Tony Woodlief reviews a book that claims to answer the problem of our loneliness “in a world mediated by screens,” but doesn’t appear to be comfortable with any answer it offers.

And so we move from confusion to confusion, with Jacobsen dipping his toe into a deep topic only to withdraw it, his attention suddenly drawn elsewhere. “Why are we so busy all the time?” he asks. Fear of death is the answer he lands on, only to back immediately away: “Regardless of whether a fear of death is behind the busy condition,” he writes, we’re busy. Then he jumps to other causes: fragmentation, consumerism, acedia. It gets worse; by the end of the chapter, he’s blaming the acedia on the fragmentation and consumerism. In Jacobsen’s narrative a primary cause is a possible cause is a consequence is an OH LOOK, A SQUIRREL.