Therapists of Decline

In a haunting recent essay, Sam Kriss writes that “we are living in an age of ambient unwellness.” It’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about a lot. Our institutions are unwell, and we are unwell. Our mania about productivity and safety veil our fearfulness, our intuition that we must outrun our collapse, or be consumed by imminent death and decay. Our politics reflect our “unwellness,” and this includes political opinion on the right and the left. As Patrick Deneen recently considered the pessimism of the left, I want us to also consider a different kind of therapeutic pessimism on the right.