Post-individualism

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,

we grew up and got it drilled into us that the problem is dependence. Don’t be needy.

That ‘individual responsibility’ idea is present in so many messages from awareness campaigns: the idea that it is our duty to reach out to loved ones and services for help; the suggestion that mental health support should come in the form of a ‘service’ at all; the emphasis on individual tools like therapy, meds, self-help, mindfulness and apps to

suffering is conceptualized in ways that protect the current economy from criticism—namely, as rooted in individual rather than social causes, which means we must favor self over social reform

unfortunately, there are no rules in human nature that turn economic abundance into a sense of personal abundance