If you’re anything like me, the world you live in feels increasingly alien every day. Evolutionary novelty is one factor – not only the advanced technologies that suffuse our cultural environment, but especially their unexpected consequences: hyperpalatable food leading to obesity; automobiles resulting in rush hour traffic jams; social media turning human minds into the neurotic pseudopods of immaterial egregores; online dating replacing romance with the anomie of hook-ups and loneliness. Beyond the merely technical aspects there are the psychosocial, the blind madness that seems to have gripped a world that has become obsessed with quantification, regulation, permits, planning, risk management ... wherever we go, we find ourselves in the same homogenized safe space, an open air prison of timid conformity and inflexible rule-following, which always seems to leave us less safe, less secure, and less sure of ourselves and our world with every tightening of the ratchet of control.

This is not the world our souls expect or desire, and it becomes less that world, it seems, with every day that passes.