When the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, commentators blamed smartphones and remote work. But the Black Death survivors of 14th-century Florence described the same crisis in nearly identical terms — and the communities that rebuilt their social fabric fastest used strategies that look almost exactly like what researchers recommend today.
Mar 13, 2026
Fifteen hundred years before anyone posted about burnout on Reddit, a monastic writer named John Cassian documented a condition so specific it reads like a modern diagnostic checklist — exhaustion, loss of meaning, compulsive distraction, and the creeping sense that your life is happening somewhere else. The condition had a name, a cause, and a treatment. We forgot all three.
Mar 13, 2026