Sociology to Save Your Life: Anomie
The Sunday scaries of the soul
“Meet a Wes Anderson protagonist. He’s definitely not a woman, but an emotionally stunted man, dealing with a vague bout of ennui.”
-Honest Trailers, Every Wes Anderson Movie
Lester Freamon: Tell me something, Jimmy. How exactly do you think it all ends?
Jimmy McNulty: What do you mean?
Freamon: A parade? A gold watch? A shining Jimmy-McNulty-day moment, when you bring in a case sooooo sweet everybody gets together and says, “Aw, shit! He was right all along. Should’ve listened to the man.” The job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole, it won’t fill your ass up.
McNulty: I dunno, a good case -
Freamon: Ends. They all end. The handcuffs go click and it’s over. The next morning, it’s just you in your room with yourself.
-The Wire
The Monday malaise
Mondays hit me like a freight train.
The biggest contrarians I know and people that claim to love their jobs will both agree that they hate Mondays.
The reasons are obvious. Mondays are a harsh wake-up call. After two days of leisure, they’re a jarring reminder of the constraints, frustrations, and petty annoyances that come with earning a living.
Ragging on Mondays is satisfying, but it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
I’m more troubled by the Sunday scaries. If we hate Mondays so much, why let that hate infect our Sundays, too?
As the frontier between weekend and workweek, Sunday’s real challenge lies in deciding how to spend our dwindling free time. Do we let anxiety about the week win, spending Sunday night responding to emails in bed? Do we treat leisure like work, joylessly jackhammering through errands as if they’re another Asana to-do list? Or do we surrender to hedonism and embrace the 30-something Olympic sport of day drinking?
My point isn’t that any of these outcomes are wrong. It’s that without clear norms—whether Sunday is for chores, family, God, or football—it’s easy to feel lost, falling between what we wanted, needed, or expected to do.
The distinct distress of the Sunday scaries comes from the disconnect between how we spend our time and how we think we should. Often, we end up in a psychosocial no-man’s-land: working when we think we should be resting, resting when we think we should be working, or mistaking activities like drinking for rest—only to feel more drained. Clearer social norms could help ease these mix-ups.
Ironically, even constrictive assumptions—like Sunday being reserved for church, football, or Bud Light—free us by removing the burden of deciding how to spend the day. The happiest people on Sundays aren’t those who spent the day tidying, crushing crispy boys, or hiking, but those who don’t feel like they have to second-guess or defend how they spent it.
Social norms are a hell of a drug.
What is “Norm-lessness” and why is it a problem?
Sociology emerged at the frontier of modernity, straddling established disciplines like economics, history, and philosophy. Fittingly, one of its earliest pioneers, Émile Durkheim, came from Lorraine, a border region between France and Germany—mirroring sociology’s own position on the borders of other disciplines.
Like Marx and Weber, Durkheim was concerned by how modernity was distorting social life. He explored this in two groundbreaking works: The Division of Labor in Society, which examines how changing social structures impact solidarity, and Suicide, which focuses on the consequences of disintegrating social norms. In Suicide, he analyzed its causes by comparing rates across geographic areas, time periods, and religions. Durkheim identified four social causes of suicide:
Egoistic: When someone feels lonely or isolated, like a hermit.
Altruistic: When identity is so tied to a group that one sacrifices their life for it, like a soldier or suicide bomber.
Fatalistic: When someone feels trapped with no freedom or control, as in a prisoner or cult member.
Anomic: When disconnection from social norms leaves someone aimless, like a factory worker facing unemployment.
Durkheim defined anomie as the aimlessness and disconnection that arise when shared norms break down, leaving us unmoored. He argued that Protestants experienced more anomie than Catholics, and thus higher suicide rates, due to Catholicism’s stronger community, clearer doctrines, and centralized authority. Whether this claim holds up is less important than his broader insight: complex issues like suicide are best understood as social phenomena, not just individual choices.
Through anomie, Durkheim demonstrated that social norms—however intangible—have real, material consequences, especially during periods of rapid change. Modernity is perilous not just because of economic instability but because so many of us must navigate it without shared norms to ground us.
Anomie & me
I had nearly forgotten this esoteric part of my college education until I felt overwhelming despair after quitting my job as a line cook at 24.
I had no clue what came next.
The only certainty was that I never wanted to cook professionally again.
I thought quitting cooking would bring an influx of time, energy, and motivation to figure out my next step.
Instead, I experienced a near-total implosion of my sense of self.
I gave in to my worst habits: staying up late, sleeping in, drinking too much, accomplishing too little, and languishing in a self-made swamp of melancholy. Looking back now, I see how foolish—bordering on dangerous—it was to strip away the norms grounding my life without replacing them with something else.
