It is a curious habit of modern society to concern itself endlessly with the lives of others while remaining remarkably unwilling to examine its own condition.

People speak with great confidence about what strangers ought to be doing — how they should dress, parent, age, earn, heal, grieve, rest, succeed, or recover. Entire afternoons are spent discussing the choices of people they neither know nor understand, as though unsolicited opinion were a form of public service.

One suspects it is often something else entirely.