Modern Life: Fragmentation, Survival, and Coherence

We’ve all become terrible storytellers of our own lives. Not because we lack material, but because the plot keeps getting hijacked by a guest writer whose only note is: “But how do they pay for it?” Our narratives of purpose, progress, and personal growth keep slamming into the unmovable wall of rent, groceries, and the haunting question of whether we can afford to have a pet. We’re trying to write an epic while constantly being interrupted by a pop-up ad for survival.

Coherence is the luxury good we can’t afford anymore. I don’t mean coherence in some grand, philosophical sense. I mean the simple, daily through-line from one thought to the next. The ability to finish a sentence to yourself about your future without a mental cutaway scene to your bank balance. We’re told to have passions, to build a “personal brand,” to practice mindfulness and set boundaries. Meanwhile, the baseline operating cost for being a person has skyrocketed into the realm of absurdist fiction. So we fragment. We develop a kind of cognitive dissonance as a survival skill.

Think about the classic viral tweet genre: the side-by-side LinkedIn post and Twitter post from the same person. On LinkedIn, they’re a “thought leader leveraging synergies for disruptive innovation.” On Twitter, they’re a gremlin in sweatpants posting “i am but a simple creature who wants to buy marked-down cheese.” It's hypocrisy. That’s coherence crumbling in real time. The platform demands the performance of capitalist ambition; the soul demands the recognition of our fundamental, cheese-desiring fragility. We hold both truths at once, and the mental strain is the background hum of modern life.

We’re fluent in therapy-speak. We can diagnose our attachment styles over brunch. We know we should “sit with our feelings” and that our jobs are “triggering our childhood wounds.” This language promised a framework, a way to make sense of the chaos inside. But it’s been steamrolled by the sheer, dumb force of economic precarity. You can’t “process your anxiety” when the source of that anxiety is a spreadsheet. You can’t “heal your inner child” when your outer adult is one missed paycheck away from having to move back into that child’s actual bedroom at your parents’ house.

And this is where the language gets weaponized, turned against us in the quiet, gaslit corners of our relationships and jobs. You’ve been in this conversation. Maybe it was with a partner, a friend, or a manager.

“I’m hearing that you’re feeling really overwhelmed by the cost of this trip, and I want to hold space for that financial anxiety. For me, this retreat is a non-negotiable part of my spiritual practice and setting this boundary is essential for my growth. It feels like your money trauma is being projected onto our shared goals. Maybe we need to explore why you’re holding such a scarcity mindset?”

See? The vocabulary of healing twisted into a cudgel to pathologize a very rational fear of debt. Your legitimate concern about coherence, as in, “our planned expenses do not cohere with our actual income”, gets rebranded as your individual psychological defect. The system’s failure becomes your failure to “manifest abundance.” It’s a masterstroke. We’re so busy trying to untangle our own neuroses, we forget to be angry about the fact that a one-bedroom apartment costs sixty percent of our take-home pay.

Our jobs are the primary sites of this fragmentation. We are asked to bring our “whole selves” to work, to find meaning and purpose in our “passion projects,” while simultaneously understanding that we are disposable, cost-center liabilities. You’re crafting a mission statement for a quarterly campaign, genuinely trying to care about the metrics, while a cold knot in your stomach reminds you that healthcare is tied to this. That knot is the coherence police. It’s the part of your brain screaming that none of this adds up, that you are a living collage of contradictions: a creative who spends all day in spreadsheets, a skeptic who must radiate cult-like enthusiasm, an autonomous individual whose time is parceled into fifteen-minute calendar blocks.

The internet amplifies this until our brains feel like they’re vibrating. We scroll from a video of a warzone to a friend’s wedding photos to a meme about burnout to an advert for investment apps, all in sixty seconds. Our empathy, our joy, our cynicism, and our financial anxiety are all flattened into the same endless feed. We’re expected to hold global horror and personal ambition in the same heart, in the same afternoon. No wonder we feel dissociated. Coherence requires a stable setting, a narrative container that can hold our experiences in some logical sequence. The container is shattered. We’re just picking up shiny, broken pieces all day.

