Here is a good dialogue between Derek Thompson and Agnes Callard, excerpt:

Callard: In general, goodness is more context-dependent than badness. There isn’t really anything that’s good all the time for everyone independent of context. Happiness depends on your context and who you are. There isn’t anything that will always make a person happy. But there are reliable ways to make people unhappy. There’s a set of evils that are close to universal: death, pain, illness, violence. Even if someone’s in very different circumstances from yours, if you see they’re being subjected to one of those, you can interpret it as suffering and understand it.

So we should predict that what we see on the internet, insofar as people are trying to be legible to large groups, is that they focus their attention on things that show up to everyone. Take two strangers on the internet trying to talk to each other. What are they going to coordinate on as a topic they can both care about? It’s likely going to be something bad.

And here is from Derek:

Here are some questions that I consider self-evidently compelling about the modern world:

• Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time?
• Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention?
• Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others?
• And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?

And more from Agnes:

With identity categories like woman, disabled, gay, Jewish, or American, the striking thing is that you are a member of those categories in every circumstance. There is no circumstance in which I stop being a woman. Identity is a hat you never take off. So identity is well suited to a uni-contextual world.

Worth pondering, interesting throughout.