The Fall of the Default
How the old social, moral, and technological scaffolds came apart and why freedom now feels heavier than it used to
If The Age of the Default gave people ready-made maps, traditions that told you who you were, what mattered, and where you belonged, the fall of the default begins the moment those maps stop matching the terrain. It didn’t happen in a single century or with a single revolution. It was more like a long thinning of the atmosphere: the old certainties still visible, but no longer breathable. The rituals, roles, and hierarchies that once held the world together began to loosen, fray, and finally slip through our fingers.
This section is the story of that unraveling: philosophical, social, technological, economic, and the strange kind of freedom and fatigue that followed.
The earliest cracks appeared in philosophy. For centuries, people lived inside inherited meaning. Morals were passed from scripture, kings ruled by divine right, and tradition carried moral authority simply by existing. But the Enlightenment flipped the source of meaning inward.
Kant famously urged humanity to dare to know, to grow up and think without leaning on external guardians. Autonomy wasn’t just a political idea; it was a spiritual one. If each one of us were capable of rational moral judgment, then the foundations of identity no longer needed the church or the monarchy. Rousseau, restless as always, pressed the point even further: perhaps society was the corruptor, and true moral life came from within.
But with every liberation comes a quiet loss. When Nietzsche wrote that God is dead, he wasn’t announcing a celebration, but he was diagnosing the vacuum. If the transcendent source of value collapses, what fills the space? Nietzsche saw the danger clearly: if humanity is now responsible for creating meaning rather than receiving it, the burden could crush most people long before it emancipates them.
Sartre pushed the logic to its final edge: no essence, only existence. We are condemned to be free, responsible for everything we do and everything we fail to do. Freedom becomes gravity.
The spread of these ideas was never smooth or equal. What we now call modernity didn’t simply radiate outward like sunlight; it arrived through invasions. Enlightenment language about reason and autonomy travelled alongside empires, landing in places where people already had their own rituals and moral vocabularies. In many regions, you ended up with a strange overlap: local traditions still holding the community together, while imported notions of the sovereign individual sat awkwardly on top of them. Freedom arrived as both promise and disturbance. You can still see the tension today where modern selfhood is layered over much older ways of understanding the world.
And as these philosophical shifts seeped into everyday life, they finally ran straight into the old social scripts. By the mid-twentieth century, the demand for personal agency was no longer abstract theory; it was something people wanted in their homes, in their bodies, in their relationships. Feminism, in particular, struck at one of the oldest defaults on earth: the assumption that women existed to serve, to care, to keep quiet. Those roles didn’t disappear overnight, but women began pushing against them in ways that felt irreversible. The expectation of silence became impossible to enforce. Ambition, desire, refusal, and all the things that had been hidden came into the open, and nothing in the family or the workplace ever looked the same again.
The counterculture of the 1960s in the U.S. in Europe, and even in parts of Asia and Latin America challenged authority on every front: the state, the corporation, the military, the family, and even rationality itself. The message was blunt: you do not have to be what you were told to be.
Globalization added another layer. Borders were blurred. Traditions collided with new images, new languages, and new ways of living. Anthony Giddens described this shift as reflexive modernity: a condition in which identity becomes a project rather than a given. Life must be continually interpreted, curated, and justified.
For many people, these revolutions felt like stepping into bright sunlight after a long night: liberating, intoxicating, and disorienting all at once. The old rules had been oppressive, but they were also familiar. Once they disappeared, people discovered that freedom brings its own unease. A life without boundaries is not peaceful; it is noisy with possibility.
And yet, not every default vanished. Some simply mutated. Religion reassembled itself into digital communities, nationalism found new life online, and corporations borrowed the language of meaning and purpose to build cultures of their own. The default didn’t die; it scattered, resurfacing in new shapes and new disguises.
While culture was reinventing itself, the economic world quietly rewrote the terms of human life. Industrial capitalism pulled people out of traditional communities and placed them into markets and factories. Late capitalism went further: it individualized everything. Work became identity, consumption became self-expression, and the economy turned the language of creativity, authenticity, and freedom into management principles.
Boltanski and Chiapello famously argued that capitalism absorbed the critiques of the 1960s: flexibility, experimentation, and personal freedom, and turned them into fuel. Be yourself, once rebellious, became an advertisement. Break the rules, once countercultural, became corporate branding.
Zygmunt Bauman described this new condition as liquid modernity: institutions melt, jobs disappear into gigs, relationships lose their solidity, and the self must stay mobile just to survive. Everything solid becomes optional. Everything optional becomes mandatory.
And then came the digital acceleration. Technology promised liberation, information for all, and connection for all, but it also fragmented time, attention, and identity. Algorithms replaced traditions as the new unseen authorities. Choices no longer came from family or faith but from feeds. Platforms turned the self into a stream of impressions. Data learned us faster than we learned ourselves. The digital self, curated and optimized, began to drift away from the embodied self.
Industrialization separated labor from home; the digital revolution separated identity from continuity. The result is a strange alienation: you are everywhere and nowhere, visible and unseen, hyper-connected and still lonely.
People rarely describe this explicitly. But you can feel it in the background hum of modern life, that mild, persistent unease. A sense of being watched but misunderstood, busy but unanchored, expressive but scattered. We gained a whole new world and lost the feeling of having a place in it.
With the collapse of defaults, we enter the age of too much freedom. The old boundaries are gone; every path is open; every identity negotiable. But when everything is possible, nothing feels stable.
This is Sartre’s existential freedom scaled to an entire civilization: always choosing, always performing, always revising. Every decision carries extra weight because there is no background authority to lean on. You must invent the meaning, justify the choice, and then live with the uncertainty that you could have chosen differently.
Bauman called this liquid fear: anxiety not rooted in any single threat, but in the instability of everything.
In the global south, the overload often appears differently as a tension between inherited community structures and imported ideals of individualism. The modern self in Delhi, Lagos, Manila, or São Paulo often inhabits two worlds: one communal, one digital; one ancestral, one globalized; one rooted, one liquid. Navigating both creates a unique, quiet strain.
Eventually, the freedom that was meant to liberate becomes overwhelming. People burn out from the endless task of self-invention.
As defaults dissolve and choices multiply, identity splinters. The self becomes a shifting mosaic of roles: professional, political, aesthetic, digital. Each context demands a different persona, a different version. Authenticity becomes a kind of performance that is not dishonest, just unstable.
One scroll online spans heartbreak, activism, jokes, disasters, beauty, and horror. The human mind wasn’t built for that kind of oscillation. Continuity falters.
Nietzsche warned that when the highest values crumble, we face nihilism, not dramatic despair but a dulled sense that nothing holds together. It’s not that people don’t care; it’s that the world offers too many directions to care about at once.
Even rebellion loses its teeth. The system catches dissent, turns it into aesthetic, and sells it back. The algorithm doesn’t crush counterculture; it monetizes it.
And this is where the fall of the default ultimately leads: not into chaos, but into exhaustion.
This post is the story of how we lost the defaults. The next post will be the story of what that loss does to the mind and heart. What happens when autonomy becomes obligation? When does choice become a burden? When must meaning be engineered rather than inherited?
The next post explores that terrain: The Psychology of Freedom Fatigue, where the philosophical collapse becomes deeply personal, emotional, and everyday.