Season 5 Ep 5 | Chris Colin | Modern Life is Designed to Exhaust You

In this episode, I talk with journalist and author Chris Colin, whose work in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and the WSJ explores the strange, frustrating, and revealing corners of modern life. We cover some of his recent journalism–and the experiences that inspired them, as well as the contemporary state of all-things literary. Some key takeaways include:

* His New York Times story “You’re Going to Lose Your Mind’: My Three-Day Retreat in Total Darkness.”How Chris ended up in a three-day total-darkness retreat; what happens to the mind without stimulus; fear, boredom, insight, and why the piece went viral.

* Sensory deprivation & anxiety:Sean reflects on his own float-tank experiences and how quickly the mind resists stillness.

* His remarkable essay “Sludge,” from The Atlantic. The argument that long holds, dropped calls, and customer-service nightmares are intentional—designed to exhaust us into compliance.

* Customers → shareholders:How corporate incentives shifted, eroding loyalty and degrading everyday life; the political and cultural consequences of institutional distrust.

* Apathy as design:Engineered exhaustion leads to resignation, which opens the door to authoritarian tendencies.

* The impetus of his brilliant piece from the Wall Street Journal, “How To Turn the Bureaucratic Grind of Life Into a Party.”Chris’s manifesto-like piece about turning administrative drudgery into a communal event—and why connection and shared suffering matter.

* Dystopian overlap:How 1984, Brave New World, and Kafka all apply to our current bureaucratic, automated, profit-driven world.

* Storytelling & power:Why corporations tell better stories than the people they burden—and how better narratives can expose the real “us vs. them.”

Chris, needless to say, is a writer you’ll be smarter and happier having read. I hope this conversation turns you onto his work, and you help spread the word!

Chris Colin’s work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and “Best American Science and Nature Writing.” He has written about billionaires, rivers, rent-a-friends, endangered noodles, solitary confinement and much more, including several books, including What To Talk About, and Off: The Day the Internet Died: A Bedtime Fantasy. He lives in San Francisco.

MORE ABOUT CHRIS COLIN