Travel to many different major cities around the world today, and you’ll notice a strange sense of sameness. The airports look about the same, the brands in the shopping malls look about the same, the short videos young people scroll through, the trends they chase, even the way they’re anxious — all about the same. The same chain coffee shops, the same gyms, the same batch of content pushed out by the same algorithms. Whether you’re sitting on the subway in New York or Shanghai, you’d struggle to find any real difference in the posture of someone looking down at their phone.
This kind of sameness is usually understood as progress brought about by globalization — information flows freely now, lifestyles converge, and everyone gets closer and closer to “a better life.” This reading sounds optimistic enough — after all, convergence is easy to interpret as “everyone finally living in the same, more civilized way.”
But ask one more question — what direction is this convergence actually heading toward — and the answer might not be so reassuring. That direction doesn’t seem to be “more meaningful.” It’s “more comfortable, healthier, more painless.”
These three words look fine on their own — after all, who doesn’t want to live a little more comfortably, a little more healthily, suffer a little less? Nearly every choice a person makes about their own life can be legitimately justified by these three words — choosing a less exhausting job, for health; choosing a less demanding relationship, for comfort; choosing a more carefree way of living, for less unnecessary pain. Taken individually, not one of these choices is wrong.
The problem is that if an entire civilization takes these three words as its ultimate pursuit, that pursuit will quietly crowd out something else — the kind of meaning that can only be reached by enduring discomfort, taking risks, going through pain. It’s not that this meaning suddenly disappears. It’s that once “painlessness” becomes the standard by which everything is measured, anything that still requires suffering to obtain gets judged, first, as “not worth it,” and then abandoned before it ever even begins.
Someone might say: pursuing comfort and health is something humans have been doing for thousands of years — what’s there to worry about? That’s true — pursuing comfort has never been new. What’s genuinely new is that this pursuit is, for the first time, happening simultaneously in nearly every country, every culture, in almost exactly the same way, at almost exactly the same speed.
In the past, different civilizations each had their own understanding of “the good life” — some valued the continuation of family lineage, some valued devotion to faith, some valued a certain sense of honor. These understandings differed from each other, sometimes even conflicted with each other, but it was precisely this difference that gave each way of living its own distinct weight. Now, these once-divergent understandings are slowly being paved over by a single, simpler, more easily grasped standard.
Thinking about it this way, what globalization has actually spread may not be some specific lifestyle, but an entire implicit standard for “what counts as a good life” — and no matter which political system this standard lands in, the result ends up looking about the same.
The more a society treats “painlessness” as the standard of happiness, the more easily people in that society come to judge every choice that could bring meaning, but also brings pain, as irrational, not worth it. Raising a child is hard. Investing in a relationship that needs years of working things out is hard. Holding on to an ideal for years with no guarantee of success is hard.
Measured against the standard of “comfort,” almost none of these things will look like the smart choice. Slowly, more and more people will instinctively steer clear of them — not because they don’t want them, but because the ruler used to measure them has already been quietly swapped out.
Nietzsche’s “last man” — that figure who seeks only ease, gives up every higher pursuit, wants nothing but a comfortable life, and refuses to take any more risks. Read in its own context, over a hundred years ago, this description probably still carried a note of warning. Read today, it sounds more like a description of a way of life that’s already widespread, even broadly embraced. This isn’t the sickness of any one country. It’s the direction an entire civilization is choosing, together.
What’s worth thinking about one layer further is that this convergence is often packaged as proof of progress — everyone becoming more and more alike gets interpreted as everyone becoming more modern, more civilized. But if this “alikeness” is actually pointing toward the same kind of numbness, then this story of progress might have the direction exactly backwards.
What globalization has truly unified isn’t some shared progress. It’s a shared numbness. Different countries, different systems, different histories are all being ground down, by the same logic of “avoid all discomfort,” into increasingly similar shapes.
This similarity isn’t because everyone is growing closer to one another. It’s because everyone is moving away, together, from the very thing that once made each civilization distinct, and each one weightier — different civilizations used to take their shape precisely from what each one was willing to endure pain for. And once every civilization starts avoiding the same kind of pain, what’s left is a hollowness that looks diverse on the surface but is, at its core, startlingly identical.
Airports can be built to look alike. Malls can be opened to look alike. But once even the judgment of “what’s worth suffering for” becomes the same, what’s left of the difference may be nothing more than a difference in interior decoration — no longer, in any real sense, a different way of living at all.