“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
bell hooks, All About Love
“Without community, there is no liberation.”
Audre Lorde
In memory of Karl Rudolf Zollner, who taught me about anomie and showed me how to keep weaving, even when the thread is worn thin.
Naming the Feeling
Lately, it feels like the world is coming apart and nobody knows what to do about it.
The headlines are relentless. Wars expand. Democracies crack. The air smells like smoke, and the water isn’t safe to drink. Food costs double, wages stay flat, housing becomes a fantasy. People go to bed scared and wake up tired. The future doesn’t just feel uncertain. It feels radioactive.
In public, we try to keep it together. We show up. We might smile. Maybe we make coffee. But underneath, there’s this tremor: Grief braided with dread.
Conversations trail off into silence, or spin into panic. Everyone is either shouting or gone quiet. It feels like fewer people are gathering—pulling back, hunkering down, unsure how to speak into the whirlwind. And yet, in the middle of that silence, there are ruptures: crowds flooding the streets with signs and chants and righteous fury.
The protests don’t undo the disconnection, but they remind us that we can still come together. Even now, something in us remembers how to link arms and say “no” out loud.
The rest of life, though—ordinary life—often feels like it’s running on fumes. As if something vital has drained out of our daily rhythms, leaving behind a strange, brittle numbness.
It’s not just political chaos or climate grief or economic fear. It’s all of it, layered and compounding, grinding us down in ways we don’t always have words for.
But there is a word for what we’re feeling. A name for this community ache.
And it’s older than you might think.
What do you call this?
This fog. This thinned-out feeling that stretches across our days like plastic wrap. This heaviness that doesn’t crash in like a crisis, but accumulates like dust in the corners of our lives. The sense that something essential has gone missing—some shared rhythm, some common tether—and all that’s left is the performance of normalcy in a world that no longer makes sense.
It’s not just burnout. Not just loneliness. Not just fear. Those are all real, but this is something else—an atmosphere. A low, humming dread that soaks into everything: the way we move through public spaces, the awkward stiffness of once-familiar friendships, the impulse to cancel plans not out of laziness but out of psychic fatigue. We are, many of us, still functioning. Still showing up. But we’re doing it through a kind of psychic static—surviving in a system that no longer feels coherent.
So what do we call that?
When the structures are still technically standing, but the soul has gone out of them?
When the connections are still there on paper, but feel spectral?
When the world hasn’t ended, but something in it has gone very, very quiet?
There’s a name for this.
But it’s not one we use often.
There is a word for this.
Not a diagnosis. Not just a vibe. Not a self-help term or a trending hashtag.
It’s a concept from sociology—over a century old, but chillingly resonant now.
Anomie.
It names what happens when the bonds that hold a society together begin to fray—not just its laws or its leaders, but its shared sense of meaning, trust, and direction. When people no longer feel connected to one another, or to the structures that govern their lives. When norms dissolve, expectations crumble, and the thread of coherence goes slack.
Anomie isn’t just personal despair. It’s a collective unraveling.
Durkheim’s Anomie: The Name for Disintegration
What is Anomie?
Anomie is the word Émile Durkheim used to describe what happens when a society loses its grip on the shared norms and values that give it coherence. It literally means without norms—from the Greek a- (without) and nomos (law or order). But Durkheim wasn’t talking only about laws. He was naming something deeper: the invisible agreements that shape how people live together, make meaning, and locate themselves in the world.
In an anomic state, those agreements begin to dissolve. People no longer know what to expect from life, or from each other. The lines between right and wrong, success and failure, belonging and isolation all start to blur. The result isn’t always chaos in the streets—it’s often something quieter and more insidious: disorientation, drift, a creeping sense of unreality.
Durkheim first wrote about anomie in the context of rapid industrialization, when traditional social structures were breaking down and nothing stable had emerged to replace them. He believed that without strong social bonds—between individuals and communities, between effort and reward—people would begin to suffer not only materially but existentially.
Anomie, in his view, wasn’t a mental illness. It was a social illness—one that manifests in individual lives, but originates in systemic rupture.1
Historical Context
Durkheim coined the term anomie at the end of the 19th century, as Europe was convulsing with transformation. The Industrial Revolution had upended centuries of agrarian life. People were moving en masse from rural villages to urban centers, trading inherited roles for factory schedules, communal ties for wage labor, and ritual for routine. What had once been stable—even if stifling—was now in flux.
Traditional institutions, like the church, the extended family, and the village, no longer held the same power to define what a good life looked like. In their place emerged markets, cities, and a new form of social mobility that promised opportunity—but offered no guarantees.
Durkheim wasn’t nostalgic for feudalism, but he was acutely aware of the psychological cost of rapid social change. He believed that when social structures shift too quickly, people lose the coordinates that once helped them navigate life. What was once obvious—what to believe, how to behave, what counted as success—becomes uncertain. The result is not just confusion, but a kind of spiritual and moral weightlessness.
