someone else will contribute to your protection. But precarization thins time. Short contracts, ephemeral projects, constant moves, changing teams and housing insecurity make emotional investment seem irrational. If you don’t know where you will be in six months, why would you build deep relationships with neighbors or colleagues? We thus end up living together in physical time, but not in moral time.

The fourth layer: the privatization of risk and the destruction of structural empathy. In traditional or social-democratic societies, major risks were partially socialized: illness, unemployment, old age, disability, poverty. Neoliberalism shifts these risks onto the individual. Everyone becomes the CEO of their own inner corporation, and any failure is read as a personal managerial defect. If you are poor, you did not invest well in yourself. If you are sick, you lacked discipline. If you are alone, you did not work enough on your relationships. In this way, the need of the other no longer appears as a common moral obligation, but as a negative externality: a discomfort that I ignore in order to preserve my own coherence.

The last layer, the most painful, is this: we have come to confuse isolation with autonomy and compassion with paternalism. Solidarity risks being transformed from a value into an opportunity cost. We stay together only as long as it is efficient to stay together. Not because we recognize in the other a part of ourselves.

The causal machinery isn’t caused by a single culprit, but a convergence

A too simple version of the argument would say: neoliberalism produced everything. This would be a convenient explanation, but too narrow. Neoliberalism is a major factor, perhaps even one of the central engines of recent transformation, but it is not the only cause. Modern fragmentation is produced by a convergence between economy, technology, urbanization, secularization, demographic changes, the transformation of the family, geographical mobility, digital platforms, more visible psychiatric diagnosis and the change in the way people report suffering.

Neoliberalism does not explain everything, but it provides the economic grammar through which many of these transformations are organized. It does not invent loneliness, but it can monetize it. It does not invent anxiety, but it can turn it into a market for services, products and identities. It does not invent competition, but it can extend it into almost all areas of life.

It must be said with precision: liberal democracy and neoliberalism are not the same thing. The first concerns rights, pluralism, the limitation of arbitrary power and the protection of the individual. The second concerns the extension of market logic into almost all areas of life. But in recent decades, the two have often worked in tandem, and this alliance has produced a form of formally free individual, but profoundly insecure.

Nevertheless, a too clean moral asymmetry should not be constructed: all gains to liberal democracy, all costs to neoliberalism. Liberal democracy itself, through its pluralism, through the weakening of traditional authorities, through the protection of the freedom to exit, can produce forms of fragmentation. And non-liberal or communist societies have also produced atomization, suspicion, denunciation, social distrust and isolation, although through other mechanisms. Therefore, the problem is not simply “the market”, but the way any system can break trust when it destroys the intermediate spaces between individual and state, between work and family, between freedom and belonging.

Neoliberalism remains important because it is not just an economic policy. It is an anthropology. It says, implicitly, what man is: entrepreneur of the self, consumer, investor in his own capital, permanent competitor, manager of his own risks. The citizen becomes a client. The employee becomes a personal brand. Solidarity becomes dependence. Security becomes rigidity. Social right becomes individual merit. This mutation is not just semantic. It rewrites the way people perceive themselves and the way they interpret the suffering of the other.

Liberal democracy offered the political ground for individualization. It weakened traditional authorities, protected individual freedom and allowed pluralism. These are real gains. But when liberal democracy is colonized by neoliberal logic, citizenship degrades. Active citizens become spectators of their own political system. Public space is occupied by private economic interests. Participation becomes consumption of opinion. Freedom becomes choice between products, not real power to shape the common world.

This double determination explains the paradox of the present. The neoliberal economy transforms uncertainty and competition into absolute values, eroding the foundations of solidarity. Liberal democracy encourages the emancipation of the individual, but often no longer sufficiently protects the common space. The result is an individual who can formally choose almost anything, but feels more and more incapable of building something durable at the existential level.

Consumerism, narcissism, neurodivergence and the toxic circuit

There is no single, linear cause of the crisis. There is rather a feedback circuit. Neoliberalism is an important structural engine, consumerism is one of the fuels, cultural narcissism is a psychological shield, and neurodivergence is one of the filters through which this reality can be experienced more intensely, more painfully or more visibly.

