Émile Durkheim coined 'anomie' to describe a condition where the moral rules that guide behaviour break down. In periods of rapid social change—industrial booms, economic crashes, sudden liberation—individuals lose the shared expectations that once told them how much to want and how to act. Durkheim argued that human desires are potentially infinite; society's role is to regulate them. When that regulation fails, people feel adrift, and rates of suicide, deviance, and despair rise.
This idea remains startlingly modern. The digital economy, gig work, and constant comparison online produce their own anomic drift: goals feel limitless yet ungrounded. Durkheim's insight was that freedom without shared meaning can become a source of suffering, not liberation.