Do you feel uneasy? Do you feel a level of ambient anxiety? Do you feel despair, despite the fact that we live in the most luxurious time and place in human history? And did my producer offer to give me a Klonopin today? That one I won’t answer.
The point is, you are not crazy. If you feel these things, you are simply attuned to reality—and it’s not a problem that’s solvable with less screen time or with meditation, red light, or sea moss.
My brilliant guest, Paul Kingsnorth, argues that the reason you feel this way is not this or that social media app or algorithm or culture war issue. That these are all superficial expressions of a thousand-year battle with what he calls “the Machine.” What exactly that means, he’ll explain tonight.
To personally fight the Machine, Paul has moved his family out of urban England to live off the land in rural Ireland, where his family grows their own food, draws water from a well, and homeschools their children. To learn more about his life, you’ll have to go back and listen to the Honestly episode I did with him in 2024.
In his new book, Against the Machine, Paul makes the argument that what this moment requires is something of a rebellion. He says the West is not dying, but already dead. And this book is an attempt to understand how we got to this profound feeling of disquiet—and how we might return to true peace. It’s being billed as a “spiritual manual for dissidents in the technological age.”
Click below to listen to our conversation, or scroll down for our favorite moments.
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On finding meaning in the technological age:
Bari Weiss: How can we live a life of meaning? How can we maintain our humanity in the age that we happen to be living in right now—short of becoming monastic?
Paul Kingsnorth: We’re living in this time, and this is the time we’re made to live in. So you better get through it, and you better just deal with it, girlfriend, as I believe they say in these parts. There’s no five-point plan to save the world, because it doesn’t work like that, but there are a number of ways you can think about how to live your life. We all live completely different lives. There’s no manifesto for everybody. But the first thing to do is to start asking yourself what this story is.
