(2025-08-10) Thompson 1910 The Year The Modern World Lost Its Mind

Derek Thompason on 1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind. “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.” - Octave Mirbeau, French novelist, 1910

many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own.

The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor

I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.

My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.

No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written

Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west.

Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.

In today’s TSMP, I want to share with you my favorite passages and lessons from The Vertigo Years, most of which come from the chapter on the year 1910

1. People in 1910 felt the world was moving much too fast

Transportation technology remade the west in a few short decades between the 1880s and 1910. A “bicycle craze” swept America in the 1890s. The Wright Brothers took flight in 1903. The first Model Ts rolled off Ford’s production lines in 1908.

Speed was a physical experience, Blom writes, and cultural critics of the early 1900s were confident that it was unnatural for people to move so quickly through space—women, in particular. A woman on a bicycle was a thing to be feared

2. Tech change created a surge in mental distress, which was called ‘American Nervousness’ (future shock)

Around the turn of the century, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the U.S. gradually made its way across the Atlantic

Europeans sometimes referred to it as “American Nervousness.”

As Blom points out, those afflicted tended to be white-collar workers working at the “frontiers of technology,” as “telephone operators, typesetters on new, faster machines, railway workers, engineers, [or] factory workers handling fast machines

In Germany, 40,375 patients were registered in mental hospitals in 1870. The number rose to 115,882 in 1900 and 220,881 in 1910

3. 1910-1913 was also a hinge point in art history

Blom deeply considers three artistic icons of the era: the composer Igor Stravinsky and the painters Vassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. Each sought to make art that felt simultaneously cutting-edge and primal. Each responded to the modern age by reaching for inspiration in the past.

Visual art was undergoing its own revolution, which may have been technological in origin. For thousands of years before the turn-of-the-century, the ability to perfectly represent nature been a rare skill possessed only by the most talented painters and drawers among us. But the Kodak camera (invented in 1888, with sales accelerating into the 1900s) turned the ability to capture realist images into a consumerist trifle. It cannot be a coincidence that the rise of abstract art coincided so perfectly with the proliferation of cheap camera technology

In the early 1900s, Vassily Kandinsky, one of the great pioneers of abstract art, pushed back against the mind-blurring speed of modernity.

Kandinsky is one of my favorite artists. But the critical response to the dawn of abstract painting was about as brutal as it gets.

Around the same time that Kandinsky was putting his mark on abstraction, Pablo Picasso was pioneering his own rejection of purely representative art, with primitivism.

What we call Modernism today was in most cases a reaction to modernity. It was an effort to excavate something ancient and honest about humanity in an age obsessed with and overrun by novelty.

4. Intellectuals in the early 1900s came up with new influential theories of human nature

Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud

In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism

It is easy to see how Sigmund Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid

Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed.

By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.

There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary