Astra Taylor



These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?

In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.

Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.


Coming Together as Things Fall Apart

The Age of Insecurity 

Nick Simson

Security is not something that we can achieve heroically or stoically through consumption or recycling, education, medicine, or mindfulness. We cannot breathe our way out of our thorny social problems, nor can we amass enough wealth to wholly buffer ourselves from them; social media sabbaths, however appealing and temporarily soothing, do nothing to change the insecurity-generating logic of the algorithms that deliver us content. These strategies all leave us embedded in systems designed to generate and profit from the very insecurities we hope to escape.

Manufactured insecurity reflects a cynical theory of human motivation, one that says people will work only under the threat of duress, not from an intrinsic desire to create, collaborate, and care for one another. Insecurity goads us to keep working, earning, and craving-craving money, material goods, prestige, and more, more, more.

Doug Belshaw &
The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor

Highlights

Join the club

Doug Belshaw &The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor

Highlights

Join the club

Doug Belshaw &
The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor