Breaking, Rotting, Enshittifying
Great writing — sharp, insightful, and deeply relevant — deserves to reach as many readers as possible, especially at a time when so few are saying so much of such great value to so many.
Our great American experiment is shifting fast, undergoing a sea-change not seen since the Industrial Revolution. The more we understand what’s happening beneath the surface, the better shot we have at making sense of where it’s all headed. This is why I want to share two excellent, and dare I say, important, essays with you. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different. Both, in their own way, take on one of the defining issues of our time, exploring how our shifting relationship with the world — and each other — is driving profound, far-reaching changes whose full impact we’re only beginning to understand.
In How Progressives Froze the American Dream, the always great Yoni Appelbaum argues that many of America's current struggles stem from a dramatic, recent decline in geographic mobility. Adapted from his new book, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, Appelbaum explores how America — once the most geographically mobile society in history — has become a place where people feel trapped. He unpacks the reasons behind this shift over the past 30 years, why it matters, and who's to blame. Among the surprising culprits: progressive reformers like Jane Jacobs, whose efforts to save cities inadvertently stifled their natural evolution, making it harder for newcomers to find opportunity.
Appelbaum writes:
But by the end of the 19th century, mobility was a deeply ingrained habit throughout the United States. That habit has now been lost, and the toll is enormous. By one estimate, the decline in mobility is costing the American economy nearly $2 trillion each year in lost productivity. The personal costs may be even greater, albeit sometimes harder to recognize. Residential relocation is like physical exercise in this way: Whether you re sitting on a couch or ensconced in a home, you're unlikely to identify inertia as the underlying source of your problems. It's only when you get up that the benefits of moving around become clear. People who have recently changed residences report experiencing more supportive relationships and feeling more optimism, greater sense of purpose, and increased self-respect. Those who want to move and cannot, by contrast, become more cynical and less satisfied with their lives. And Americans are shifting from that first category to the second: Since 1970, the likelihood that someone who expects to move in the next few years will successfully follow through on that ambition has fallen by almost half. Americans of previous generations would be shocked by our stagnation. The inclination to keep moving was long the defining feature of the American character.
The title of the other essay — Haley Nahman's What is Rotting, If Not Rest? An Anatomy of the Modern Rot — may give you pause, at first. Oh no, yet another same-ol think piece on 2024’s word of the year? Please do yourself a favor and ignore that intuition. Nahman's essay is one of the most insightful dissections of rotting I've read yet. She pushes beyond the shallow cultural narratives surrounding the term. Instead of treating it as a trend, Nahman unpacks the psychological and even existential undercurrents behind why people are so drawn to this specific form of escape.
I especially love how Nahman positions rotting in contrast to idling — her own word for a state of passive, semi-engaged digital consumption — and actual rest. She captures something most people intuitively feel but rarely articulate: that much of what passes for leisure today isn’t actually restorative. Instead, it’s a numbing mechanism, an evasion tactic that mimics relaxation while quietly depleting us. And Nahman doesn’t just blame personal weakness — she points to the ways modern media is designed to facilitate and profit from this kind of existence. I discuss a similar, related idea in Soon We Will Have Nothing Left to Give Away of Ourselves.
Nahman’s piece also stands out in how it frames rotting as a spiritual condition rather than just a behavioral one. Where most of the other essays focus on the aesthetics of the trend (people, yawningly and exhaustively posting about “rotting in bed” for hours), she interrogates the deeper causes at play: an intolerance for stillness, a fear of unoccupied mental space, and a culture that encourages constant consumption but rarely genuine pause. Nahman's essay ultimately challenges the reader to rethink not just rotting, but what true rest actually looks like — and whether we even know how to access it anymore.
Nahman writes:
Rotting may have a particular posture, but I think what separates it from other activities that involve horizontal entertainment is its catalyst: avoidance — the avoidance of responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, anxiety, thoughts. Rotting shares this quality with idling, but offers a more comprehensive escape, thus taking on a more sinister edge…
True avoidant rotting keeps us trapped in the push and pull of should and shouldn't, never transcending it. If avoidance is the litmus test for rotting, it follows that tolerance is the litmus test for rest. Tolerance for responsibility, pressure, uncertainty, anxiety, thoughts — and especially the stillness that brings these things to the fore, asking us to contend with them.
Why do I write so often about this and adjacent topics? Well, if I'm being candid, I suppose it's my way of working through the shock and utter disappointment of bearing witness to the rot and enshittification everywhere all around us (brilliantly enshrined in Cory Doctorow's 2023 essay — Tiktok's Enshittification).
It infuriates me and makes me sad.