malaise

Addressing tech malaise has become a trend with authors and self-help coaches – such as Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone, who, during a $295, 50-minute phone call, will offer you advice on things like how to create roadblocks to checking your phone by putting a rubber band around your screen, and “think of the bigger picture” rather than what you’re missing on Twitter.

Their failure helped produce the widespread malaise reported by Thucydides: the Athenians "grieved over their private sufferings, the common people because, having started out with less, they were deprived even of that; the rich had lost their beautiful estates in the country, the houses as well as their expensive furnishings, but worst of all, they had war instead of peace" (2.65.2).