This wasn’t a fringe idea. Durkheim considered anomie central to understanding rising suicide rates, labor unrest, and the deep unease of modernity itself. 2 He saw that when people were cut off from stable roles and relationships, it wasn’t just their income that suffered—it was their sense of purpose and belonging.
The parallels to our own era are impossible to ignore. But before we jump ahead, it’s worth sitting with what Durkheim saw: that the root of anomie isn’t chaos—it’s disconnection.
What Does Anomie Look Like?
Durkheim believed that the effects of anomie weren’t just intellectual or moral—they were visceral. When people lose their sense of place in the world, their suffering often shows up in deeply personal ways: rising suicide rates, chronic loneliness, emotional numbness, and the turn toward self-destructive behaviors.
He observed that when the norms connecting effort to reward begin to dissolve, when there’s no clear path to meaning or belonging, despair follows. People become unmoored. They withdraw. Some lash out. Others collapse inward. In Suicide, Durkheim argued that even the most private decisions—like taking one’s own life—can be traced to systemic disconnection and societal breakdown.3
Today, the symptoms of anomie are all around us.
Loneliness is an epidemic. Young people report historic levels of anxiety and hopelessness. Suicide rates continue to climb, especially among marginalized groups. Substance use has surged. Overdose deaths are often framed as public health failures, but they are just as much evidence of social collapse. These are not isolated tragedies. They are signals.
At the same time, many people retreat from uncertainty by grasping for absolutes: conspiracy theories, fundamentalist ideologies, identity-based purity tests. In the face of a reality that feels chaotic and untrustworthy, extremism begins to look like clarity. Cults of certainty rise where trust in institutions falls. Fantasy offers refuge where community once offered care.
Durkheim warned us. Anomie isn’t about crime or chaos in the streets. It’s about the quiet corrosion of meaning.
It Isn’t You. Anomie is a Systemic Condition
It’s tempting to read all of this—despair, isolation, burnout—as personal dysfunction. To assume we’ve just become more fragile, or that mental health has mysteriously collapsed on a mass scale. But Durkheim insisted otherwise: the anguish we feel in times of anomie is not primarily a symptom of individual weakness. It is a response to a society that has lost its coherence.
Anomie, in Durkheim’s view, was not reducible to depression, even if it looked like it from the outside. He argued that when people feel aimless, overwhelmed, or unmotivated, it is often because the social fabric around them has frayed to the point of uselessness. The norms that once structured life—what to expect, how to succeed, what’s worth striving for—no longer function. In a system like that, distress is not an illness. It’s a mirror.
This doesn’t mean that mental illness isn’t real, or that everyone’s struggle is the same. But it does mean we cannot treat despair as a purely personal problem. If the world feels unlivable to so many people at once, the problem is not only in our minds. It is in the conditions we’re being asked to survive in.
Durkheim’s insight still holds: the suffering we carry inside us is often a rational response to a world that has stopped making sense. And when that world fails to offer clarity, belonging, or purpose, people don’t just suffer—they disengage. They shut down, check out, or look for meaning elsewhere.
To pathologize that is to miss the point.
To understand it is the first step toward repair.
Tocqueville’s Warning: The Fragile Thread of Civic Life
Tocqueville Admired Early American Civic Strength
When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States in the early 1830s, he wasn’t just observing a young democracy—he was witnessing a social ecosystem unlike anything he’d seen in Europe. What struck him wasn’t just America’s laws or its Constitution. It was the way ordinary people showed up for each other.
He marveled at the sheer density of civic life: town halls packed with debate, neighbors organizing schools and fire brigades, voluntary associations springing up for every imaginable cause. Mutual aid societies, agricultural clubs, religious fellowships, and abolitionist groups all pulsed with energy. Americans, he wrote, seemed to instinctively form associations wherever there was a need—and through those associations, they practiced democracy daily. 4
To Tocqueville, this habit of civic engagement was more than just admirable—it was essential. He believed that democratic institutions alone weren’t enough to hold a society together. What mattered just as much, if not more, was the fabric of communal participation: the relationships people built, the trust they sustained, and the norms they co-created through shared, face-to-face life.
In this regard, early America was fertile ground. Tocqueville saw in it a kind of moral counterweight to the isolating tendencies of modern life. While Europe’s revolutions were often top-down and bloody, he saw in America a slower, quieter revolution—one rooted in cooperation, trust, and small-scale self-governance.
The town meeting was not just a political structure. It was, in Tocqueville’s eyes, a training ground for freedom.
What Did Tocqueville Fear for America?
For all his admiration of American civic life, Tocqueville saw storm clouds on the horizon.
He worried that the very conditions that made democracy possible—freedom of choice, personal autonomy, mobility—might also give rise to its greatest internal threat: a deep and growing individualism that would slowly dissolve the social fabric from within.
