...Adam Smith imagined the free market of labor and goods operating much like freely circulating blood within the body and with similar life-giving consequences. Smith, in observing the frantic business behavior of his contemporaries, recognized a design. Circulation of goods and money proved more profitable than fixed and stable possession. Ownership served as the prelude to exchange, at least for those who improved their lot in life. Yet for people to benefit from the virtues of a circulating economy, Smith knew, they would be obliged to cut themselves free from old allegiances. This mobile economic actor would moreover have to learn specialized, individualized tasks, in order to have something distinctive to offer. Cut loose, specialized Homo economicus could move around in society, exploit possessions and skills as the market offered, but all at a price.
Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places. Any strong visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie the individual down. This was the premonition expressed at the end of The Merchant of Venice: to move freely, you can't feel too much. Today, as the desire to move freely has triumphed over the sensory claims of the space through which the body moves, the modern mobile individual has suffered a kind of tactile crisis: motion has helped desensitize the body.

- Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone