In the fall of 2016--the year in which the proportion of online adults using social media reached eighty per cent--I published an Op-Ed in the Times that questioned the popular conception that you need to cultivate a strong social-media brand to succeed in the job market. "I think this behavior is misguided," I wrote. "In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable." I suggested that knowledge workers instead spend time developing useful skills, with the goal of distinguishing themselves in their chosen fields.

How to Unplug from the World-Gobbling Machine One year ago, on March 19, 2020, I took a walk in my neighborhood park, seeking to clear my mind. The governor had declared a state of emergency 11 days ago in response to the WHO's pronouncement of a global coronavirus pandemic. In the week that followed, I voluntarily transferred my counseling practice to video-only sessions, doing my part to participate in the "two weeks to flatten the curve" campaign that had spread virally via social media and other means of internet delivery. After all, "We're all in this together," I thought. But during my first week of teletherapy sessions, a new, involuntary form of curve-flattening had begun to sweep the country, starting in the California Bay Area, in imitation of the Chinese and Italian lockdowns. Earlier that day the California Governor had extended this lockdown to cover the entire state by executive decree. It seemed only a matter of time before the Oregon Governor would follow suit (she did ...

On February 26, 1928, a headline in the New York Times announced, "MARCH OF THE MACHINE MAKES IDLE HANDS," with the subhead: "Prevalence of Unemployment With Greatly Increased Industrial Output Points to the Influence of Labor-Saving Devices as an Underlying Cause." What these alarming words referred to was the abundance of goods being produced in the roaring plants, mills and farm fields of 1920s America. According to a variety of statistics cited and charted by the Times, what Americans could now make was beginning to outstrip what they could consume, to the point of diminishing employment. "More and more the finger of suspicion points to the machine," the Times reporter, Evan Clark, claimed. "It begins to look as if machines had come into conflict with men--as if the onward march of machines into every corner of our industrial life had driven men out of the factory and into the ranks of the unemployed."