The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa suggests that our experience of life in the twenty-first century is increasingly shaped by our desire to control the world; to structure it through empirical observation, rendering it as a series of challenges to overcome. ‘Everything that appears to us must be known, mastered, conquered, made useful,’ writes Rosa. He says this is most obviously apparent in our constant tracking of our own bodies, but that the same framing increasingly structures how we encounter the world outside ourselves. ‘Mountains have to be scaled, tests passed, career ladders climbed,
...more
