The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized

In our relentless quest to fix ourselves, we’ve created a peculiar paradox: the very language meant to liberate us from suffering has become another cage. Perhaps the revolution we seek won’t come through healing our traumas, optimizing our minds, or achieving peak psychological wellness. Perhaps it will come from recognizing how these pursuits themselves have become part of the machinery they claim to dismantle.

the therapy of everything

A colleague described their frustration with a delayed project as “traumatic.” A friend mentioned their “OCD” about keeping their desk organized. An influencer called their ex “narcissistic” for wanting to keep a favorite coffee mug after the breakup. We’ve all heard—or said—versions of these casual diagnoses, these borrowed clinical terms that have escaped the consulting room to colonize everyday conversation.

This isn’t merely linguistic inflation. When everything becomes trauma, nothing is. When every preference becomes pathology, we lose the vocabulary for ordinary human experience. We’ve psychologized existence itself, transforming the messy complexity of being human into a series of disorders to be diagnosed, traumas to be processed, and dysfunctions to be optimized away.

We’ve replaced the poetic with the pathological, mystery with malfunction. The vernacular has become global and psychologized. Is this a manifestation of our quest for precision-everything? Is this a result of a poor relative of the scientific method, with its longing for replicability? Is it a sign that we’ve become conceptually and linguistically poorer as a product of great scientific and technological advancements; a sign of the decay of the humanities? Is it the allure of morbidity? Or is it plain and simple human natural stupidity?

the commodification of attention

Here’s what strikes me most: we now pay strangers to give us what communities once provided freely—attention, witnessing, the simple act of being heard¹. The therapeutic hour has become a commodity, packaged in fifty-minute increments, billed by the session. This isn’t to diminish the value of good therapy. I’ve been both provider and recipient of its genuine benefits. But something shifts when care becomes commerce, when healing becomes an industry.

The therapy room promises a space outside the system, a sanctuary from the pressures that create our distress. Yet it operates entirely within that system’s logic—scheduled appointments, insurance codes, treatment plans with measurable outcomes. And even the attempts to place therapy out of the traditional room have not escaped the tyranny of consumerism. One can argue that some of those attempts even progressed further the mercantilization of psychological therapy, under the claim of disruption, innovation, and democratization. We seek help for our alienation through a fundamentally alienating transaction.

I think of what psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas called “normotic illness”: the pathology of being too normal, too adapted to a sick system. It’s a condition where someone becomes so perfectly adjusted to dysfunctional circumstances that their very “health” within that system signals a deeper illness—like thriving in a toxic workplace or finding peace with injustice². Perhaps our real ailment isn’t our inability to function within this world but our increasing success at it. We therapize ourselves into better functioning cogs rather than questioning the machine itself.

post-activism and the useful uselessness of not fixing

This is where Bayo Akomolafe’s concept of post-activism becomes vital. Akomolafe, the Nigerian philosopher and “recovering psychologist,” as he introduces himself, suggests that our solutions often intensify the very problems they address. Like the Yoruba trickster god Èṣù who appears at crossroads to confuse travelers into new directions, Akomolafe invites us to lose our way productively.

“The times are urgent; let’s slow down,” he writes—a paradox that captures something essential about our moment³. Our frantic efforts to heal, to fix, to optimize ourselves psychologically might be precisely what prevents the deeper transformations we seek. The revolution isn’t stalled because we haven’t done enough therapy; it’s stalled because we’ve made therapy itself into a revolution substitute.

The psychologization of everything serves the system beautifully. It individualizes collective problems, turning structural violence into personal pathology. Can’t afford rent? Work on your money mindset. Burned out from exploitation? Try mindfulness. Depressed by ecological collapse? Here’s a prescription. This is also evident in corporate settings. Workers are pushed into workshops about resilience, prioritization, productivity methodologies and frameworks, empathy, unconscious bias, emotional intelligence⁴, many times with the stamp of blame for not coping with unreasonable workloads, dysfunctional teams, toxic cultures and asshole leaders.

We’ve created what Byung-Chul Han calls “the tiredness of self-optimization”: exhausting ourselves in the pursuit of psychological wellness while the conditions that create unwellness remain untouched⁵. The revolution will not be psychologized because revolution requires recognizing that some problems aren’t meant to be adapted to—they’re meant to be overthrown.

the schizophrenia of solutions

The mental health industry—and it has become an industry—fragments into ever-more-specialized approaches. CBT, DBT, EMDR, IFS, somatic experiencing, psychodynamic, existential, humanistic… Each school claims its piece of truth while the whole remains elusive. Meanwhile, coaching emerges as therapy’s entrepreneurial shadow, promising transformation without the inconvenience of actually examining our wounds.

This fragmentation mirrors what it claims to heal. We seek integration through increasingly disintegrated methods. We pursue wholeness through ever-more-partial approaches⁶. The market loves this multiplication—more modalities mean more certifications, more trainings, more ways to package and sell the promise of healing.