Tocqueville didn’t use the word selfishness—that wasn’t quite it. What he feared was something subtler and more corrosive: the tendency of people in democratic societies to withdraw into private life, to focus on personal concerns while retreating from the shared labor of community. As people became more focused on their own families, fortunes, and freedoms, he warned, they would lose the habit of looking outward—toward neighbors, toward collective projects, toward the long, slow work of mutual care.
This shift wouldn’t happen all at once. It would unfold quietly, as people stopped joining associations, stopped attending meetings, stopped believing that civic participation made any real difference. And as that withdrawal took root, democracy would begin to hollow out—not from the top down, but from the inside out.
In Tocqueville’s vision, the danger wasn’t dictatorship—it was disconnection. The state wouldn’t need to seize power if the people simply stopped exercising it. And in that vacuum, he feared, more centralized and impersonal systems would emerge: bureaucracies, markets, technocracies—all efficient, none accountable. The citizen would become a consumer. The town hall would be replaced by the ballot box—and the ballot box, eventually, by apathy.
Without the daily practice of building shared life, he warned, freedom would become little more than a slogan.
And democracy, a shell.
The “Tyranny of the Majority” and the Rise of Algorithmic Pressure Today
One of Tocqueville’s most unsettling insights was that democratic societies might not need authoritarian rulers to silence dissent—because the majority could do it themselves.
He called it the tyranny of the majority: the way public opinion, once dominant, could become a kind of invisible coercion, punishing those who think or live differently. This tyranny wouldn’t show up as censorship or police raids. It would manifest through social shame, ostracism, and moral pressure. People would internalize the norms of the majority, and those who resisted would be pushed to the margins—not by law, but by culture.
In the 1830s, that idea was already provocative. In 2025, it feels prophetic.
Because now, we don’t just face the tyranny of the majority—we face the tyranny of the algorithmically amplified majority, or what looks like one. Social media doesn’t just reflect public opinion; it reshapes it, optimizing for outrage, visibility, and conformity. Platforms don’t show you the quiet nuance or the thoughtful dissent. They show you what will provoke, polarize, and perform. They reward alignment and punish ambiguity.
Under this system, we learn quickly what kinds of speech get likes and what gets shunned. What identities are affirmed and what questions are labeled suspicious. Even in progressive spaces, people are often afraid to speak honestly—not because of state repression, but because of the accelerating speed of judgment. You can be exiled for stepping outside the current consensus—even if the consensus is constantly shifting.
Tocqueville feared that in a democracy, people would stop thinking freely for fear of offending the crowd.
What he couldn’t have predicted was that the crowd would be sorted, stacked, and served to each of us in a hyper-personalized feed—a million private majorities, each demanding allegiance.
What Would Tocqueville Say if He Could See Us Now?
Probably: “You’ve stopped practicing democracy.”
If Tocqueville were somehow dropped into the United States today, he might be dazzled at first. The technology, the constitutional endurance, the formal right to vote—it would all look like a triumph of democratic evolution.
But it wouldn’t take him long to see the hollowness beneath the surface.
Where are the town halls? The neighborhood assemblies? The cross-class associations built not just around identity, but around action? Where are the daily rituals that train ordinary people to speak, listen, compromise, and lead?
He would see a country where democratic institutions still technically exist, but where the habits of democracy have atrophied. Where people vote every few years—if they vote at all—but rarely organize, deliberate, or build anything together between elections. Where civic engagement has been replaced by partisan spectacle, community by consumption, and participation by performance.
He might look around and say, simply:
“You’ve stopped practicing democracy.”
Because to Tocqueville, democracy was never just a set of procedures. It was a way of life—messy, slow, deeply relational. It required neighbors knowing each other. People taking responsibility for their communities. A willingness to wrestle with difference instead of canceling it, to argue with integrity instead of retreating in silence.
He would recognize the symptoms of its absence not just in our politics, but in our loneliness, our fatigue, and our disconnection. And he would warn—again—that democracy cannot survive on structure alone.
It must be lived.
Robert Putnam’s Diagnosis: The Collapse of Social Capital
Bowling Alone and the Empirical Cliff
If Tocqueville gave us a warning and Durkheim gave us a theory, Robert Putnam gave us the data.
In his landmark 2000 book Bowling Alone, Putnam documented what he called the collapse of social capital in the United States—the slow erosion of the relationships, networks, and shared activities that once formed the backbone of American civic life.5 His research revealed what many had sensed but struggled to articulate: that over the last half-century, Americans had become profoundly less connected to each other, and the decline wasn’t anecdotal. It was measurable.
The numbers were staggering. Participation in local organizations—PTAs, neighborhood associations, Lions Clubs, and rotary groups—had plummeted. Union membership fell. Church attendance dropped sharply. Fewer people hosted or attended dinner parties. Volunteering declined. Even seemingly innocuous social pastimes like playing cards with friends or having people over for coffee became statistically rare.
And then there was Putnam’s now-iconic metaphor:
Americans were still bowling—but they were bowling alone.
