Comment by pgwhalen

I mean this earnestly, and not as some sort of comeback: what would “checking” this behavior look like? What is gone in society now that checked it in the past?

I’m sympathetic to this view but I can’t really make it a coherent theory in my head. When people talk about it on the internet it doesn’t seem to go very far beyond “something changed after Covid” and maybe “social media is to blame” but those two observations don’t make for much of a theory.