Consumerism did not cause individualism. It is one of the solutions that the system has sold for the anguish produced by individualism. When community disappears, identity becomes a personal problem. And when identity becomes a personal problem, the market appears with solutions: clothes, diets, gadgets, courses, aesthetics, subscriptions, retreats, packaged life philosophies, ready-made identities.

Modern consumerism does not sell only objects. It sells superficial remedies for structural gaps. You buy products not only to use something, but to feel that you are someone. You buy personal development to resist competition. You buy technology to alleviate loneliness. You buy ethical products to feel that you are participating in a moral purpose. Structural anxiety can be transformed into economic demand. The crisis is not resolved; it is monetized.

Narcissism, in this context, should not be understood only clinically. There is a cultural narcissism, vulnerable and performative, that becomes an adaptation strategy. The system demands visibility, uniqueness, exceptionality. You must be special, but also flexible. Authentic, but sellable. Sensitive, but productive. Different, but perfectly integrable into market flows. This tension produces oscillation between grandiosity and shame: when you succeed, you feel exceptional; when you fail, you feel nothing.

In addition, the world of total competition can reward narcissistic traits: lack of empathy can be interpreted as efficiency, emotional cooling as professionalism, manipulation as strategic skill, self-promotion as leadership. The problem is not that people are, simply, more narcissistic. The problem is that certain environments reward narcissistic behaviors and punish healthy dependence on others, modesty and vulnerability.

Neurodivergence introduces a delicate layer and must be treated without romanticization. It is not produced by the system, but the system can exacerbate it to intense suffering. Current society functions as a selection environment: it does not necessarily favor mental health, but functioning within parameters useful for production, consumption and adaptability. Neurodivergences become visible when the environment demands exactly those things that for certain brains are costly: continuous social flexibility, noise, ambiguity, multitasking, rapid changes, relational performance, tolerance to interruptions, masking.

The neurotypical profile, in a broad sense, seems more operationally compatible with this environment: more linear processing, intuitive socialization, better tolerance to standard routine, easier reading of social subtext, emotional compartmentalization between work and personal life. This does not mean that neurotypicals do not suffer. Anxiety, depression and burnout affect them too. The difference is that, for many neurotypicals, suffering can be experienced as a reaction to stress, not as structural incompatibility with the environment itself.

The system does not treat neurodivergence uniformly. It can exploit certain traits and pathologize others. Hyperactive or impulsive ADHD can be valued in startups, advertising, crisis management, environments that require rapid response, chaotic creativity and energy under pressure. But the same person can be punished for delays, bureaucracy, forgetting, administrative difficulties. Systematizing autism can be valued in technology, engineering, science, accounting, data analysis, where pattern recognition and intense concentration are valuable. But the same person can be pushed towards social masking, isolated or penalized for lack of political game or for difficulties in relational ambiguity.

This is not a contradiction if formulated correctly: the same profile can be exploited economically in a niche and existentially made vulnerable in the ensemble of life. A trait can produce value for the organization and inner cost for the person. Hyperfocus can be monetized, but recovery after hyperfocus remains unpaid. Systematic thinking can be valued, but social or sensory sensitivity can be ignored. Therefore, neurodivergence does not automatically offer an epistemic privilege. Suffering does not guarantee truth. But sometimes it signals incompatibilities earlier than others who normalize them.

There is also a controversial discussion about subclinical psychopathic traits in corporate, financial or executive environments. Some works have suggested a higher prevalence of these traits in positions of power, while other analyses warn that the concern may be exaggerated or methodologically fragile. Therefore, the statement must be formulated as an interpretative hypothesis, not as a closed fact: certain environments can reward, under certain conditions, emotional coldness, risk-taking, superficial charisma and absence of remorse, but the literature does not allow transforming this intuition into a simple rule.

More important than the diagnoses is the mechanism of promoted disharmonies. The system does not only exploit traits; it maintains profitable inner conflicts.

The first disharmony is that between identity and performance. Culture tells you that you are unique, but the economy requires you to be interchangeable. This chasm produces frustration and compensatory consumption.

