I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. (Merlin, in C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength)

Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA and Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire recently triggered a firestorm on social media with a post about how burritos shouldn't cost so much. The $20 Burrito Tweet touched a nerve with many, and it quickly became its own Rorschach test.

As some had it, the $20 burrito is a figment of your imagination—the ingredients to make burritos at home cost significantly less than $20, so if you just cook the thing yourself, whiny Zoomer, you won't have to pay $20. Furthermore, wasting your money on eating out is what makes the economy seem so tight.

But many agreed with Kolvet's and Walsh's sentiments and pointed out that prices for basic items that Americans enjoy, like the occasional fast-food burrito, have skyrocketed over the past few years. Yet, when anyone draws attention to higher prices, the content of what they're saying is ignored and they're labeled as a whiner; lazy; ungrateful; or just plain stupid.

So, who's right? Is the $20 Burrito an invention of lazy Zoomers or is it the metric of hard economic times?

I present to you a third possibility. The internet has stumbled upon an uncomfortable truth about modern economic life, and it doesn't know how to process it. What's more is that, though this truth is becoming more noticeable with time, it isn't new. C.S. Lewis discovered it in 1945, and Hilaire Belloc wrote of it over a century ago.

Essentially, it is this: modern man is neither rich nor poor, neither a lord nor a hermit. He is both; he is neither. He is a Technoserf.

A Technoserf is best defined by what he has, which is a lot, and what he lacks, which is also a lot. Much like the Lewis passage quoted above, these haves and lacks come in pairs.

For example: Modern man has a supercomputer with the combined knowledge of every library in the world in his pocket, but he lacks the wisdom to verify the truth of basic moral precepts. He has a house—if he's lucky—but he lacks ownership, as the bank truly owns it and the county taxes it every year. He has a corporate job, but he lacks security because they can fire him at any time, for any reason; and if they do, he loses the house. He has more than enough food, but it lacks nutrition. He has more than enough water, but it's filled with chemicals. He has a dozen apps with which to order gourmet meals on credit, but he lacks a loving spouse to make him so much as a grilled cheese sandwich. He has a grand city to live in, but he lacks the basic safety and cleanliness that his tax dollars are supposed to provide. He has the natural drive to stand up for righteousness and defend the weak, but he lacks a cause, so he uses video games as an outlet. He has a thousand social media followers, but he lacks a friend.