In other words, the activity survived, but the togetherness did not.
These weren’t just cultural shifts. Putnam showed that declining social capital had tangible consequences: lower trust in institutions, weakened democratic participation, and a rising sense of dislocation. People were voting less, trusting each other less, and engaging with their communities less—and they were feeling the effects in everything from mental health to local governance.
What Durkheim called anomie, Putnam translated into numbers and graphs. What Tocqueville called the art of association, Putnam showed was in freefall.
The Link to Rising Distrust and Civic Withdrawal
As social capital declined, Putnam observed, something else crept in to take its place: distrust.
It didn’t happen overnight. It followed the curve of disconnection. As people stopped joining, gathering, and sharing space, they began to lose the reflex of belief in one another. Not just trust in government, but trust in neighbors, coworkers, local institutions—even in the idea that we’re all part of something worth caring about together.
When people no longer feel embedded in a web of relationships, their sense of obligation to the common good begins to fade. Why invest in a community you don’t feel connected to? Why vote if you don’t think it matters? Why speak up at the school board meeting if no one listens, and everyone is already shouting?
Putnam showed that civic withdrawal is both a symptom and a cause of mistrust. As we disengage from public life, institutions become less responsive—less democratic—and people feel even more alienated. The feedback loop deepens. Fewer people participate, which makes the system weaker, which makes participation feel more futile. And so on.
This spiral doesn’t just affect politics. It affects health outcomes, education, disaster response, and neighborhood safety. Communities with high social capital are more resilient in every measurable way. But when that capital dries up, people start to live like strangers—not just to each other, but to the very idea of society.
It’s no wonder that conspiracy theories, political cynicism, and fatalism flourish in that vacuum.
When people stop showing up for one another, it becomes easier to believe no one ever will.
His Theory: When We Stop Investing in Each Other, We Lose Our Democratic Immune System
Putnam’s core argument was never just about bowling leagues or church potlucks. It was about infrastructure—not the kind made of roads and bridges, but the invisible systems of trust, care, and cooperation that keep a democracy alive.
In healthy societies, people participate. They vote, yes—but they also join, volunteer, help, listen, and gather. These habits of connection are what Putnam called the “schools of democracy.” It’s in local associations and community networks that people learn how to deliberate, compromise, lead, and trust across difference. These small acts aren’t trivial—they’re how we build the capacity to navigate larger crises together.
When people stop investing in one another, those democratic muscles atrophy. The result isn’t always immediate collapse—it’s something more like an immune deficiency. The body of society still stands, but its ability to respond to stress is weakened. Division spreads more easily. Authoritarian ideas gain traction. Institutions become brittle. Cynicism hardens.
It’s a slow erosion, not a sudden disaster. But by the time a true crisis hits—a contested election, a pandemic, a climate catastrophe—the system can no longer protect itself. Not because the Constitution failed, but because the people no longer trust each other enough to act collectively.
In this sense, Putnam didn’t just measure decline—he mapped out how democracies decay from within.
And he showed that the damage begins not in Washington, but in neighborhoods. In how we treat one another.
In what we choose to build—or let unravel.
Tocqueville warned that democracy depends on shared life. Durkheim gave language to the despair that sets in when shared life breaks down. And Putnam showed that this breakdown wasn’t theoretical—it was already well underway. The decline of social capital wasn’t just a cultural shift. It was a slow collapse of the structures that keep us connected, engaged, and resilient. By the time the next great crisis arrived, we were already living with the symptoms of anomie—whether we knew its name or not.
2020 and After: The Anomie Accelerator
The Pandemic Broke Social Ties That Were Already Fraying
By the time COVID-19 arrived, the fabric of American civic life was already worn thin. The bonds that once held communities together had been quietly fraying for decades. The pandemic didn’t start the unraveling—but it ripped the thread clean through.
Lockdowns isolated us in ways few had ever experienced. Offices, schools, churches, libraries, gyms—what sociologists call “third places,” the public and semi-public spaces where we casually encounter others—suddenly disappeared. Gatherings were canceled. Doors were closed. And what replaced them was cold and strained: Zoom calls that left us depleted, social distancing that quickly became social erasure.
Even brief, informal contact—the kind that builds familiarity and trust over time—vanished. We no longer bumped into neighbors or lingered in checkout lines or made small talk at the bus stop. The rituals of daily life that sustained social capital were stripped away, and for many people, they haven’t returned.
And underneath it all: fear, suspicion, and grief.
We grieved loved ones, lost opportunities, vanished milestones. We feared the air itself, and each other’s breath. Every interaction became a potential threat. People became nervous, withdrawn, vigilant—not just about the virus, but about social signals, political cues, and unspoken rules that shifted faster than anyone could keep up with.
These were not temporary inconveniences. They were deep psychic and communal wounds, inflicted on a society already weakened by disconnection. The result wasn’t just loneliness—it was a loss of orientation, a breakdown of social rhythm and shared presence.