Even our attempts at escape are incoherent. “Self-care” becomes a purchase. Therapy is a line item. A vacation is a financially reckless plot to manufacture a feeling of freedom we’ll pay for, literally, for the next six months. We take a “mental health day” to soothe our frayed nerves, then spend it vibrating with low-grade guilt because we’re not “using the time productively.” Productivity has infected our rest. We can’t even fall apart correctly.

We mock the hustle culture bros, but at least their story is simple. Grind, win, acquire, flex. It’s a stupid story, but it has a beginning, middle, and end. Our story is messier. We were raised on the promise that if we were smart, worked hard, and got the degree, a certain stability would follow. That stability would provide the stage upon which we could build a coherent self: a person with hobbies, political beliefs, relationships, and growth. But the stage never materialized. We’re building the self while being buffeted by hurricane-force winds, trying to nail down our personality traits while the floorboards are being ripped away.

So we speak in two registers. The performative, aspirational one: “I’m pivoting to a freelance career, it’s about building a portfolio of joyful work!” And the private, desperate one, texted to a friend at 2 PM on a Wednesday: “i have no idea what i’m doing and i’m pretty sure i’m going to die in a rented room.” Both are true. The gap between them is where coherence goes to die.

Money isn’t just currency. It’s the physical manifestation of our safety, our time, our freedom. When it’s perpetually scarce, our sense of safety, time, and freedom is perpetually scarce. You can’t plan. Planning is a fantasy game for the secure. You react. You hop from one gig to the next, one crisis to the next, one fleeting dopamine hit to the next, because the long arc is too terrifying to contemplate. Your biography becomes a list of things you did to not go under. It’s not a plot. It’s a ledger.

This is the millennial condition, or at least the non-wealthy millennial condition. We are the most therapized, analyzed, self-aware generation in history, armed with more tools for understanding ourselves than any before us. And we are utterly baffled by our own lives. We can name every cognitive distortion that fuels our anxiety, but we can’t name a year we might own a home. We understand the theory of setting boundaries, but not the practice of setting them with a landlord who can raise the rent by thirty percent. The tools are for fixing the mind. They are useless against the material world.

We patch ourselves together with internet lore, with micro-identities, with niche hobbies and curated subscriptions. We find coherence in fleeting, tiny tribes: the group chat that gets your specific despair, the forum for your overly specific interest. These are life rafts, not homes. They keep us afloat, but they’re not solid ground. We float from raft to raft, speaking the insular language of each, forgetting how to speak a broader, steadier story about who we are and what we want.

In the end, we are tasked with an impossible alchemy. We must spin the base metal of survival—the commutes, the invoices, the grocery runs, the panic, into the gold of a meaningful life. And we’re trying to do it while everyone, from influencers to corporations to our own internalized voices, sells us the philosopher’s stone: this app, that mindset, this course, that ritual. Buy this and your fragments will fuse. They don’t. The fracture is fundamental. It’s not in you. It’s in the world.

So we perform coherence. We clean our apartments for the Zoom call background. We use the right words in the meeting. We post the photo that suggests a curated existence. The performance is exhausting because it is a full-time job on top of our full-time jobs. It’s the labor of pretending the fragments are a whole.

What’s the alternative? To stare, openly, at the broken picture? To admit that the story doesn’t make sense? That’s the terrifying part. We are narrative creatures. We need a story to live. Without one, we dissolve into pure, panicked reaction. So we cling to the shards and call it a mosaic. We write captions about the journey. We treat our burnout as a sign of depth. We monetize our coping mechanisms. The ultimate contradiction is this: our most authentic experience is one of profound incoherence, and the only way to survive it is to pretend, constantly, that it’s not happening.

Is it any wonder we’re so tired?

The devastating, simple truth is that we are building selves on quicksand, using tools meant for solid ground. And the deepest, most unspoken contradiction we live is this: we were taught to dream in high definition, but we can only afford to live in buffering, low-res fragments. Our promised life was a novel. The one we’re getting is a pile of missed notifications. And we keep trying to read them as if they’ll eventually form a sentence that makes sense.