The second is the cognitive disharmony of the double mind. You say “I am free”, but you are trapped in installments, rent, job dependence, algorithms and social expectations. You say “I take care of myself”, but you work ten hours a day. Those who feel the contradiction too acutely are called difficult. Those who tolerate it without friction are promoted.

The third is sensory and emotional disharmony. Overload becomes status. Being busy becomes proof of importance. Exhaustion is treated as a side effect of ambition, not as a signal of a wrong form of life. Caffeine, anxiolytics, screens and the culture of permanent availability maintain this tension in a functional form.

In this sense, neurodivergent people can sometimes function as early signals of the toxicity of the environment. Not because they would be morally superior and not because their suffering would automatically prove something about the world, but because certain forms of sensitivity can make it harder to ignore the noise, contradiction, injustice or artificiality. But this must be said with care: there are economically perfectly adapted neurodivergent people and deeply critical neurotypicals. It is not the diagnosis that gives clarity, but the relationship between sensitivity, environment and the capacity not to transform pain into ideology.

Anxiety, depression and burnout are, in many cases, metabolic byproducts of this circuit. Anxiety comes from chronic uncertainty. Depression can come from the failure to achieve the ideal of a perfect, sellable and always growing self. Burnout comes from the attempt to remain productive in a system without a natural stopping point. But here the same caution must be preserved: these phenomena have multiple causes — biological, familial, medical, technological, cultural, economic. Reducing them to neoliberalism would be an error. Excluding neoliberalism from the explanation would be blindness.

Objective truth and epistemological prudence

In the face of a sick world, the natural temptation is to say: we do not adapt to the disease, we correct the disease according to what is correct. There is something profoundly true in this sentence. Just because a lie is pleasant, just because illusion has affective, economic and social anchors, does not mean it must be maintained. A sick world does not become healthy by the fact that the majority adapts to the disease.

But here appears a difficulty that any serious analysis must assume: who establishes what is correct? How do we avoid the claim of truth becoming another form of will to power, another narrative that hides its origin? Nietzsche would object that even the desire to denounce illusion can itself be the expression of a need, of a configuration of forces, of a desire for symbolic domination.

It is not enough to name this objection and then move on as if it had been resolved. It touches the very foundation of the text. If “biological truth”, “social truth” or “ecological truth” are invoked as authorities, we must be careful not to transform description into prescription. The fact that people are social beings does not automatically dictate a political model. The fact that the planet is finite does not by itself establish the optimal level of redistribution. The fact that people need belonging does not demonstrate that localism is the final solution.

What can we still preserve, without falling into relativism? We can preserve a modest realism, not a triumphalist one. There are constraints of the body, of the environment and of human relationship that do not disappear because they are philosophically contested. Prolonged isolation has costs. Overload has costs. Destruction of the environment has costs. Lack of sleep, security, relationships, trust and meaning has costs. These do not automatically produce a political program, but they limit the credibility of any political program that ignores them.

Therefore, the distinction between truth and illusion remains operative not because the author would speak from outside history, but because certain consequences return upon the body, community and environment regardless of the story with which we justify them. This is not an absolute position. It is a fallibilist position: we can err in diagnosis, we can select convenient data, we can moralize excessively, but we cannot completely dissolve reality into interpretation without losing the possibility of correcting suffering.

There is no ideologically demonstrated scientific model that is “the true model of human nature”. Biology does not tell us directly how much should be redistributed, how property should be organized, what exact form the state should have, what is the optimal ratio between market and community. These are normative decisions. Nevertheless, there are biological, ecological and social constraints that any mature model must respect.

The first layer is biological truth. Man is a living organism, a social mammal, a being neuroendocrinologically related to the presence of others. Our brain was not formed for permanent informational overload, continuous competition, emotional isolation and non-stop availability. We need real connection, not just digital; sleep, light, movement, rest; security and predictability; meaning and contribution. A system that treats the body as a productivity machine and the mind as software to be optimized enters into tension with biological reality.

The second layer is ecological truth. The planet is finite. Resources are limited. Natural cycles are fragile. Infinite economic growth on a finite planet is a practical contradiction, even if it can be hidden for a while through accounting, externalizations and technological optimism. Nature is not an inert exterior, but the system of which we are part. Any economy that behaves as if the environment were only a deposit and an evacuation channel produces, ultimately, disease.

