Neither wars nor economic crises. The decline of the West is primarily emotional. A book

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In the modern era, emotion is considered a formidable lever of production, a necessary feeling for aspiring, longing, and, as it is often said, realizing one's dreams. Emotion is therefore the foundation of that quintessentially Western productive capacity, which aims to achieve well-being. However, in recent years we have been witnessing a dangerous reversal of this trend: the most widespread emotion is no longer a form of enthusiastic, perhaps naive, but sincerely pursued hope, but rather a profound disappointment. A dangerous depression that affects all social classes .

Despite all the economic data being essentially favorable and despite more widespread prosperity, especially in those societies where the reviled neoliberalism (as its critics call it) has taken real shape, the sense of individual failure pervades its inhabitants. An ideal failure, but one that rapidly becomes substantial, entangled in a centrifugal movement from which it becomes increasingly difficult to emerge. Eva Illouz thus attempts in her latest brilliant, cultured, and convincing essay, " Explosive Modernity " (Einaudi, translated by Valentina Palombi), to lay out, in a sufficiently broad and clear framework, a dynamic affecting the West that easily goes by the name of decadence. A decadence, therefore, that is emotional before anything else, a form of widespread sadness that, as statistics indicate, sees nearly 80 percent of Americans experiencing little or no satisfaction from their work (beyond financial remuneration) in 2022.

The impression is that what modernity has required since the nineteenth century—a faith in the future and a strong belief in one's own abilities—has turned into a noose that squeezes the necks of people to the point of suffocation. People are no longer bound by a strong community element (and feeling), but are now seen as singular individuals called to undertake and pursue success and satisfaction. This model no longer envisions a cohesive and welcoming society, perhaps characterized by limitations and impediments that can make it difficult to pursue one's ambitions , but rather an open field within which responsibility for every failure, or worse still, every difference, rests solely with the individual.

An extreme performance whose evaluation parameters are imposed as rigid and absolute, while simultaneously making the objectives unattainable in a logic of infinite competition . The increasingly widespread feeling, according to Illouz, a sociologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is one of nostalgia and disorientation, also the result of a society—Western society—that in recent years has betrayed a fluidity primarily expressed in virtuous globalization and has favored encounters and exchanges like never before. In this closing in and tightening ranks evident at various levels of society, we perceive a dangerous spiral that, while partly disavowing an extremely aggressive emotional individualism, also reintroduces an idea of society too similar to a fin-de-siècle nation state.

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