The Philosopher Peasant

You’ve had a long, stressful day. You get home, make dinner, and settle onto the couch. You don’t turn on the TV; instead, you open Twitch or YouTube. You click on a familiar face, a streamer you’ve been watching for years. For the next three hours, you listen to them chat, laugh at their jokes, share in their triumphs and frustrations as they play a video game. Maybe you type a message in the chat, and for a fleeting moment, they read it aloud and respond. You feel a sense o

Take a moment and open your preferred social media app. Scroll through the feed. What do you see? It’s a world built just for you. The news articles align with your politics. The jokes match your sense of humor. The products are things you’ve thought about buying. The opinions are ones you already hold, articulated with a satisfying, righteous clarity. It’s a comfortable, frictionless, and deeply affirming space. Your digital world understands you. It gets you. It feels like

A few years ago, a cultural tidal wave swept through our homes, led by a soft-spoken Japanese organizing consultant named Marie Kondo. Her method was simple, almost ritualistic: take every single object you own, hold it in your hands, and ask a single, profound question: “Does this spark joy?” If the answer was no, you were to thank the item for its service and let it go. Millions of us dutifully piled our clothes into mountains on our beds, wept over old photographs, and fil