The third layer is social and psychological truth. People are beings of relationship. Chronic isolation is not a neutral preference, but a pathogenic environment. Trust is the invisible infrastructure of any society. Extreme inequality breaks cohesion. Recognition is not a whim, but a fundamental need. When all these needs are transformed into markets, inversion appears: we buy friendship through platforms, validation through likes, security through services, meaning through personal branding.

If we accept these three layers, the correct model cannot be one that puts the market at the center. But neither should it fall into a centralized collectivism that crushes autonomy, competence, difference and initiative. People are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. We need belonging, but also personal space. We need solidarity, but also recognition of differences in competence. We need stability, but also freedom. Any system that absolutizes one of these dimensions mutilates man.

The most plausible models are those that try to hold together limited market, social solidarity, local interdependence, pluralism and ecological limits. Communitarianism corrects negative freedom with dense belonging. Distributism tries to prevent the concentration of property and land. Nordic-type social democracy preserves the market, but socializes major risks. Other models, such as local participatory democracy, mutualism or forms of cooperative economy, try to bring decision closer to those affected by it.

None is “the correct model” in an absolute sense. But all are closer to biological and social reality than a neoliberalism that confuses abandonment with freedom, competition with merit and loneliness with responsibility.

Atomization without pluralism in the communist mirror

It would be convenient for this argument if isolation were a disease specific to liberal capitalism — a symptom of markets, choice and pluralism gone too far. But the twentieth century does not allow this convenience. Non-liberal and communist societies produced their own atomization, their own suspicion, their own collapse of trust between neighbors, family and colleagues — and they did so while suppressing almost every mechanism this text has blamed for liberal fragmentation: there was no market individualism, no consumer choice, no pluralism of identity, no freedom to exit. The walls were not weakened. They were reinforced, centralized and placed under surveillance. And atomization happened anyway.

This convergence is the most important piece of evidence against any monocausal theory of fragmentation. If two systems built on opposite premises — one maximizing exit, the other eliminating it; one multiplying authorities, the other abolishing all but one — arrive at structurally similar outcomes of distrust and isolation, then the common factor cannot be choice, or its absence, considered alone. The common factor is more likely the destruction of intermediate space itself, regardless of which direction the destruction comes from.

The mechanisms, however, were specific, and they deserve to be named with the same precision given to neoliberalism’s mechanisms above.

The first mechanism was the absorption or abolition of intermediate institutions. Churches, guilds, independent unions, voluntary associations — everything that in a healthy society sits between the individual and the state — was either dissolved or nationalized into organs of the party. Where liberal fragmentation comes from too many competing authorities thinning out any single bond, communist fragmentation came from leaving no authority at all between the citizen and the apparatus. The middle layer of society, which is precisely where trust accumulates, was not weakened by competition; it was removed by decree.

The second mechanism was the structural weaponization of trust through informant networks. In systems such as the Securitate in Romania or the Stasi in East Germany, the rational response to a world in which a neighbor, a colleague or even a spouse might be reporting to the state was not increased solidarity but increased silence. This produced an inversion of the liberal pattern: liberalism offers an abundance of voice with the option of exit; communism removed exit but also corrupted voice, since speaking honestly to anyone outside the immediate family carried real risk. The result, paradoxically, was a society that looked maximally collective on the surface and was maximally atomized underneath.

The third mechanism was the forced split between public performance and private withdrawal. Václav Havel’s description of life under what he called post-totalitarianism captured this precisely: people learned to perform loyalty publicly — attending rallies, repeating slogans, displaying the correct signs in shop windows — while reserving an entirely separate, unexpressed self for private life. This is not the same phenomenon as liberal narcissistic performance, where the self is performed for recognition and reward. Here the self was performed against exposure, as armor. But the long-term effect on social trust converges with the liberal case: a self that survives by habitual concealment becomes less and less capable of unguarded closeness, even once the external danger that required the concealment is gone.

