pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease.

These lines come from E. E. Cummings’s satirical poem “pity this busy monster, manunkind,” written in the mid‑20th century amid accelerating industrialization, mass consumer culture, and faith in technological “progress.” Cummings, long skeptical of conformity and mechanized modern life, often attacked the rhetoric of improvement that masks spiritual or imaginative impoverishment. The poem’s coined word “manunkind” (suggesting “mankind” turned unkind) and its typographical play are characteristic of his style, using linguistic disruption to critique social habits. The speaker refuses sentimental pity and instead indicts humanity’s self-satisfied busyness and its addiction to the comforts of modern progress.

Cummings treats “Progress” not as liberation but as an illness—“a comfortable disease”—because it can feel soothing while quietly eroding what makes life fully human. The refusal to “pity” implies that modern humanity is complicit: people choose convenience, speed, and productivity even when these values diminish wonder, intimacy, and moral imagination. By calling humanity a “busy monster,” the poem suggests a creature driven by compulsive activity, devouring time and attention. The irony is that the disease is “comfortable”: it doesn’t announce itself as harm, so it spreads through pleasure, habit, and social approval rather than through obvious suffering.