A Therapeutic Journey

We can blame ourselves too much for our mental suffering. It is not that we are personally fragile but merely that we are living in a high-tech age that routinely smashes its more sensitive members to pieces through adherence to what will one day be recognized as a grossly primitive and unimaginative ethos.

We will have liberated ourselves from the madness of the age when we can look on loud and heroic lives—perhaps led by people we once knew—and with good faith say that this is not for us, that we are happier where we are, because we at last understand what we really require to survive mentally: cosiness, connection, and an ongoing lack of drama.

Once we have properly surveyed the merits and demerits on offer, we may willingly choose to side with what the modern age typically considers to be a disaster: a quiet life. This is not from any lack of ambition, but from a more focused aspiration for what we now recognize to be the primordial ingredient of happiness: peace of mind.

Our age attempts to cure loneliness through romantic love with the promise that we may, each of us, find one very special person to whom we can tie ourselves for life and who will spare us the need for anyone else. But this emphasis serves only to aggravate our isolation and renders our relationships more fractious than they should be, for no singl

We have grown ever more capable of subsisting without others. We can endure for days in cities of 10 million people without uttering a word. Yet we have lost the art of admitting our sorrows to others and of building connections based on vulnerability. We are lucky if we can lay claim to even one or two people we can call on when disaster strikes.

To further aggravate our emotional woes, modernity has cast aside what had been, since the dawn of time, a central resource for coping with life’s vicissitudes. God has died and there is now little we can turn to, intone in front of, or beg for deliverance from when times grow hard. We dwell in a world ruled by the pitiless laws of science in which

The burden of personal responsibility grows exponentially and explains why this age has seen a corresponding increase in rates of suicide, since the blame for a life that has gone awry can only reside narrowly within each of us.

Whereas past ages resigned themselves to offering modest destinies to most of their citizens, modernity has insisted that everyone—whatever their background or families of origin—should be capable of realizing the most stellar feats. No longer should anything—education, background, race, creed—stand in the way of ambition. This has been in its way

We may never have revealed to anyone the peculiar arguments that reverberate inside us and make us feel so hemmed in. But speaking these arguments aloud to an outsider can help us to see their absurdity and cruelty—and ultimately break their unwarranted spell over us.