The fourth mechanism was the substitution of vertical dependency for horizontal solidarity. Patronage, favors, access to scarce goods and even basic mobility ran through the party apparatus rather than between citizens. Mutual aid that arises naturally between neighbors — the kind this text later proposes rebuilding through care circles and local reciprocity — was actively discouraged wherever it carried the risk of becoming an independent base of organization. Horizontal trust was not just neglected; it was treated as a potential threat to be monitored.

The fifth mechanism was engineered scarcity. Shortage economies forced citizens into competition with one another over housing, food, travel permits and basic goods, corroding solidarity from the material side rather than the ideological one. Where neoliberalism produces scarcity psychologically — manufacturing anxiety about a status one might lose — command economies produced scarcity literally, and the daily struggle for allocation did to neighborly relations something structurally similar to what market competition does to professional relations: it converted the person next to you from a potential ally into a rival for a finite supply.

None of this should be read as proof that communism and neoliberalism are, at bottom, the same phenomenon wearing different clothes; the differences in coercion, violence and the availability of exit are not minor details, and collapsing them would falsify both histories. Nor should it be read as evidence that resistance was impossible: black markets, second economies, family networks and informal solidarities persisted precisely because people kept trying to rebuild intermediate space even when the state worked actively to prevent it — a fact that some critics of the strong Arendtian “totalitarianism atomizes completely” thesis rightly use to complicate any picture of total success. What the comparison does show is narrower and, for this argument, more useful: that atomization is not a single ideology’s side effect, but a structural risk that appears whenever the space between the individual and the largest organizing power is hollowed out — whether that hollowing happens through multiplying exits until no bond is load-bearing, or through removing exits until no bond can be safely tested.

This is why the solution proposed later in this text is not a return to centralized collective life, which produced its own well-documented catastrophe of trust, and not an intensification of market individualism, which produces a quieter but cumulative version of the same wound. The target, in both diagnoses, is the same: the rebuilding of a middle layer — neither state nor isolated individual — where reciprocity can be slow, visible and safe enough to become real again.

Before moving toward reconstruction, the argument owes itself one more test. If the diagnosis so far is correct — that fragmentation follows from the destruction of intermediate space between individual and largest organizing power — then this diagnosis should not hold only for liberal and neoliberal societies. It should also illuminate, by contrast, what happened in the systems liberalism defined itself against.

Towards resistance and reconstruction

How do we get out of this? Not through nostalgia for old communities and not through total withdrawal from the world. Traditional communities had warmth, but also constraint. The modern market has freedom, but also abandonment. The next stage must be conscious solidarity: not a return to walls, but the building of homes with doors, windows and mature rules.

Perhaps precisely the crises will trigger awareness. Ecological crises show us that we cannot live only individually. Pandemics have shown brutally that interdependence is not a metaphor. Extreme inequalities make a purely meritocratic explanation impossible. The mental health crisis turns loneliness into a public problem, not just a private one. Algorithms and artificial intelligence show us that freedom of choice can be manipulated in depth.

But awareness is not enough. The system can transform even resistance into a product: wellness, subscription mindfulness, retreats for people exhausted by work to which they must return more productive. Nevertheless, not every therapy, personal development or self-care practice must be rejected as a product of the system. Sometimes they are captured by the market. Other times they are real forms of recovery. The difference is seen in direction: do I take care of myself to become fuel again or do I take care of myself to live more truly and more relationally?

The answer must be double: at the individual level, detoxification and the rebuilding of psychic boundaries; at the community level, the building of small territories of health; at the institutional level, changes that reduce precarity, protect time, limit the capture of attention and rebuild public trust. The local alone cannot defeat global systems. But without the local, any macro reform remains abstract.

At the individual level, the first gesture is the resacralization of boredom and the useless. The system wants to monetize every second. To stay without a screen, without a podcast, without optimization, without personal development, without a productive purpose, can become a form of inner hygiene again. Boredom is the space in which critical thinking regains its breath.

Practically, this can mean thirty minutes a day in which you do nothing “useful”: you do not check your phone, you do not listen to educational content, you do not plan, you do not transform silence into another project. You stay, you look, you let thoughts appear and disappear. The discomfort that appears in the first minutes is already the diagnosis: the mind has been taught to believe that its value depends on occupation.

