The Ensh*ttification of Everything

Why Everyday Life Can Feel Worse Amid Material Progress

The video examines why people can live amid unprecedented material progress and still feel that everyday life is getting worse. It calls this mismatch “enshittification”: economic measures may show greater affordability, access, or efficiency, while the actual experience of using goods and services deteriorates.

Examples include air travel, streaming, search engines, appliances, and online shopping. Lower headline prices or wider access can conceal stripped-down service, extra fees, advertising, and products designed to be difficult or expensive to repair.

Four Forces Behind the Decline

1. Platform lock-in: Companies offer unusually attractive deals to build user habits. Once people and businesses depend on their platforms, companies add ads, raise prices, and charge sellers for visibility and access. Switching costs make it difficult to leave, even as the service worsens.

2. Private equity takeovers: Firms buy essential local businesses using debt, then cut staff, raise prices, and extract fees. The speaker argues that this is especially damaging in areas such as veterinary care, hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral services, where customers often have little time or ability to shop around. The video cites research associating nursing-home acquisitions with increased resident mortality.

3. Baumol’s cost disease: Some work—such as teaching, nursing, childcare, and live performance—cannot become much more productive without reducing the human attention it requires. Wages in these fields still have to compete with those in more productive sectors, so costs rise even when output does not. This helps explain why technology gets cheaper while human services become less affordable.

4. The loss of shared social resources: The speaker argues that community support, public services, and social connections that once helped people care for children, meet partners, or access good schools have weakened. People increasingly have to buy substitutes, turning formerly shared or informal support into commercial transactions. Those transactions count as economic growth even when the underlying community has diminished.

Progress and Everyday Experience

The video also acknowledges genuine long-term gains: lower infant mortality and extreme poverty, longer life expectancy, declining violence, and the eradication of smallpox.

Its conclusion is that both realities can be true. Humanity has made major progress at the macro level, while many people experience worsening conditions in the micro details of daily life, such as rent, healthcare, search results, and the cost of care. Broad statistics describe trends, but people feel their everyday circumstances most directly.

Presenters and Contributors

• Presenter and narrator: Mark Manson
• Thinkers referenced: Cory Doctorow, William Baumol, and Johann Hari