Nature abhors a vacuum; human nature doubly so.
Even a job you hate offers structure and purpose in addition to a paycheck. The hardest part of necessary change isn’t the work—it’s the novelty and vulnerability of it all. As I wrote in my recent take on therapy, “We prefer to be miserable in familiar ways rather than be uncomfortable in new ways.” Losing the scaffolding of norms—whether from a job, relationship, or family role—can leave people after a layoff, breakup, or becoming an empty nester facing a challenge they’re not prepared for.
Men, whose identities often hinge on being workers or providers, are especially vulnerable to the destructive potential of anomie. In “The Men—and Boys—Are Not Alright,” an episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Richard Reeves dives into why. The most sobering detail comes from a British Medical Journal study examining the words men used to describe themselves before suicide. The two words they most commonly used were “useless” and “worthless.” Reeves explains that, unlike women—whose identities are often “diversified” across roles like friend, mother, worker, or hobbyist—men over-index on the singular identity of father and provider. As a result, men who lose their role as providers often have no other identity or norms to ground them. The result is a crisis, plunging your sense of self into an abyss of ambiguity, where falling too far is quite literally fatal.
Is busyness the antidote to anomie—or just another symptom of it?
Some people have packed work schedules or demanding family lives, that mean they are simply too busy to have this kind of identity crisis. Anomie cannot touch them, it seems, because it’s so abundantly clear what they need to be doing and what their top priorities are at all times. If anything, they’d benefit from a bit more time without clear social norms.
This is true, to a point.
It does explain why hobbies, quite literally chosen work, are so useful, especially for those in need of new direction and structure, like retirees, people between jobs, or new arrivals to a city. Run clubs offer 20-somethings exercise with built-in dating prospects while pickleball gives retirees a low-impact way to keep their joints limber while making new friends. Hobbies help us distill meaning from busyness. What matters isn’t that they add to your to-do list, but that they offer clarity, focus, and connection in return.
This is a key distinction, because if merely being busy was enough to be satisfied, Americans would be happier than ever. Instead, the opposite appears to be true.
Still, if you ask most people how they’re doing, the response you’re most likely to get is busy. When you ask when they’ll be free to hang out, they’ll say three years from now on February 32nd, under the full moon. The American state of being terminally busy has well-documented downsides, but it persists in large part because it’s an effective way to keep anomie at bay. As Tim Kreider writes in his viral essay “The Busy Trap,”
“Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.”
Though busyness is often framed or experienced as inevitable, it’s just one possible way to live—reflecting the norms we’ve chosen to prioritize and those we’ve chosen to neglect. I also believe that it’s actively sowing the seeds for even more anomie.
If you are overscheduled, whether deliberately or incidentally, you never have to slow down and hear yourself think.
You never stop to wonder what all this is for.
This can feel like a blessing in the short term that becomes a curse over time.
Like Jimmy McNulty, the workaholic detective in The Wire I quoted to start this essay, busyness can fool you into mistaking productivity for identity, activity for progress, and constant motion for meaning.
Without the time and quiet to arrive at a clear “why” you can cover countless miles before realizing you’ve been heading in the wrong direction all along.
Ultimately, everyone must confront the question of what it’s all for—whether at retirement, when kids leave the house, or after losing a loved one.
Life excels at giving you a chain of changes and crises to react to, but will never give you enduring norms to help you navigate them.
These must come from within or be cultivated by community or they will never appear.
American Anomie
More recently, I’ve come to see anomie as not just a useful concept for better navigating life transitions, but also as one of the most prevalent and troubling features of modern American life.
America is dominated by anomie.
Put simply, the one thing all 50 states can agree on is that we have very little in common.
Consider how COVID-19—a public health crisis that could have unified us—only drove Americans further apart, with business shutdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine rollouts turning into politicized shouting matches rather than unifying public health efforts.
January 6th was the clearest embodiment of collective anomie I’ve seen in my lifetime—a violent march on the Capitol that signaled participants no longer viewed our shared political norms as legitimate. For it to unfold this way, we first had to lose trust in the electoral process, the government, and the media.
How did it come to this?
A simple but compelling explanation like the one Robert Putnam offers in Bowling Alone, attributes much of it to the decline in community engagement and the shared connections that once bound us together.
Where religion (like Catholicism) or shared culture (like Irish immigrants) once provided grounding norms and expectations, today the only universal norms left—beyond the law—are those dictated by the capitalist free market. This is compounded by America’s unique brand of individualism, which inherently rejects shared norms in favor of personal goals, preferences, and whims. Combine this with a media landscape that prioritizes inflammation over information—as sharper minds than mine have noted—and you have a recipe for a profoundly norm-less society.
