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“Have you seen Julie?” Matt asked me. “She’s pregnant and she’s sitting back there.”

Julie is a casual friend who got married last year. I don’t know her that well and I rarely see her. I had just walked into a restaurant for dinner Friday evening and an employee told me the news.

My first reaction was to express happiness for Julie and her husband, but I suddenly realized I felt something unexpected. My inner emotional mask slipped slightly and I felt … what was this?

Envy.

Instead of pure happiness for Julie — who will be a great mother, by the way — I felt something ugly in my gut. My heart felt cold and hard. There was a powerful hint of anger — self-directed? — and then I realized it was hard to put labels on the things I was feeling.

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I feel like a contradiction lately.

I want to withdraw from the modern world — from the intellectual, psychological and spiritual rot that’s leading humanity down an ugly path — but I don’t want to give up the conveniences that have come with that modern world.

I suspect the internal rot which I see around me inevitably comes right along with the technological marvels we’re building for ourselves — and it requires some kind of terrible tradeoff that I don’t want to make. I want to have the shiny technological toys with none of the downsides.

It’s hard to know where to strike a balance. On one side, there’s an Amish-like life of being grounded in the warmth of community and personal connection. It’s the ideal or fantasy of country life — of being rooted to land and a slower pace and more traditional values. On the other side is a post-modernist life of shallow connection with little meaning, but filled with technological progress and urban excitement — along with opportunities for success and wealth and ego gratification.

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If your culture were selling you a lie, how would you know it? And if you assumed the lie were true — and you lived your life the way the lie told you to live — how would you know there was any other way to live?

Powerful forces in modern culture are eager to use the natural human desire for sex in order to sell us goods and services. If those forces — advertisers, entertainers and publishers, among others — can tie their products to your sexual desires and promise to satisfy those desires, they might sell you more of whatever they’re selling.

Sex sells. It sells movies, music, television shows, fashion, magazines, cosmetics, perfume, deodorant and toothpaste. Sex sells so many things today that we couldn’t possibly list them all. It’s treated as a shortcut to get your attention and make you believe you will get whatever you want from various partners — all in exchange for buying whatever some company wants you to buy.

This isn’t a puritan lament that sex is bad. This is an acknowledgment that our culture is making a mockery of something special — and it’s an assertion that this practice is seriously damaging our ability to make emotional connection with our partners.

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