The Malady of Our Time

He moves stiffly, almost robotically, while speaking excitedly to a lady near the Mirafiori farmhouse in Turin. «I’m out of work; today I went to the employment center and they told me you have to apply for NASPI and register on SIISL, then go to EDO and then contact temporary agencies for training. I asked, excuse me, what are you talking about? I’m here for a job». The lady replies that he must think of himself, of his mother, «I know, but for me doing nothing is worse than going to war». He returns alone, swaying on his steps through the large gate. This is because today we tend to isolate psychic pain from its historical and material roots, focusing on the biographies of those who suffer instead of the contexts that generate suffering.

According to the DSM, the “bible” of psychiatry, depression is characterized by: depressed mood for most of the day, anhedonia, insomnia or hypersomnia, fatigue, excessive guilt, recurring thoughts of death. But in that list, so orderly, the context in which those symptoms emerge is missing. The quality of the experience is not there, nor are its historical, social, or biographical causes. Furthermore, those who live in contexts that restrict time, bonds, and pleasure do not complain: they withdraw. They do not ask for help: they stop participating.

«It is no coincidence, says Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, that depression is so widespread today. In fact, it is necessary that it be so». If depression is everywhere, it is because an air of generalized exhaustion, of affective precariousness, of the wearing down of meaning is breathed everywhere. It is the emotional condition consistent with a system that exhausts, atomizes, and defuses conflict. In many cases, what we call depression increasingly resembles a form of adaptation: a mass resignation, anesthetized but pervasive, resembling a collective numbness of desire. A condition that is not experienced as an emergency, but as normalcy: one works anyway, produces anyway, moves forward anyway. Not that everything is terrible, but that it will always be this way. This is the hardest idea to uproot: that the current state of affairs is inevitable.

It is a demon that does not take away sleep: it makes it opaque. It does not impose silence: it camouflages it in background noise. And if malaise has social dynamics – emotional contagion, anomie, information overload – then the environment in which we live can also extinguish or fuel it: this is where urban space and social infrastructures come into play. It is difficult to heal in a place that does not allow for meeting. Our cities seem designed to keep us separate: benches without shade, empty but guarded squares, courtyards closed to those who don’t live there. Public spaces are reduced to transit corridors, while resting places are privatized and people meet only to consume. Thus, pleasure becomes a solitary act, and desire a performance to be optimized. But if the malaise is collective, the cure must be too. Without going to war.

Fabrizio Floris
NP February 2026