Social Cooking: The Challenge of Human Flourishing
Imagine you've blown up your group chat and gathered all the finest ingredients for a communal feast. Fresh vegetables from local gardens, grains harvested from nearby fields, and herbs grown on neighbourhood windowsills all waiting to be enjoyed. The original recipe called for slow cooking and everyone to contribute something to the meal, each contributing some of their skills and effort. The meal would be shared equally, nourishing the entire gathering. But somewhere along the way, the recipe changed. Someone in the group chat convinced everyone that individual microwave meals would be much more efficient. Each person now receives a pre-packaged, personalised, portion-controlled meal. After all, it's faster and requires less coordination, there’s no sharing required and you can just toss out the cheap plastic containers at the end. Yet despite the convenience, something essential seems lost. The richness of flavour, the joy of collective creation, the satisfaction of breaking bread together have all fallen by the wayside in favour of individual choice and convenience.While this might seem like a barefoot, hippy commune way to spend our Saturday, it mirrors a profound shift that began reshaping our societies in the mid-1970s towards neoliberalism.
This economic and political philosophy emphasises free markets, deregulation, privatisation, and reduced government intervention. Neoliberalism promised efficiency, freedom, and prosperity through market mechanisms and individual choice and suggested that human flourishing would naturally follow from economic liberalisation. Yet nearly five decades later, like shifting from communal cooking to individualised bland microwave meals, we find ourselves questioning these promises as they clash with our lived experiences.
Neoliberalism established what scholars call a hegemony. A fancy word for when a ruling consensus becomes so deeply embedded in social consciousness that it appears natural. Just as it might be hard to imagine a pot-luck without a Deliveroo driver dropping off pre-packaged meals, we struggle to envision economic systems beyond neoliberalism's framework.
You don’t need to be a genius to know we all need nourishment to thrive, but the form that nourishment takes matters deeply. A microwave meal might address hunger, but it rarely provides the complete nutritional and social sustenance of a shared meal. Similarly, the individualised rewards of neoliberalism such as consumer choice, personal branding, and social media validation might address certain human needs, but they fail to provide the deeper nourishment of genuine community, meaningful work, and collective purpose.
The psychologist Karen Horney suggests that humans are like seedlings that need proper conditions to flower and grow. We possess innate drives toward self-realisation and fulfilment that seek expression.
The tragedy of our current moment is that while this drive to flourish remains integral to our humanity, the material conditions created under neoliberalism make its achievement increasingly difficult for most people. The financialisation of everyday life has transformed how we understand our worth and potential.
Scholar Michel Feher articulates this transformation through his concept of "ratings." We now live in an age where traditional measures of value have been replaced by various forms of rating. Governments worry more about their popularity ratings than citizens' wellbeing; corporations prioritise stock value over worker compensation; and individuals focus on their online followings and ‘likes’ rather than substantive achievements or community connections.
What's particularly insightful about Feher's analysis is how this economic logic connects to Horney's psychological theory. In our neoliberal context, human flourishing is increasingly measured through external validation such as our ratings, our networks, our followers rather than through meaningful development or community belonging.
The triumph of individualism over collectivism has left us ill-equipped to address the systemic issues that confront us. We find ourselves trapped in a system that is visibly failing yet seems impossible to replace, a system that has colonised not just our economies but our very sense of self.
The irony is that the neoliberal system itself is now showing signs of fracture. The cracks are becoming undeniable, yet we cling to it as though it remains our salvation. The promise that markets, banks, and finance could solve all our problems has proven hollow, yet alternatives remain unclear or seemingly impossible to implement.
In this context, the question becomes: how do we recover the capacity for community connection and collective action? How do we move beyond the individualised, rating-driven conception of human flourishing to imagine new forms of solidarity and shared purpose? How might we create material conditions that actually support genuine human development rather than its simulacrum?
This might be the central tension of our time: our human drive to flourish remains strong, but the material conditions created by neoliberalism channel this drive into individualised, competitive, and often unsatisfying forms of expression. We seek growth, meaning, and connection, but find ourselves in an economic system that values us primarily for our capacity to service debt, generate data, and maintain positive ratings.
These questions haunt our present moment. The answers may lie in rediscovering the value of shared lived experience while honouring our individual drives toward growth and self-realisation. We could say, rediscovering the value of empathy.
Perhaps it's time to experience the joy of cooking together again, sharing both the labour and its fruits. The microwave meals of individualism may be convenient, but they've left us malnourished in ways we're only beginning to understand.