The triumph of our “don’t tread on me” ethos—embodied in our suburban sprawl—has come at a cost.
Social norms aren’t just limiting.
They also clarify, ground, and empower us. Without them, we struggle to connect with our neighbors.
Modern America isn’t just polarized; we increasingly debate and legislate which words we can even use to discuss our problems.
It’s not just that we disagree on how to solve these problems or even how to describe them; we can’t even agree on what the problems are anymore.
Is America’s biggest issue illegal immigration, gun violence, cancel culture, affordable housing, income inequality, election integrity, AI, the opioid crisis, climate change, or trans athletes in sports?
I’m not here to answer any of these questions, but to observe how without common norms we turn complex, often interwoven challenges to a zero-sum battle for attention, fueling division instead of fostering solutions.
My point is that if we keep dodging our real problems with rhetoric instead of confronting them with concrete action, we risk sliding even deeper into anomic disarray.
Any attempt to bridge our divisions must begin with reestablishing shared norms—however fractured they may seem—and grounding them in something we can all recognize: our shared humanity.
History offers fascinating signposts in this regard. In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s recent passing, his famous “Crisis of Confidence” speech resurfaced online. In this 1979 address, Carter called out the entire country for embracing a culture of vapid, selfish materialism and consumption at the cost of our sense of community, warning of the dangers of losing faith in the power of government, institutions, and even ourselves to solve problems. What Carter described as a “national malaise” is what Durkheim would have identified as anomie. Perhaps even more striking than the speech’s prophetic accuracy is realizing how unlikely it is that any mainstream politician—let alone our 47th president—would dare to deliver such a message today.
It speaks to how deeply our national discourse has been shaped by the very forces of disconnection and distrust Carter sought to confront.
Politicians have come and gone, but anomie endures.
Effervesence (Wake me up inside)
I’m writing this post during perhaps the most anomie-drenched time of the year: the liminal, throwaway days between Christmas and New Year’s.
In past years, this lame-duck time has been a wintry mix of late-night bar outings with high school friends and hungover hikes with family and visitors the next day. This year, however, has been underwhelming. After catching the flu on Christmas Day, I canceled plans with friends and family and resigned myself to a Jabba the Hutt-like existence on the couch.
From this self-imposed exile, I’ve pondered what an antidote to anomie might look like and daydreamed about how 2025 could surpass its predecessor. That’s when I remembered one of Durkheim’s most uplifting contributions to sociology: the concept of collective effervescence.
In his 1912 work on religion, Durkheim described collective effervescence as the transcendent experience of individuals coming together for a ritual or ceremony, emerging with a profound sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. These experiences are the literal antidote to anomie because they reinforce rather than weaken social norms. While Durkheim was writing about religious worship, I’d argue you can find this exact experience at concerts, sports games, and protests as well.
With this lens, I don’t think it’s an accident that as America has become less and less religious, we’ve splintered into smaller identity groups chasing the same high offered by collective effervescence.
Musical festivals like Coachella and events like Burning Man have become a sort of secular pilgrimage. Fandoms like the friendship bracelet-clad swarms of Swifties provide an enduring identity, like-minded peers, and the transcendent experiences of concerts. Even chasing conspiracy theories as part of Q-Anon offers a sense of community, solidarity, and meaning—unsettling proof of how deeply we crave belonging more than the truth.
Whether you loathe Taylor Swift, Q-Anon, or both, you still must reckon with the universal draw to belong to something bigger, stronger, and more meaningful than our own petty and fleeting existences.
As our national identity frays and fragments into smaller and smaller pieces, it’s telling how drawn we all are to create and tend spaces that provide us with the norms and meaning we are deprived of elsewhere. As modernity bulldozes norms, we instinctively seek them out, chasing effervescence wherever and however we can find it.
When I think back on what felt truly meaningful to me in 2024, it’s the effervescent experiences that rise to the top: supporting a new NWSL team, exploring a new hobby and subculture, and the cozy quiet of playing a bird board game with friends. As I consider what I want to build, value, and practice in 2025, I find myself increasingly drawn to these kind of pursuits. In a bleak and broken country, carving out communities, nurturing them, and imbuing them with meaning isn’t just worthwhile—it’s one of the few tangible ways we can resist the entropy around us. For your sake, my sake, and everyone’s sake, let 2025 be a year where we seek and cultivate collective effervescence—not just as a reprieve from the chaos but as a foundation for rebuilding meaning and connection in our weary and fractured world.
Thank you for your instructive musings and wise words of counsel.