How modern life compounds the ancient struggle to belong

Philosopher Ian Corbin explores mismatch between human nature and contemporary society

Jun 24, 2026 / Read time: 5 minutes

Eileen O’Grady

Harvard Staff Writer

Why do so many people feel lonely in a world designed for connection?

As Ian Corbin sees it, Americans are experiencing a crisis of belonging, which he attributes to some fundamental misunderstandings about what humans need to flourish.

“We are confronting widespread and deep-seated alienation and loneliness in a lot of modern, wealthy populations right now,” said Corbin, an instructor in neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “It seems like the way we’ve been organized in our common life is not working very well. People aren’t happy with it. They may have creature comforts that an 18th-century French aristocrat couldn’t even imagine, but there is this creeping, important, and maybe dangerous feeling of ‘not-at-home-ness.’”

A recent event put Corbin, a philosopher on faculty in the HMS Center for Bioethics, who also co-directs the Trust and Belonging Initiative at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program and directs the Public Culture Project in the Division of Arts & Humanities, in conversation about his new book, “To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World.” He was joined by philosopher Samuel Kimbriel, founder and director of the Philosophy & Society program at the Washington, D.C.-based Aspen Institute.

Struggling to find one’s place is an ancient problem, Corbin pointed out, explored through literature in every generation from Homer’s “The Odyssey” to the 1942 T.S. Eliot poem “Little Gidding.”

But Corbin says the feeling is intensified by modern American society, rooted in the philosophy of rugged individualism. The common narrative today suggests that being happy and successful means being independent — with a focus on personal achievement, consumption, and accumulation of wealth. It’s a worldview he calls “ownerism,” where people build their identities around materialism and consumption.

“The idea that I am the sovereign autonomous individual who creates safety and ‘home-ness’ by establishing myself and getting my property and putting up my fence is a very recent invention, and I don’t think it’s going that well,” Corbin told an audience at Barker Center.

The ownerism mindset, he added, contradicts the communal nature of humans, creatures shaped profoundly by relationships. “Friendship and sustained interaction is, from the beginning and all the way to the end, deeply constitutive of what a healthy self looks like,” Corbin said.

Total individualism and isolation are bad for us; we know this from the mental distress experienced by incarcerated people subjected to solitary confinement. But the other extreme, total absorption into a collective, can be just as dangerous. In the leadup to the rise of Germany’s Nazi party, Corbin said, people expressed feeling alienated and adrift from home. The promise of immersion in the spiritual unity of a German cultural identity was, by contrast, attractive.

“In the temptation of a certain kind of totalitarian collective politics, there is a pleasure to losing yourself in a crowd, into a communal story of who we are,” Corbin said, adding that the sensation can be healthy when experienced in reasonable doses. (Think dancing in a crowd at a rock concert.)

The ideal situation, Corbin suggested, is a “virtuous circle” that alternates solitude with community participation, allowing time to reflect and build ideas before they are discussed and refined with others. As an example, Corbin cited the Lakota tradition of the haŋbléčeyapi, or vision quest, a rite of passage where a young person goes to a hilltop for several days to think and pray, and then returns to share newfound knowledge with their community.

“For human groups in general, there should be this dialectic of going off by yourself and coming back in to interpret what you’ve seen,” Corbin said. “I teach, and I write, and I talk incessantly to friends who will talk to me, and I think that there is a very significant degree to which you can get an inkling, but until you bring it to other people and think it together, you don’t fully know what you’ve learned.”

At one point in the exchange, Corbin and Kimbriel debated whether modern monetary systems contribute to feelings of isolation by separating the ability to meet basic human needs from participation in community. In contrast to agrarian societies where people grow food together, Corbin explained, going to the supermarket and buying potatoes leaves one with a different perception of their role. Especially when knowing that, with no money, the potatoes needed for survival can never be obtained.

“Living in that for years and years, it can start to seem like reality itself is cold and withholding and tit for tat,” Corbin said.

Kimbriel pushed back, arguing that money brings people together in many ways. “It allows people who don’t already know each other, or strangers who don’t agree in some way, to operate within society together,” he said.

Corbin countered that money removes feelings of human connection and mutual obligation. But he agreed the system is necessary given the scale of modern society.

“Can you run Manhattan on a gift economy? Probably not. Of course you’re going to be required to use impersonal forms of exchange,” Corbin said. “But I do think there are ways in which we’ve construed a regime of private property and private enterprise that make people feel like they live in a dog-eat-dog, lonely sort of place.”