For many, the pandemic didn’t only isolate us—it dislocated us.
And we haven’t really found our way back.
No One Will Protect You If It Isn’t Convenient
For me, the pandemic didn’t bring isolation—it brought exposure. I had to rent a room because I live in a minivan, and the public spaces I relied on—parks, vault toilets, gyms—were suddenly off-limits. I thought an apartment would keep me safer. But the people I lived with didn’t believe COVID was real. They said I looked fine. They didn’t notice when I lay on the floor of my room for three days, convinced I was dying. I’d caught the virus from one of their out-of-town guests.
While I flunked out of school and lost my health, they kept inviting people over for board games and sex parties. Another time, someone flew in from Spain to “quarantine” at our place before seeing their family. No one asked if I was okay. No one changed their behavior. And when my body started to break down from indoor living, they moved me from room to room like I was furniture.
I’ve had COVID three times now—all because other people decided my safety was less important than their convenience.
The pandemic didn’t just leave me alienated. It taught me something:
That no one would protect me if it costs their comfort or convenience.
People Didn’t Come All the Way Back
The lockdowns eventually lifted. The signs changed from “closed until further notice” to “now open.” Offices reopened. Planes filled. Restaurants hummed again.
But something didn’t come back with us.
We returned to commerce—but not to connection. The rituals of spending resumed. But the rituals of belonging—potlucks, playdates, drop-in visits, late-night conversations in folding chairs—remained fractured, or vanished altogether.
Some people never resumed their old lives. Others tried, but found the spark had gone out of the group text, the gathering, the friendship. What had once felt natural now felt effortful. And many simply stopped trying. The muscle of community had atrophied. The grooves of togetherness had been overwritten by isolation, suspicion, or exhaustion.
We told ourselves the pandemic had ended. But for many, the deeper rupture—the social rupture—never healed.
It’s not just that we stopped showing up. It’s that we stopped expecting others to show up, too.
We learned to get by without each other.
And that may be the most dangerous lesson of all.
Political Chaos Amplified the Breakdown
Into the void left by fractured communities, something darker poured in.
As people drifted apart and institutions lost credibility, political chaos surged forward to fill the space. What might have been a moment for collective rebuilding instead became a battleground. In the absence of trust, there was suspicion. In the absence of shared truth, there were conspiracy theories. In the absence of belonging, there were factions. And in the absence of public meaning, there was rage.
Polarization deepened into mutual incomprehension. Neighbors became strangers. Families fractured over masks, vaccines, elections, pronouns. Facts became optional, alliances hardened, and every interaction threatened to become ideological. What began as civic disengagement curdled into civic hostility—not just apathy, but active contempt.
And beneath it all: violence, or the threat of it, lurking in the margins. School board meetings filled with shouting. Statehouses filled with armed protesters. A presidential debate that ended with a sitting president telling a paramilitary group to “stand back and stand by.” And, eventually, a mob storming the Capitol, chanting for executions.
Durkheim would have recognized the symptoms. Tocqueville would have seen the consequences. And Putnam might have called it the final stage of the spiral: when social disconnection becomes so complete that democracy itself begins to feel like an illusion.
What we were experiencing wasn’t just political instability. It was the emotional aftermath of collective abandonment. A society built to reward individualism had left people isolated—and now, that isolation had turned volatile.
Economics, the J-Curve, and the Looming Crisis
James C. Davies’s J-Curve Theory of Revolution
In 1962, political scientist James C. Davies proposed a theory to explain when revolutions are most likely to erupt. His insight was simple but unsettling: people don’t revolt when they are at their lowest point. They revolt when they’ve begun to climb out of hardship—only to be thrown suddenly, violently backward.
Davies called it the J-Curve—a graph where expectations rise over time, and then plunge downward in a sharp, destabilizing collapse. The deeper the plunge, the more explosive the reaction. It’s not just suffering that triggers unrest—it’s the shock of disappointment, the psychological whiplash of hope turning into betrayal.6
Historically, this pattern shows up again and again. The French Revolution didn’t happen at the peak of starvation—it came after growing prosperity, Enlightenment optimism, and a taste of political reform. The Russian Revolution followed a period of rapid modernization. The Arab Spring came on the heels of increasing education, internet access, and rising youth expectations. The uprisings weren’t born of stagnation alone—they were sparked when progress seemed suddenly, brutally reversed.
The J-curve theory tells us that social order doesn’t collapse just because people are poor. It collapses when people believe things were getting better—and then are confronted with the realization that they were wrong, or that the system was never going to deliver on its promise.
The revolt begins at the breaking point between optimism and despair.
Today’s Curve: From Rising Expectations to Sharp Disillusionment
For much of the 2010s, it seemed—at least on the surface—that the United States was on an upward curve. The economy had begun to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Real GDP grew steadily, averaging about 2.3% annually between 2010 and 20197, and unemployment dropped from a post-recession high of 10% in 2009 to below 5% by the end of the Obama administration.8 During that same period, a national conversation about equity and inclusion gained ground. Diversity initiatives spread through universities, corporations, and federal agencies—including Executive Order 13583, which directed the U.S. government to promote a coordinated approach to diversity and inclusion across the public sector9.
