Habits common in affluent societies both sustain and conceal an unsustainable status quo. Enactivism, a philosophical approach emphasizing embodied and embedded cognition, can help identify and critically examine these habits and the environments that foster them. This analysis is situated within a critical theory of the unfelt, which describes how social collectives systematically produce gaps in emotional concern. The lack of proportionate affective and practical responses to the ecological crisis exemplifies this. The article draws on the concept of the imperial mode of living to develop a fuller picture of habits of affluence, then discusses two dimensions of these habits to advance a politically engaged version of enactivism.
Inner speech—the silent, internal use of language—emerges not as a simple transfer of outer social talk into the mind, but as a developmental reorganization of the agent's cognitive and bodily resources. Rethinking Vygotsky's concept of internalization through 4E cognitive science and phenomenology, the authors argue that this process creates a new inner space of intentional experience, shaped by embodied and social interactions. This inner space then actively influences how a person interprets, evaluates, and acts in the world, integrating cognitive, affective, and symbolic capacities.