Post-individualism

Will we update our scripts and stories about how the world actually works? Or is this a conversation that people just don’t want to have? Is it easier to pretend that everyone can make it?

I don’t have good answers to these questions, but I sense the disconnect between what people believe at a societal level and the market finding reality of an

“Individuality can only be valuable when it is not individuality for its own sake but individuality for the human community.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything

I see in so much of therapy culture young people desperate to be loved and trying to train themselves out of it. I see so much abandonment pain. We are reparenting ourselves. We are self-soothing. We are healing our inner child. Nobody is asking why. Please will somebody step in and say to this generation that maybe they don’t need more self-love,

oftentimes when folks think about existing in groups, their self sort of gets lost. But, actually, caring for yourself—and, maybe, reinventing the individual narrative that has been so Americanized into something that’s going to contribute to the group’s care—is what I’m getting at.

All this to say, being abandoned is not trivial. Not only having divorced parents, but being cut off from community, from culture, from all sources of support. Maybe it means more to you than you are letting on. Feel it, grieve it. Then turn that disappointment into determination. Nothing’s guaranteed, but we can take the pain and put every inch of