It is important to be able to say “this thing is bad for me, and for people like me, and so we should structure society such that it can be avoided” without concomitantly having to say “this thing is objectively bad and we need to ensure that it is never a part of anyone’s life.”  The alternative is an abyss of social problems (endless conflicting-needs-driven culture war) and cognitive problems (twisting yourself in pretzels to explain why the thing that’s bad for you is actually just objectively bad). 

I am guilty of screwing this up, way too often.  When I rant about, e.g., the virtues of atomization and the awfulness of thickly obligatory social roles…well,  there are an awful lot of people who benefit hugely from that kind of tight-knit community embeddedness, it’s just that people like me die in obligatory social roles, and therefore I will fight hard to ensure that there’s always an available out.  And I should be clearer about that, and about the tradeoffs involved, and I should get less lost in my own point of view.

But there are so many people who screw this up so much more than I do.