One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.
Interpretation
Loneliness arises from shallow connections and a secure environment, leading to feelings of disconnection.
In this quote, Steven Pinker highlights the issue of loneliness that can occur in modern society. He suggests that when individuals live in a safe environment where their lives are not at risk and their relationships are primarily transactional, they may experience a sense of disconnection from others. This underscores the importance of deeper, meaningful relationships in fostering a sense of community and emotional well-being.
In practice
During a mental health awareness talk, to emphasize the need for deeper relationships.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.
I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be β or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.
No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.
May was young and beautiful, we were legally married, but she was caught in the prison of my skin.
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