Durkheim introduced the idea of anomie in his first book, The Division of Labour in Society, but developed it much further in his second monograph Suicide: A Study in Sociology, in which he aimed to show that suicide, which at the time was widely thought to be a reflection of profound individual failings, often had social causes and so presumably could also have social solutions. He used the term to describe the feelings of intense dislocation, anxiety, and even anger that drove people to behave antisocially and, when desperate, perhaps take their own lives.

Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.

It is a curious paradox that schizophrenia might be imagined as a condition of being both less or too much of whomever we might be. An intricate balance is lost.

It was not the voices in themselves that prompted such anguish with disastrous consequences, but the disruption of something beyond, and something that might be considered innate and particularly human: a sense of self, of the privacy of the self, and a precarious notion of free will.

It’s not just technology that has improved people’s lives; moral change has done so, too. In 1700, women were unable to attend university, and the feminist movement did not exist.If that well-off Brit was gay, he could not love openly; sodomy was punishable by death. In the late 1700s, three in four people globally were the victims of some form of forced labour; now less than 1 percent are. In 1700, no one lived in a democracy. Now over half the world does.