There was a sense—however tentative—that things might be getting better. Then came the crash.
The COVID-19 pandemic was more than a public health crisis. It was a massive disruption of economic, social, and psychological life. Supply chains collapsed. Entire industries stalled. Unemployment spiked. Inflation surged to levels not seen in forty years, reaching 7.0% in 2021 and remaining high through 2022.10 Simultaneously, the climate crisis intensified, bringing more frequent extreme weather events, rising insurance costs, and growing anxiety over food and water security.11
This sharp reversal—from rising expectations to cascading uncertainty—tracks precisely with what James C. Davies warned about. It wasn’t just suffering that unsettled people. It was the collapse of a narrative they had just begun to believe in: that maybe, finally, things were improving. When that fragile hope snapped, disillusionment filled the gap. And in that disillusionment, anger, paranoia, and polarization flourished.
The Recovery That Wasn’t: J-Curve After J-Curve
By 2023, many people were cautiously beginning to believe in recovery. Pandemic disruptions were fading. Supply chains were stabilizing. Grocery store shelves were mostly full again. Gas prices, though still volatile, had cooled from their peaks. Inflation was finally slowing, and headlines talked about a “soft landing.”
There was still grief, still debt, still burnout—but there was also a flicker of hope: that maybe we were through the worst of it. That we could begin rebuilding.
And then came another plunge.
In early 2024, new waves of economic instability were triggered—not by a virus this time, but by politics. Tariff threats, global trade disruption, and retaliatory economic policies sent markets lurching. Prices for basics like eggs, lumber, and used cars spiked again. Fear returned. Investment froze. Talk of recession re-emerged, now layered with fears of supply shortages, political interference, and global conflict.
What James C. Davies theorized as a single curve has begun to feel, in practice, like a series of J-curves, one after another. We rise just enough to begin to hope—then plunge back into uncertainty. The cycles of expectation and betrayal are accelerating. Each wave erodes trust further. Each crash deepens fatigue.
We are not experiencing a stable decline or a linear crisis.
We are riding a rollercoaster of collective disappointment.
And with every loop, the safety bar feels a little looser.
Widespread Fear of Civil War or Authoritarianism Isn’t Paranoia—It’s Pattern Recognition
The ambient fear so many people carry now—that democracy may collapse, that civil war might break out, that authoritarianism is not just possible but already underway—can sound, on the surface, like panic. Like the fevered edge of political discourse.
But it isn’t paranoia.
It’s pattern recognition.
History teaches us that no society is immune to collapse. And it shows us what collapse often looks like before it arrives: widening inequality, eroding trust, factional violence, institutional fragility, scapegoating of marginalized groups, increasing surveillance, and the normalization of political cruelty.
We are not imagining these things. We are witnessing them.
We’ve seen a sitting president attempt to overturn an election. We’ve seen books banned, protest criminalized, and entire demographics targeted as existential threats. We’ve seen vigilante violence applauded, and the language of extermination creep into political speech. We’ve seen pandemic aid rolled back while billionaires gain wealth, and basic survival reframed as personal failure.
What Davies called the “revolutionary situation” doesn’t begin with marching bands and manifestos. It begins when people lose faith in the future and feel they have nothing left to lose.
We are surrounded by people who feel that way right now—on the left, on the right, and in the vast, frightened middle.
The language of collapse has entered the mainstream not because people are overreacting, but because they’re paying attention.
They are watching the curve rise.
And they are bracing for the next drop.
Breathing Space: Before We Turn
It would be easy to stop here.
To say: this is the end, the unraveling, the long slide down. To let the fear harden into fatalism. To declare the experiment failed.
But that’s not the story we’re telling—not yet.
Because if anomie is a social illness, then it means we’re not doomed. We’re sick. And sick things can be treated. Systems can be repaired. Threads can be rewoven—if we understand the diagnosis, and if we remember how to care for one another.
The question isn’t just what’s breaking.
It’s what still holds.
And that’s where we go next.
So What Do We Do? The Antidote to Anomie
Community as the counterspell
Anomie feeds on disconnection. It grows where people are isolated, unseen, and unsure that they matter. Its cure, then, cannot be individual. It cannot be found in better habits or more discipline or another mindfulness app.
The antidote to anomie is community.
Not performative unity. Not empty slogans about healing. Not a kumbaya fantasy where everyone agrees. What we need is real, tangible connection—the kind that grows slowly, awkwardly, messily. The kind that can survive disagreement. The kind that makes room for people who are grieving, angry, exhausted, or unsure how to be in a room with others again.
We don’t need to agree on everything.
We need to show up.
