Last week I published the second edition of “Essai by Essay,” my book of essays about Michel de Montaigne. As part of the editing process, I made revisions to nearly all of the pieces in the original book, including the essay “On Solitude” from Montaigne’s first book.

I’m not sure if the new version fully captures this, but I’m beginning to edge closer to Montaigne’s view of solitude, which can be best summed up by these two sentences:

We have lived enough for others; let us live at least this remaining bit of life for ourselves. Let us bring back our thoughts and plans to ourselves and our well-being.

I’ve written many words through the years about what Montaigne meant by his, but what meaning do they hold for me? For me, there are a number of issues converging at once.

Living enough for others resonates. I still have obligations, family and professional, that I cannot step away from … but I can limit how much of myself I’m wiling to surrender. There’s no need for me to perform my abilities anymore. I know my role as a father and there’s no need for me to exceed my professional mandate, to voluntarily take on tasks that others have ignored.

So, I accept that part of Montaigne’s argument. However, the “remaining bit of life” part of Montaigne’s formulation seems to me like a trap. I doubt that I’m anywhere close to the end of life, and even if I were, full-on retirement would not suit me. However, horizons do tend to close later in life. I no longer expect to achieve more or, if I did, to be properly recognized for the achievements.

Bringing back thoughts and values to myself is what I have done with my writing projects, especially over the last three years. It’s interesting that Montaigne also ties this to personal well-being. That might be the most interesting formulation here, but also the most difficult, because personal well-being is increasingly dependent on social constructs.

Technically, nothing prevents us from retreating to a tower with paper and pen, musing on the things we’ve read and seen. But we don’t tend to express ourselves in such a low-tech manner these days, we use technologies. And when we communicate, we express ourselves within a financial and technological system that shapes the boundaries of what Charles Taylor called a “social imaginary.”

We can still find joy in images and words that extol the natural world, even when those images are brought back to us from satellites and spacecrafts. But that is not the world we come into contact with day by day. We have to plan escapes to experience the natural world, few of us wake up each day immersed in it.

So, we live in a financial/technological world that is designed to shape shift constantly, and that world is increasingly difficult to comprehend. The ever-changing nature of this world works to prevent us from having a coherent worldview.

Given this, perhaps the best we can do is to remain true to our core beliefs. Yesterday, I finally got around to watching Terrence Malick’s 2019 film “A Hidden Life,” about an Austrian farmer during World War II who refused to pledge loyalty to Adolf Hitler, even at the price of his life.

At several points during the story, characters remind the protagonist that his personal refusal amounts to nothing—no one knows what he’s doing, people don’t actually believe the oaths they give, his refusal to serve just means another must take his place and his death will to nothing to change the reality of the moment. All of these arguments are true, yet ultimately irrelevant to him. He holds firm to the view that a human being cannot be free without the ability to live to values.

Consider the alternative, holding onto nothing, adjusting your life purely to the rhythm of the world. This is what the financial/technological world asks of us. And these systems have now created alternative narratives about the world we’re moving into:

1. The financial. The United States is $40 trillion in debt and the situation is getting progressively worse. The Trump administration is asking for a 50% increase in defense spending, last year’s tax cut bill further eroded our tax base, and we are less than 10 years away from the Social Security trust fund running out and massive automatic payment cuts being implemented.

2. The technological. AI companies tell us that we are only a few years away from a massive leap in capabilities for AI systems that will lead to an exponential leap in the performance of these systems. Elon Musk is saying that people shouldn’t even bother to plan for retirement because money will become meaningless soon.

How can an individual who “goes with the flow” navigate these overwhelming and conflicting realities? Do you protect yourself and build up your personal savings, or will that money be meaningless soon? Do you acquire new workplace skills or prepare for a non-work future? Most of all, do you assume that other people, smarter than you, will solve the world’s great problems?

We cannot trust that these are foundational realities to shape our thoughts around—they are ideological, often self-serving interpretations of facts that force us towards the conclusions that the narrative shapers wish us to follow.

I call this narrative cramming — full visions of the future that try to force individuals to accepting a point of view about the world because there’s no alternative. One form of it is the “Primal Forces of Nature” speech in the movie “Network,” where a corporate executive named Arthur Jensen demands that Howard Beale accept the reality that the flow of petrodollars is the only force in the world that matters.

Narrative cramming is important to the solitude discussion, because belief systems like these make it impossible to step away from the world and focus on our lives. The narratives are intended to disrupt personal choice and opinion. They are screaming at you that continuing with whatever we consider to be our everyday joyful existence cannot continue. The world has bigger, more important plans.

Just having thoughts about the world will not help. Ideology will only give us a guide for accepting or rejecting the given narratives. Ideologies give comfort, but they do not ease the anxiety of an age built on disruption and risk. We can only govern ourselves and that governance is built on values.

Why can’t we also apply our values to politics? For one, the world of power and money does not care about our values, it only cares about our compliance. Especially in the United States, where we live under a binary partisan system, our opinions only matter to the extent that we validate one side and, ideally for them, also help fund their campaign endeavors. Politicians eagerly seek public opinion to win support, but don’t expect to find wisdom in the process, just means to manipulate.

