That’s a great observation. It leads one to wonder why we became so fearful. And why we collectively decided that all relationships are only about power. I’ve heard people posit it was due to increased precarity, but that doesn’t ring true to me. That’s a pat answer that only touches the surface.

There’s no single explanation of course, but I believe this retrogression has more to do with smartphones, social media and the exaggerated performativity they inject into the sociocultural landscape than it does with the socioeconomic concerns. Essentially, by compressing us back into de facto small communities again with Instagram, Facebook and those other evils, we’ve been forced to resume the mores and norms of a medieval village. That is, a now-virtualized non-locality where everyone knows or can easily discover your business and pass judgment upon you, sometimes with devastating consequences.

We are not cognitively set up to handle this compression of all of us into one tiny yet vast mental conurbation, so we adapt in various ways — most of which are actually maladaptive to any end goal of human happiness or eudaimonia. The solution isn’t to retreat to a past that would no longer be composable with now-novel minds never seen in human history but to tame the beasts of tech and moral overreach to make our tools serve us rather than have us further bent to their whims and limitations.

At least, we should do this. We probably will not and instead will stumble along until something breaks. But change will occur either way. That, at least, is certain.