Not just once. Not just when it’s convenient. But over time, with care, with attention, with the humility to ask “How can I help?” and the courage to answer “I need you.”
Community doesn’t mean consensus. It means accountability. Witnessing. Mutual investment. It means hosting the meeting, cooking the meal, checking on the neighbor, holding the sign, offering the ride. It means organizing the union, tending the garden, building the group chat that turns into a support network that turns into something that can actually weather a storm.
It’s not dramatic. It’s not efficient. It’s not even always fun.
But it’s how we remember we exist—not as individuals floating through crisis, but as people tethered to each other by choice.
Small-Scale Social Fabric Matters
It’s easy to believe the problems we’re facing are too big to touch. The climate is collapsing. Democracy is backsliding. Billionaires own the infrastructure. What could a garden or a book club possibly do?
But this is where social repair begins—not at the scale of the nation-state, but at the scale of human beings in rooms together.
A community garden doesn’t stop capitalism. But it brings people into shared rhythm with the land and with each other. It creates space for conversation, for nourishment, for presence. A mutual aid network can’t replace a safety net, but it can keep someone from losing their home—or their hope. A book club doesn’t pass legislation, but it builds trust, shared language, and the kind of sustained attention that democracy requires.
Public schools. Disability justice collectives. Religious and spiritual circles. Makerspaces. Scout troops. Choirs. Block parties. Grief groups. Protest camps. Hobby clubs.
These are not distractions from resistance. They are resistance.
Because they restore the thing anomie corrodes: the belief that our lives are interwoven, that we are not meant to carry the weight alone.
In the aftermath of disconnection, these spaces offer ritual, repetition, and relationship. They ask us to return, to show up even when it’s awkward or inconvenient, to become part of something that lasts longer than a single crisis cycle.
Small-scale community is not a backup plan.
It is the seedbed of every durable movement.
Not Just Self-Care, but Interdependence
In a culture obsessed with binaries, we are taught that we must choose between being independent or being dependent. To stand alone, strong and self-sufficient—or to fall into need, weakness, and shame. These are the only options offered.
But there is a third way. And it is older, wiser, and more sustainable than either extreme.
Interdependence.
Interdependence says: we are not whole without each other.
It says: your wellbeing is bound up in mine.
It doesn’t mean giving up autonomy. It means recognizing that autonomy was never meant to be exercised in a vacuum.
In the wake of burnout, disconnection, and capitalist survivalism, we’re told that the answer is better self-care. Rest more. Set boundaries. Breathe. These things matter. But they are not enough—not in a world where the deepest wounds are social.
Anomie cannot be meditated away. It must be mended—through relationship, through repair, through reciprocal care.
The opposite of anomie isn’t control.
It’s solidarity.
Not the kind of solidarity that shows up once and leaves, but the kind that stays. The kind that cooks meals, folds chairs, answers late-night texts, and comes back the next day. The kind that lets us say “I can’t do this alone” without shame—and hear “You don’t have to” without hesitation.
We cannot rebuild trust alone. We cannot recover a sense of meaning alone.
And we cannot survive what’s coming alone.
Interdependence is not weakness. It is our only way forward.
A Personal Turn
Living the Antidote in Exile
For over a decade, I’ve lived in a minivan.
Not because I gave up, but because I refused to break. Traditional housing, for me, meant sensory overload, unsafe roommates, insufficient light to manage my circadian rhythm disorder, and overall compromised health. Living in my van allowed me to stay connected to what my body actually needs: sunlight, rhythm, solitude, and air.
But it wasn’t isolation.
What I’ve built, often on the margins, is community without architecture. I’ve formed relationships in parking lots and libraries, laundromats and forest clearings. I’ve facilitated autistic peer support groups on Zoom from the front seat of my van. I’ve built mutual aid networks from places others wouldn’t consider home.
There’s no front porch. But there are ritual check-ins, shared stories, and people who notice when I’m gone.
When the pandemic came, I tried to be smart and safe: I rented a room. But the space wasn’t safe. That experience didn’t just make me sick. It made the truth impossible to ignore:
No one will protect you if it isn’t convenient for them.
But I also learned something else.
That safety doesn’t come from walls. It comes from witnessing. From the people who do check in, show up, and help you stitch a little meaning back into your day. From those who say, “You still matter,” even when the world says you don’t. From those who allow you to stitch meaning into their day. From those who matter to me.
The antidote to anomie isn’t comfort. It’s recognition.
It’s knowing you’re not invisible. That someone, somewhere, still sees you.
That someone, somewhere, still stays.
The Choice to Survive Through Connection, Not Alienation
It would have been easy to pull away.
After so many failures of care—after being ignored, dismissed, pushed out, or put at risk—it would have made sense to give up on other people. To choose isolation. To disappear.
But I didn’t.
I chose to stay in the web of community, even if I had to build and re-build it from scratch. I chose to keep showing up—for my people, for my cohorts, for strangers who felt as lost as I did. I chose to believe that connection is still possible, even if it doesn’t look like what we were told it should. Even if it comes without sidewalks or front doors.
