The first entry in this series attempts to generalize the particulars of human life as occurring within four distinct spheres of activity: the private, the social, the public, and the transcendent. This classification system is intended to establish a useful and at least somewhat novel conceptual framework to ground observations about contemporary life.More specific ideas will be developed in future entries. For now, I leave you with the overarching argument of this series: that the increasingly dysfunctional character of both individual experience and collective life can be profitably understood as a consequence of the rapid growth of the social, and the steady diminution of the private, the public, and the transcendent.The private refers to those aspects of life taking place within the confines of some protective barrier, from the walls of a home to the outer limits of a village, in which one can be ‘who one really is’, away from the eyes of non-intimates and their implicit demands to keep up appearances. The private sphere confers both individual and collective forms of identity that are given, secure, taken for granted – at least within those confines.One dimension of the private – a universal, transcending cultures and historical periods – is our animal being: the aspects of human existence shaped by the body as biological entity, as a composite of metabolic processes and instinctive drives. It encompasses our appetites for food and the labor required to satisfy them, from the ‘procurement’ work of agriculture, hunting, and foraging to the domestic labor of preparing, cooking, and serving. It includes also our need for shelter, for protection from the elements and potentially hostile life-forms, and the work of construction, maintenance, furnishing, and cleaning which that need entails. It contains the drive to reproduce and the family and kinship structures within which that drive is exercised, encompassing everything from mating rituals and sex to child reari