Post-individualism

That’s the thing about attachment—you need to depend to be independent. You need a stable base to venture out. Something to rely on to take risks. Some stability to cope with chaos. Otherwise you can’t explore with confidence. If you fear abandonment, you won’t risk romance. Words will feel traumatic. You will stay stagnant, afraid to move. Maybe

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.

“Quiet Quitting” articles allowed readers to access a convenient cause (damn lazy Gen-Zers) for a pretty existential problem (work sucks). It’s also, conveniently, a way of blaming workers for systemic ills. “Quiet Hiring” deflects from organizational norms that call for eking out as much productivity (at the lowest cost) from each employee in the