At Christmas in 2015, the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander wrote a post about his experience treating people “in a wealthy, mostly white college town consistently ranked one of the best places to live in the country.” Despite being in the sort of place that both the intersectional left and the populist right would reasonably identify as wildly privileged, Alexander wrote, his practice was dominated by people with “problems that would seem overwrought if they were in a novel, and made-up if they were in a thinkpiece on ‘The Fragmentation of American Society.’ ”

He went on to argue that these encounters were not just an artifact of his vocation — that actually, by virtue of being a psychiatrist, he was getting a more accurate look at how bad things can get in a comfortable part of the United States than a basically healthy person circulating among basically healthy people might realize.

For personal reasons his essay resonated strongly with me at the time, and particularly his point about how Americans tend to “filter for misery” in the same way we filter for political agreement in our increasingly self-segregated social worlds.

This misery filter is partially a function of the other forms of segregation. Think of how upper-class America didn’t notice the crescendo of misery that became the opioid epidemic until the Trump phenomenon sent journalists out to the hinterland looking for an explanation. Or how partisanship encourages us to downplay suffering within the rival political coalition — to imagine Republican “whiteness” as one long suburban barbecue, or life on the liberal coasts as all Georgetown cocktail parties and welfare-queen idylls.