But even more important than the nature of contemporary electoral politics, it is important to understand that values often shift with realities. To be sane in the contemporary world is to hold contradictory opinions about the right steps to take, depending on reality.

Go back to those two scenarios. In the financially-centered scenario, we are indeed in a situation where a debt crisis is looking dangerous and perhaps inevitable. If this is the case, the only rational course is to become a limited government conservative. We need to cut our spending drastically — including to national defense, by the way. And we probably also need to implement a wealth tax to capture the extreme wealth of billionaires, without expecting any new government services from that revenue. The new taxes would be intended purely to keep commitments we have already made. This is, actually, the course New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani finds himself in right now, unable to implement campaign promises like free buses, but desperately in need of the revenue sources he pointed out to pay for the promises.

Then there’s the technologist’s vision. If the AI evangelists are correct and we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution that will lead to abundant wealth and resources for everyone, then everything the American left is considering to improve the quality of life, including the proposals from Mayor Mamdani, are woefully inadequate.

If money is no longer an object, concentration of wealth and power is the only issue to consider. If money is not an object for anything we need, then it should be shared freely, not just within our borders, but globally. People will still find other ways to compete in this new world. We’ll still have religions and regional rivalries. Politics will not dissolve. But money no longer needs to keep score in society, we can do that in other ways. The techno-utopian vision is as close to Marx’s definition of communism that we could hope to achieve. In this future, we won’t need a market (or efficiency) to take care of human needs.

These two scenarios set the terms for the future of American politics, because finance and technology have dominated the world since the end of the Cold War. And these two forces are telling us that, in the very near future, we are facing either an extended period of difficult, painful austerity similar to what the UK has lived through the past 10-15 years — or we’re entering a period of superabundance that, for those who believe in an egalitarian form of government, demands we take the most radical action possible to limit the concentration of wealth and power.

Perhaps there is a third vision of the world out there — or some hybrid of these scenarios, but it’s important to point out that no one left-of-center has come anywhere close to articulating what an alternative future might look like, and time is running out for the left to have a meaningful voice in the future. What the left seems to be embracing right now is a belief that we can continue to muddle through America’s debt problems, incrementally improve government services like health care and education, protect Social Security and restore some level of institutional reliability and competence to our government — and maybe use the increased productivity of the AI era to pay for these small changes in a way that somewhat limits the power and wealth of the technologists.

The closest the Democratic Party came to making this approach sound workable and appealing was in the second term of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Clinton seemed to have moved the Democratic Party to a place where it could benefit from both financial and technological growth. The nation was also running a budget surplus. And the final major war of Clinton’s term, against Serbia, was won without a single American casualty.

The problem with Clinton’s co-optation approach is that it simply doesn’t work. The prosperity of the late 1990s was not enough to put Vice President Al Gore over the finish line and keep these policies in place. The American people preferred lower taxes to balanced budgets and a turn towards technologically-supported business practices like outsourcing came rushing in during George W. Bush’s deregulation friendly era.

The Democrats have only returned to power since then as a result of global catastrophes — the lost Iraq War and the financial crisis of 2008, then the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The Democrats have never been rewarded for a stay-the-course approach to American politics. The American people are not satisfied with the status quo and don’t believe in fighting for it, even at the risk of inviting authoritarianism through the front door.

Absent a vision, the people perish. The left’s greatest failure since the end of the Cold War is its inability to articulate anything that approaches an alternative to the dominance of the financial and technology sectors. The left’s naive belief that it could co-opt Wall Street and Silicon Valley—and that money people would never embrace the authoritarian right, even if doing so could massively improve their short term wealth and power—has created the current crisis.

Which brings me back to where we began, in Montaigne’s solitude. An individual cannot reshape the world through their own values or with their own narrative. As Tolstoy argued persuasively, the values of a culture are shaped by the simple, everyday lives and choices of individuals, not the grand plans and campaigns of Great Men.

We have no way of knowing if the grand narratives before us are true and we are helpless to find alternatives absent the ability of political leaders to stop seeking narrow victories and instead focus on articulating an alternate vision of our future. As individuals, we can do nothing but plant our personal flags in the ground.

These flags are built on faith, morality, ethics, hopes and dreams. We don’t plant them with any false hope that they will change in the world. Our best hope is that if people choose to think for themselves and not surrender to what the wealth and power of the world want them to do, our own story will emerge.

Tolstoy believed that this force rose up to defeat Napoleon’s invasion—not the maneuvers of generals or visions of Tsars. And it is what George Eliot had in mind when she wrote of the “unhistoric acts” of those who faithfully lived “a hidden life.”

We cannot expect a messiah or an ideology or a technology to save us. We are left to our values and our stubborn refusal to let anyone speak for us. If we have optimism about anything, it should be in the power of our collective embrace of values, our ability to shut ourselves off from the narratives of the world and stubbornly declare that our humanity matters.