The second gesture is cutting comparison at the root. Vulnerable narcissism lives from comparison. Envy can become an instrument of knowledge if it is questioned correctly: do I want the other’s life or only the validation that it seems to receive? Without this distinction, we end up running after lives that, in fact, we do not want.

A radical exercise is a week without social networks or, if this is not possible, a week without checking reactions to your own posts. Not for digital puritanism, but to observe what happens to the self-image when it is no longer fed by micro-doses of validation. What is really missing: people, attention, confirmation, the spectacle of one’s own existence or the feeling that you are still visible?

The third gesture is a correction of meritocracy, not an inversion of responsibility. When you fail, do not immediately diagnose yourself as insufficient. Look also for the structural conditions. When you succeed, do not attribute everything to your talent. Recognize luck, support, context, privilege, invisible infrastructure. This double movement shatters both grandiosity and toxic shame.

At the end of each week, three personal factors, three relational factors and three structural factors that contributed to successes or failures can be noted. Not to flee from responsibility, but to place it in a real world. Responsibility without context becomes cruelty. Context without responsibility becomes excuse. Maturity lies in the tension between them.

The fourth gesture is protecting one’s own way of functioning. If you are neurodivergent, the question is not how to become neurotypical, but how to build structures compatible with your real rhythm, sensitivity and limits. If you need routine, unannounced meetings are not a simple inconvenience, but a disorganization of the entire internal system. If you need the room closed during online meetings, sensory breaks, written communication, predictable rhythm, spaces without noise, these are not whims. They are infrastructure for functioning.

If you are neurotypical, your adaptation advantage is not a moral merit, but structural compatibility; it can be used to protect those who cannot filter the violence of the environment as easily. A practical question becomes essential here: which of my traits are exploitable by the system and which are necessary for my inner peace? Creativity, hyperfocus, empathy, speed, charisma or stress resistance can be transformed into economic fuel. But not everything that can be exploited must be offered.

A simple exercise: note five adjustments to the work or life environment that would respect the way you really function. Fewer notifications. Warmer light. Work blocks without interruptions. Written communication before meetings. Recovery spaces. More predictable schedule. Then observe how many of them are treated culturally as “demands”, although they are, in fact, minimum conditions of health.

The fifth gesture is the recovery of time. Time is not only a resource to be optimized. It is the substance of life. Blocks of deep work of two-three hours without interruptions, real rest, spaces of non-productivity dedicated to simple pleasure, rituals of transition between work and personal life, reduction of notifications, refusal of permanent availability: all these are not whims, but forms of reappropriation.

A person who no longer has continuous time no longer has a continuous self either. Fragmentation of attention produces fragmentation of identity. Therefore, the recovery of time is not only a productivity tactic, but a form of reconstruction of the person.

At the community level, resistance begins with small and concrete forms. We cannot fight against global abstraction only with other abstractions. We need living localism.

Mutual care circles are a first step. Not charity, because in charity there is often the hierarchy of the giver and the receiver. Mutual care presupposes asymmetric reciprocity: today I give time, tomorrow I receive help; today you have money, tomorrow you need food, transport, babysitting, emotional support. It does not have to be equal in accounting. It has to be equal in intention.

Such a circle can begin with three-five trustworthy people. The first meeting does not have to produce a manifesto, but a simple map: what needs we have, what resources we can offer, what limits must be respected, what form of communication we use. A messaging group, a weekly or monthly meeting, small exchanges of time, food, repairs, transport, care for children or listening can create an infrastructure of trust more real than many abstract declarations about community.

The local polis must be revived: the scale of the block, the community garden, the parents’ association, the neighborhood library, block dinner, object repair workshop, time bank. An hour of repairing the computer can be exchanged for an hour of mowing the lawn or a cooked meal. Thus, the transaction exits monetary abstraction and enters personal trust.

The examples seem modest, but precisely their modesty makes them real: a monthly block dinner where everyone brings something; a community garden on an unused space; a small repair café where people learn to repair objects instead of throwing them away; a neighborhood library with book exchange; a common list of tools; a group of parents who share children’s transport; a network of neighbors who check on elderly people during periods of extreme heat or cold.

