Richard Sennett spent years talking to people about their work — a baker, an IBM programmer, a cleaning woman, a former union activist. What he found was that the new economy wasn't just changing how people worked. It was changing whether they could make sense of their own lives.

Sennett returns to a Boston bakery he had visited twenty-five years earlier. The Greek bakers he had interviewed — sons of bakers, bound by an ethnic solidarity tight enough that shame about being a bad baker served as work discipline — have all retired. The workforce is now polyglot, part-time, contingent. The foreman is a Jamaican man who worked his way up through the old system and watches the new one with what Sennett calls the unhappy consciousness. He is the only person in the bakery who understands what has been lost. The workers operate screens showing icons of bread they never touch. They cannot tell a good loaf from a bad one. One woman tells Sennett she has skills in baking, shoemaking, printing — you name it. She also tells him, several times, that she is no baker. These two statements are, he argues, intimately linked.

That gap — between material improvement and the erosion of something harder to name — is Sennett's subject. He is a sociologist who thinks in human stories, and The Corrosion of Character is built from encounters: the baker, an IBM executive who cannot tell his son what loyalty means in the new workplace, a cleaning woman in Boston who has held the same job for fifteen years while her colleagues cycle through on short-term contracts, a former union activist whose children have absorbed the values of flexibility and self-reinvention so completely that his own life looks to them like failure. These are not anecdotes illustrating a thesis. They are the thesis — evidence that something is being lost that cannot be recovered by the next career pivot or the next performance review.

The loss Sennett identifies is narrative. A coherent life requires the ability to connect past, present, and future into a story that makes sense — that shows how what you did shaped who you became, and points toward something you are building. The new economy of flexibility, short-term contracts, constant reinvention, and the injunction to treat every disruption as an opportunity systematically dismantles the conditions for that kind of narrative. Not because people are less intelligent or less resilient, but because the structures that once supported long-term commitment — to a job, to a place, to a community of colleagues — have been deliberately dismantled in the name of efficiency.

The empathy argument is embedded in this capacity to understand another person which requires something similar to narrative coherence: the patience to stay with complexity, the willingness to commit to a relationship over time, the ability to distinguish between what someone is and what they are temporarily performing. A culture that rewards constant reinvention and penalises attachment trains people out of exactly these capacities. The transactional replaces the communal not because people prefer it, but because the structures that supported anything else have been removed.

The quality of attention Sennett brings to the people he encounters is exemplary. He listens without any hidden agenda. He allows contradiction to stand. He does not resolve his subjects into illustrations of a point but lets them remain, as people do, somewhat resistant to the frameworks applied to them. That quality of attention is itself a counter-argument to the world he is describing: the demonstration, in method, of the very thing that the new economy misses.