I’ve seen what happens when people remember how to care for each other.
I’ve seen disabled folks redistribute emergency funds in hours.
I’ve seen trans people find housing through group chats and mutual aid.
I’ve seen Autistic adults come alive in peer-led circles after a lifetime of being pathologized.
None of it’s easy. All of it’s fragile.
But it’s real.
And it’s worth choosing.
I don’t believe the antidote to anomie is something we’ll legislate or download. I believe it’s something we choose, again and again—through fatigue, through fear, through the ache of disillusionment.
Not because we’re sure it’ll work.
But because we refuse to vanish.
Remembering Who We Are
Reframe the Fear
It’s not just you.
The exhaustion. The disorientation. The sense that something is wrong but you can’t name it, can’t fix it, can’t escape it. The fear that the world is crumbling—or that it already has, and you missed the moment it snapped.
That feeling is real. And it’s not a personal failing.
It’s the ache of a fraying social fabric.
We were never meant to live this way: isolated, overstimulated, under-supported, and saturated with fear. We were never meant to navigate pandemics, fascism, climate collapse, and economic precarity alone, cut off from one another, taught to see connection as weakness or threat.
What you’re feeling isn’t just burnout. It isn’t just anxiety. It isn’t even just political despair.
It’s anomie.
And once you have a name for it, you can start to see it not as a fog in your own mind, but as a systemic rupture. A wound we’re all walking around with. A wound that can be seen, understood, and—if not healed entirely—held together.
This fear doesn’t have to lead to collapse.
It can lead to recognition.
To remembrance.
And to the radical act of reaching for one another in the dark.
A Call to Gentle, Persistent Action
You don’t have to fix everything.
You don’t have to carry it all.
You don’t have to save the world.
Just don’t let the thread slip through your fingers.
The social fabric is tattered, yes. But it’s not gone. It still exists in potlucks and protests, in bike repair collectives and porch conversations, in small group texts that turn into lifelines, in the way someone brings soup as a wordless way of asking if you’re okay.
You don’t need to create something massive.
You just need to continue. Show up. Reach out. Check in. Make space. Tend the fire of whatever tiny community still warms your hands.
Gentle, persistent action is not weakness. It’s what survival looks like in an unraveling world. It’s what builds back trust—not in institutions alone, but in each other. It’s what reminds us that belonging is not a gift handed down from the powerful, but a practice we can reclaim from the ground up.
Every time you choose to show up—especially when it’s hard, especially when it’s imperfect—you’re helping stitch the world back together.
One thread. One gesture. One gathering at a time.
Final Image
Picture a small circle of people sitting around a fire.
There’s food being passed, gently. A hand reaches to refill another’s cup. Someone is laughing. Someone is crying. Someone is silent, just listening. No one is performing. No one is being fixed. They’re just… there. Together. Present.
Behind them, the world is still burning. The headlines still scream. The systems are still cracking.
But in this one small clearing, there is warmth. There is care. There is a thread being handed from one hand to the next—looped, knotted, passed again. Not to bind, but to hold. Not to control, but to remind.
This is what survives.
The circle.
The flame.
The quiet meal shared between people who choose not to let go of one another.
This is not the end of the story.
It’s the place where we begin again.
FOOTNOTES
- Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. 1897. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, Free Press, 1951.
↩︎ - Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. 1893. Translated by W.D. Halls, Free Press, 1984.
↩︎ - Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. 1897. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, Free Press, 1951. ↩︎
- Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000. ↩︎
- Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000. ↩︎
- Davies, James C. “Toward a Theory of Revolution.” American Sociological Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1962, pp. 5–19. ↩︎
- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Tracking the Post-Great Recession Economy.” https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/tracking-the-post-great-recession-economy ↩︎
- Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Civilian Unemployment Rate.” U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025. ↩︎
- Executive Order 13583. “Establishing a Coordinated Government-Wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion.” August 18, 2011. ↩︎
- Investopedia. “US Inflation Rate by Year.” https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832 ↩︎
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Change and Agriculture.” https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-change-impacts-agriculture-and-food-supply ↩︎
WORKS CITED
Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Civilian Unemployment Rate.” U.S. Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm. Accessed 20 Apr. 2025.
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Tracking the Post-Great Recession Economy.” https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/tracking-the-post-great-recession-economy
Davies, James C. “Toward a Theory of Revolution.” American Sociological Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1962, pp. 5–19.
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society. 1893. Translated by W.D. Halls, Free Press, 1984.
Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. 1897. Translated by John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, Free Press, 1951.
Executive Order 13583. “Establishing a Coordinated Government-Wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion.” August 18, 2011.
Investopedia. “US Inflation Rate by Year.” https://www.investopedia.com/inflation-rate-by-year-7253832
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Change and Agriculture.” https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-change-impacts-agriculture-and-food-supply
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