Not long ago, people mostly bought things because they needed them. A coat kept you warm. A chair gave you somewhere to sit. A notebook held your thoughts. Of course, objects have always carried meanings beyond their practical purpose, but those meanings usually remained in the background. Today something feels different. Increasingly, products are being …
A strange contradiction sits at the centre of modern life. Most people today communicate with more human beings in a single week than their grandparents might have encountered in a month. We send messages across continents. We join group chats with hundreds of people. We can video call relatives thousands of kilometres away. We can …