How bad are things?

I can see strawmen, reactiveness, ad hominem attacks in your post. Please take time to read and empathize with the people you respond to. This is not a place to win arguments with aggressive tone.

Scott (the author) is using "thinkpiece writers" a bit equivocably, I think, with the latter usage being his hobby horse of attacking left wing social justice activists.

His counterpoint to you, which I would say has some traction, would likely be that those thinkpiece writers are deploying constructs like "privilege" as a way to discredit the very real struggle of people in groups that don't fall under the accepted rubric of privileged and oppressed, for the very reason that their issues' existence is either ignored or defined out of the category of "systemic oppression."

Most everyone is "in favor of being empathic to everyone's humanity and not discrediting anyone's struggle," but as humans everyone seems to have a hard time putting that principle into practice.

Even if you believe "local government is an expression of communion," that would not invalidate the fact that there are important distinctions, as a many political scientist and public choice theorist have outlined. You may well believe it to be a purely benevolent arrangement by and for the people, but that is very weak and ignores problems highlighted by James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock and many others.

I don't understand the logic of "Direct family made this decision at some point, therefore you are obligated to perpetually obligate it." The "rightfulness" comes from the fact that the extended family may in fact be harmful and detrimental to one's well-being if it is highly dysfunctional. It can happen.

Our social self-image is dominated by only a few corporations, which have a lot to gain from controlling that image.

The implications of this statement, even if true, are quite unfortunate. It would imply the public is that naive and susceptible, but that moreover they have absolutely no recourse. This is a plain falsehood, they can each reject various parts of consumer culture if they wish, just as I (and presumably you) are doing by abstaining from lots of activities. You may also organize boycotts or engage in activism.

Obviously, without knowing who these corporations are and examining how they emerged, this statement you've given me alone is of little use to deliberate, and mostly makes the public look gullible.

Just as the military motive is intrinsic to a world of uncertainty, I guess. Is developing and deploying nuclear weapons wholly neutral too?

Well, you jumped the shark on this one. Whether you define profits as the speculation in opportunities concerning undervaluation or overvaluation of production factors, or profits as the surplus value extracted from variable capital, or surplus at all, I can't tell how it is anything but neutral. A particular profit-seeker may not be, but profit in general is. Production-for-use is a classic socialist anthem, but in practice it means always operating at subsistence and having distribution be inefficient because of cutting yourself off from a price system. Only in a hypothetical final state of rest/general equilibrium that cannot exist will profits disappear and only interest be obtained.

On the contrary, when the majority of consumers is led to the wrong choice (cue philosophical derailment about moral relativism), it becomes a systemic problem. Maybe it's time to stop relying on 400-year old dogma?

Not really moral relativism, but more that you cannot do interpersonal comparisons of utility. Even if you leave that aside, it is genuinely difficult to say that a majority of consumers are making a wrong choice, if it may be that is what they intended by their own volition. I'm sure going to strip clubs in general would count by a many definition, but, ultimately you have to convincingly prove there is both a massive and predictable irrationality going on. Even when you do, you have to weigh in the costs-benefits of intervention over individual bargaining and Coasian solutions of transaction costs and property rights.

If mine is 400-year old dogma, yours must be much older.

Your post also reads as the most cliched refrain of every economic anarchist. Can you even name one truly free market?

That's not the point, nor am I an economic anarchist. You can't just handwave useful economic research in a pithy one-liner about market irrationality without proposing a consistent model that doesn't lead to outright analytical nihilism, and you absolutely cannot refrain from extending irrationality to all other institutions and examine the effects, over merely assuming the perfection of some form of government.

> 3. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact this unhappy, but they never tell anyone except their psychiatrist all of the pieces necessary to put their life story together.

4. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact unhappy, but they never explicitly tell anyone and I'm not noticing the other obvious signs because admitting the existence of such would reveal my unhappiness and bring me some questions I wouldn't want to answer.

A few more:

Worshiping beauty, and always feeling ugly as a result.

Worshiping their own intellect, and always feeling like a fraud.

Being crippled with self-doubt and skepticism.

Constant anger at the world for wrongs, real or imagined.

Being underemployed and hating oneself for it.

Really, there are as many variants and flavors as there are people.