The affluent hollow
There are mornings when a place feels heavier than the weather suggests, like the air has taken on a mood of its own.
You see it in the way people move, eyes fixed on nowhere, shoulders pulled inward. It isn’t dramatic, just a quiet dullness that lingers in checkout lines and parking lots and late-night streets.
The country feels tired in a way money can’t explain. Zoom out a little, and the pattern sharpens.
For years, the story has centered on paychecks, prices, and all the usual charts. Yet beneath that, something more basic has been eroding. The spaces meant to hold people together have thinned. Communities scattered. Beauty is relegated to an afterthought.
A culture that knows how to produce everything except a place to belong is bound to feel unsteady.
The strange part is how this happened while the material indicators kept improving.
Productivity climbed. Choices multiplied. Wealth became more accessible, at least in theory. But the pursuit came with a cost.
Neighborhood rhythms broke apart as work stretched into every corner of life, and the physical world slowly reshaped itself around speed and efficiency. An economy can grow while the ground beneath people quietly hollows, leaving them unsure why the unease keeps spreading.
There’s a tension sitting in the middle of all this.
Material progress does matter. Economic structures aren’t some backdrop that can be ignored. They shape the hours of the day, the distance between people, the kinds of lives that feel possible. Yet they can’t answer the more profound need for connection and meaning.
The country has been chasing one and neglecting the other, and both sides of that equation leave marks.
Still, there’s a slight shift available in how we look at the moment.
If despair comes not only from scarcity but from the spaces where richness used to live, then rebuilding those spaces becomes part of the work. A different kind of prosperity is possible, quieter and more rooted, the kind that reminds people what they already sensed but couldn’t name until now.