Finalist, 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction
Finalist, 2024 Writers' Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing

These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?

In this urgent cultural diagnosis, author and activist Astra Taylor exposes how seemingly disparate crises—rising inequality and declining mental health, the ecological emergency, and the threat of authoritarianism—originate from a social order built on insecurity. From home ownership and education to the wellness industry and policing, many of the institutions and systems that promise to make us more secure actually undermine us.

Mixing social critique, memoir, history, political analysis, and philosophy, this genre-bending book rethinks both insecurity and security from the ground up. By facing our existential insecurity and embracing our vulnerability, Taylor argues, we can begin to develop more caring, inclusive, and sustainable forms of security to help us better weather the challenges ahead. The Age of Insecurity will transform how you understand yourself and society—while illuminating a path toward meaningful change.

These days, everyone feels insecure. We are financially stressed and emotionally overwhelmed. The status quo isn’t working for anyone, even those who appear to have it all. What is going on?

"A must-read." — Peace News

"Astra Taylor’s The Age of Insecurity made me feel I understood something obvious that I had overlooked before ... that we on the left can (and need to) offer a different, better conception of security." — Current Affairs

"Taylor makes the case for clearing away capitalism’s distracting, destabilising regime; Keltner for expanding and more clearly valuing our connections to each other, to our own depths and capacities, and to the grandeur and order of the world beyond." — New Statesman

"The Age of Insecurity doesn’t tackle those challenging questions. What it does, instead, is explain why our world hardly allows them to be posed and hardly gives us the breathing space to think about them. It is, yes, a readable and insightful analysis of our present. But we have a lot of those—maybe too many. What makes this book worth the reader’s time is its idiosyncratic blend of the personal and the public, the emotional and the economic." — Commonweal Magazine

"A handbook for a new way forward." — Literary Review of Canada

"The ideas that Taylor puts forth are not only radical, but world changing … The Age of Insecurity is exactly the right book at exactly the right time. That time is now." — The Tyee

"Taylor asks us to contemplate a better world … This ethic of insecurity, collectivism and egalitarianism should be on the forefront of every educator’s mind." — Winnipeg Free Press