In 2025, the world has never been more distracting. Every moment something needs to be seen, liked, shared or consumed. The feed refreshes, the algorithm reconfigures the next thought we’re supposed to have and neglecting to be in the silence of our surroundings seems like the worst thing that could ever happen. Many of us cannot sit still with our thoughts without actively wondering what happened on our phone in the past minute. But to understand why this is, we turn to A Room of One’s Own and Dialectic of Enlightenment, two texts created one hundred years apart about the same idea–what it means to live in a world saturated with entertainment. Virginia Woolf and Theodor W. Adorno with Max Horkheimer tackle these concepts to help us confront something many of us would rather not: an identity. Are we but shells of ourselves recycling ideas that we’ve never come up with only from what we’ve learned from media? Their arguments not only justify modern existence but challenge us to come to terms with how we’ve become consumers, neglecting our voices in order to simply become great at regurgitating everything we’ve digested.

What defines us—what potentially endangers us—is the dissolution of individuality. Adorno refers to this as “pseudoindividuality”—a false sense of differentness created to make us feel unique even though, as he writes, “the peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity” (Horkheimer and Adorno 125). In other words, what we believe to be “our personality” is often manufactured. One influencer wears baggy jeans and suddenly, they’re sold everywhere. One celebrity drinks matcha and suddenly, it’s a daily ritual. We do what we see not because it expresses anything about us but because it protects us from judgment. From a culture industry perspective—Adorno’s term—our personalities are no longer cultivated but rather determined.

And we know this intimately. We see it in ourselves. If I interact with one Marvel clip, every platform decides I am a Marvel fan. One scroll rewrites our preferences. “Choice” feels less like autonomy and more like training. Even authenticity has been hijacked: anyone who tries to be different is labeled “performative,” as if originality were suspicious. Adorno predicted this when he warned that “the details become interchangeable” and that culture continually reproduces “sameness” (Horkheimer and Adorno 98). What feels like individuality often turns out to be a microtrend.

This is why many of us feel most like ourselves when we are alone and least like ourselves in public. Outside, everything we do feels observed, compared, or anticipated. Alone—truly alone—we reclaim some sense of interiority. When I am walking alone in Mexico with no WiFi, or when my headphones block out the world, I feel something like my own mind returning to me. The stillness sharpens thought. The world’s grip loosens. But this fragile space where thinking becomes possible is becoming rare. And that is where Woolf enters.

If Adorno warns us about the external forces shaping who we are, Woolf reveals the conditions needed to resist them. Her idea of “a room of one’s own” is not simply about a physical space; it is about preserving a mind unaltered by the world. Woolf argues that “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” (Woolf 106), and she insists that no person—woman or man—can think freely without privacy, money, and uninterrupted solitude. Without a protected space, creativity collapses and thought becomes impossible. Her statements remain true today: we cannot form an authentic self when the world is constantly watching.

In today’s world, it won’t be public sentiment or considerations for gender but our technology. We’re always being interrupted by alerts. We’re conditioned through social media to think in half sentences and slang. We shy away from long novels because we don’t get our dopamine in a ten-second window. We no longer have the ability to fantasize and imagine—not because we don’t care—but because we’re so overwhelmed with stimuli. Woolf would see this as a fragmentation of inner life. Fragmentation of the self means people rarely read. Rarely reading means people have no compassion. No compassion means people are uneasy, on edge, easily manipulated.

Putting Woolf and Adorno in conversation reveals something essential about the world we live in. Adorno examines society’s machinery—the production of sameness, the manufacturing of desire, the shaping of personality through mass culture. Woolf examines the mind’s machinery—the conditions necessary for thought, reflection, and artistic creation. For Adorno, mass culture breaks down individuality from the outside; for Woolf, the lack of solitude breaks it down from within. Together, they describe our time with precision: a world where external forces script our desires while internal forces—our empathy, our patience, our solitude—dissolve.

This conversation forces us to take the reins. We’re bored by the length of novels and it’s not because we’ve become impatient, it’s because we’ve been conditioned to feel this way. We’ve become reliant on fads; it’s not personality but instead, conditioning. We feel static and incapable of movement after hours of swiping—not laziness, but the residue from a capitalist framework that has designed us to be consumers. When Adorno notes that entertainment is “the prolongation of work” (Horkheimer and Adorno 109), we, as students, feel this in our bones; scrolling is rest but we’re more drained than before and left with the aftermath of procrastination. When Woolf notes we need a room of our own, we feel that room can never be had with a telephone always dinging.

Yet both thinkers also give us a path forward. Adorno teaches us to resist the illusion of choice—those petty decisions that distract us from the fact that our tastes are engineered. Woolf teaches us to reclaim solitude, to carve out mental spaces where the world cannot reach. And I would add: we need to read again. Not because books are traditional, but because the deliberate act of reading forces us into the one state the culture industry cannot monetize: deep attention.

Reading slows us down. It destabilizes the algorithm. It teaches us to think expansively rather than reactively. It creates empathy, interiority, and imagination—qualities that cannot be mass-produced, tracked, or monetized. Woolf believed reading was essential to freedom; Adorno believed culture’s deterioration was a symptom of deeper societal decay. Together they challenge us to choose a different way of existing.

But how does one live in 2025? We need our own spaces, not just physically, but psychologically. We need to resist the muted violence of uniformity. We need to be aware of how much we are shaped by the mass culture so we know when we can step outside of it. We need to acknowledge that every time we put the phone down, every time we read in a daze, every time we embrace being alone, we take back what would have been bitten off and swallowed whole.

Woolf and Adorno show us that the crisis of individuality is not inevitable—it is a choice, renewed every day by the habits we allow to shape our minds. If we want to think freely, we must become aware of the forces that think for us. If we want to reclaim individuality, we must cultivate the interior spaces where it can finally happen. And if we want a world that values creativity, empathy, and originality, then we must first restore those qualities within ourselves.

Ultimately both authors question us, albeit silently yet with an urgency: Will we protect our inner lives? Our response is contingent upon whether we can remove ourselves from the overwhelming outside world to give ourselves the time to contemplate–and whether we consider those contemplations worth fighting for in the first place.

Works Cited

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Mariner Books, 1989.