At the workplace, minimum solidarity can begin without heroism. Two or three colleagues can make a non-aggression pact: do not compete destructively, do not hide information about salaries and conditions, do not accept advantages that make others vulnerable, support the one attacked. Even a small cell of solidarity changes the power dynamic.

Not every environment allows formal unionization, but almost every environment allows discreet beginnings of reciprocal protection: exchange of salary information, documentation of abuses, refusal of strategic gossip, support in difficult meetings, transmission of knowledge to new colleagues, maintenance of an institutional memory that prevents management from isolating each employee in their own fear.

For neurodivergent people and for all those sensitive to overload, environments must be rebuilt so as to reduce disharmonies, not to exploit them. At home: adjustable light, fewer notifications, spaces of silence, predictable routines, pleasant textures, zones without background noise, technology used as a tool, not as a master. At work: direct communication, evaluation based on results, not on social charisma, real breaks, remote work options, reduction of internal politics and unnecessary ambiguity.

At the community level, the same principle can produce spaces of silence in the neighborhood, benches placed where people can sit without consuming, neighborhood libraries, events with clear structure instead of free networking, support groups for parents of neurodivergent children and a culture in which cognitive diversity is treated as wealth, not as deficit.

The connection between individual and community must be thought with care. The neoliberal trap says: I take care of myself so that I am more productive for others. A healthier form says: I take care of myself because I know I am part of a circuit of reciprocal presence. My rest is not an investment in GDP, but a condition for being able to be alive, attentive and available.

A simple beginning is the tribe of five. Five people who meet weekly, without phones, without performance, without turning the relationship into networking. A table, a circle of discussion, an exchange of objects, an hour of sincerity. Confidentiality, rhythm, presence. Collective vulnerability is the most direct antidote to performative narcissism.

The passage from “we have no choice” to “we choose with full knowledge to remain” requires three things. First, awareness of the second wave: to understand that our loneliness is produced structurally, not only by our personal failures. Then, exercises of trust in conditions of safety: small groups in which vulnerability is not punished. Finally, models of life that are not based on exceptionalism: people who live well without being special, happy without being winners, dignified without being permanently visible.

The practical model of a local reconstruction

A first step does not have to be big. It can begin with a neighbor. In the first week you observe who lives near you and greet without asking for anything. In the second week you offer something small: a cake, a plant, a fruit, a question about the neighborhood. In the third week you create a context: a coffee, a tea, a short discussion. In the fourth week you propose something common: planting flowers, cleaning a space, a block dinner. In the following weeks, if there is a response, you gently institutionalize: a communication group, a monthly meeting, a neighborhood library, exchanges of tools, books, plants, time.

The relationship must not be forced. Refusal must not be taken personally. People are tired, scared, trapped, ashamed, distrustful. Perseverance must be gentle. The goal is not to build the perfect community, but to create the possibility for people to know each other and help each other. Even if only one person responds, something that did not exist before has appeared.

Similarly, a larger movement begins through a visible, small and repeatable project: a cleaned common space, a planted corner, a message left for others, a fixed hour when people can join. Community is not discovered as a buried treasure. It is built through repetition, trust and imperfection.

There are also some healthy prohibitions. Do not force the relationship. Do not turn community into an image project. Do not expect immediate gratitude. Do not judge people for their withdrawal: sometimes refusal is not cynicism, but lack of energy. Do not turn every gesture of care into proof of your own moral superiority. The moment help becomes a stage for the self, solidarity is already contaminated by the narcissism it wanted to heal.

If you receive refusals or indifference, do not personalize immediately. Some people cannot respond now. Others have been hurt by previous communities. Others have learned that any closeness comes with a hidden price. Try with others, continue the small gestures and do not confuse slow rhythm with failure. The transactional world has taught us to measure everything through rapid conversion. Community is measured differently: through repetition, availability and accumulated trust.

If two or three interested people appear, the next question is not “how do we build a movement?”, but “what would we like to do together in this place?”. Cleaning a common space, planting flowers, repairing a fence, a meal for neighbors, a book exchange, a day of repairs, an evening without phones: these are concrete forms through which the abstraction of solidarity gains body.

A simple message can be more powerful than a speech: “I planted these flowers because we like to live in a beautiful place. If you want to join us, we are here on Saturday at 10 a.m.” Community begins when a gesture becomes an invitation, and the invitation becomes repeatable.

Nevertheless, localism must not be transformed into a romantic refuge. The scale of the block cannot by itself regulate transnational corporations, financial markets, digital platforms, fiscal policies, public infrastructure or labor legislation. Here was one of the vulnerabilities of the initial version of the argument: the diagnosis was macro, the solution was almost exclusively micro. The correction is the following: the local is the place where solidarity gains body, but it is not enough. It must be linked to institutions, public policies, press, unions, administration, education, social protection and democratic forms of control over economic power.

Without the local, macro reform remains abstract. Without the macro, the local remains fragile and easily crushed. Reconstruction needs both.

What model would better correspond to life?

If we were to synthesize the orientation, it would look like this: the economy must serve life, not the other way around. Limits must be recognized as forms of truth, not as obstacles to growth. Interdependence must be assumed, not treated as shame. Cognitive diversity must be seen as a resource of resilience, not as a deviation from standard productivity. Time must be recovered as a space of life, not exploited as raw material.

In the economy, this would mean reducing dependence on GDP as the sole indicator of success, supporting local circuits, smarter taxation of pollution and extraction, guaranteeing real forms of security. In politics, it would mean decentralization, participatory democracy, transparency, protection of public space from commercial colonization and recognition of the fact that nature is not only property, but a condition of life. In culture, it would mean education for cooperation, art, critical thinking, combating social comparison and the cult of performance. In community, it would mean neighborhood, mutuality, common spaces, support groups and solidarity without humiliating the vulnerable.

This is not utopia in the naive sense. It is an orientation. It does not promise the end of conflict, selfishness or difference. But it refuses the idea that man is best understood as an isolated economic agent, and society as a sum of transactions between interests.

We demolished the walls, now we must build homes

The crisis of modernity is, in essence, the crisis of an incomplete maturation. We learned to exit old forms of constraint, but we did not learn well enough to build mature forms of belonging. We gained individual rights, but we thinned reciprocal obligations. We gained options, but we lost rituals. We gained mobility, but we lost roots. We gained voice, but we lost listening.

But this conclusion must be kept in tension with the other half of the truth: many of the lost roots were also chains. Many of the disappeared rituals were also mechanisms of control. Many of the dense communities were also spaces without exit. Therefore, the task is not a return to the past, but the building of a form of belonging that does not cancel freedom.

We cannot solve this crisis through integral return to the past. But neither through accelerating the same logic that produced the wound. We need a freedom with a home, not just a freedom without walls. We need communities that do not crush the individual, but neither do they abandon him. We need an economy that recognizes the body, time and limits. We need a politics that protects the common space. We need a culture that does not confuse depth with inefficiency and vulnerability with failure.

Never alone against the system: any purely individual resistance can be absorbed and sold back in the form of a product. Localism is not provincial withdrawal, but the place where solidarity becomes visible. Vulnerability is not weakness, but the beginning of relational truth. Time is not only a resource, but life itself. Solidarity is not discovered ready-made; it is built. The sensitive, those who give in first, are not defects of the system. Sometimes they are early signals of its toxicity, but these signals must be interpreted with rigor, not automatically transformed into moral superiority.

The question is not how we get completely out. Perhaps there is no pure outside. The question is how we transform our corner of the street, our block, our family, our group of friends, our workplace and our institutions into a space where outside no longer seems so frightening.

The beginning can be minuscule: one person, one hour, a conversation without purpose, a meal without performance, a plant placed in a common space, a question addressed with true attention. But it must not remain only minuscule. The small gesture must learn to become institution, and the institution must remain human enough not to crush the small gesture.

There is no final answer, but direction. And the direction is clear: from individual to community, from consumption to care, from performance to presence, from adaptation to disease to the reconstruction of the conditions in which life can become whole again.

We demolished all the walls that enclosed us, but we forgot to build homes. Now is the time to build them together — without forgetting why we demolished the walls.