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 fellow “recovering psychologist,” as I found out we both introduce ourselves, 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.

But what if the proliferation of solutions is itself symptomatic? What if we’re mistaking the map for the territory, the technique for the transformation? In our desperate hunger for healing, we’ve created a buffet of methodologies while remaining existentially malnourished.

the workplace as asylum

Nowhere is the contradiction sharper than in our workplaces, those factories of psychological distress that simultaneously preach wellness. Companies invest in meditation apps while maintaining cultures of burnout. They offer mental health days while creating conditions that necessitate them. They hire happiness officers—surely one of the most Orwellian job titles ever conceived—while structuring work in ways that systematically undermine human flourishing.

The suspicion that surrounds mental health in professional contexts reveals the cruel paradox: we’re expected to be psychologically optimal for productivity’s sake, but actually experiencing psychological difficulty marks us as defective units. Those who admit to struggling risk being seen as either fragile or fraudulent: too weak for the job or too clever by half, gaming the system for time off.

We’ve created workplaces that are simultaneously therapeutic and anti-therapeutic, preaching psychological safety while practicing psychological violence. The solution isn’t more workplace wellness programs—it’s recognizing that the workplace itself, as currently conceived, might be incompatible with wellness.

I often joke that every person who starts working is gifted with a small vase with a plant. That plant causes severe allergy to every human. Some have more tolerance or immunity, but, in the long term, everyone suffers. What some companies like to do, in a sort of “psyche washing” is to gift some antihistamines or to offer a voucher for an allergist, but that plant has to remain.

the ethics of not knowing

Recently I had a client who went through a severe traumatic event, as self-reported. I had some external confirmation of the supposed event. It was not formal therapy, but I was selected because of my therapy background. I had doubts about what kind of progress was happening, as self-reports were positive and toward the direction the person had defined in the beginning of our work together. But I always wondered how were those changes received by the person’s team and company. Something felt off. I did not doubt the existence of the said trauma but I had a recurring intuition that the experience had left the person with a sort of entitlement to feel perpetually victimized. Suddenly, by self report, they had started to gain self confidence and to impose more of certain conditions. A few months after the contract ended, I encountered the person’s boss, who shared very inadequate, strange attitudes portrayed by my former client.

Some questions have haunted me for years and have stuck with me, educating my intuition and understanding. Were we “healing” people or helping them bear the unbearable? Were we expanding possibility or enabling impossibility? Were we enabling egotism instead of helping people become more ethical and communal? Were we fixing a supposedly dysfunctional “system” while reinforcing the dysfunction of another, larger one? Or vice-versa?

I don’t mean to dismiss the genuine relief therapy, or other professional help relationships, can provide. I’ve seen it save lives, including my own. I have no doubt that I’m able to write this and share it publicly because of my therapy. But I wonder about its broader function in our culture… How it might serve as a pressure valve that prevents necessary explosions, a management strategy that keeps the intolerable tolerable just a little longer.

Akomolafe speaks of “staying with the trouble” rather than rushing toward solutions. What if our psychological distress isn’t something to be cured but a messenger bearing vital information about the world we’ve created? What if anxiety, depression, burnout, and trauma are not just personal experiences but collective signals, canaries in the coal mine of late capitalism?

beyond the psychological revolution

The revolution will not be psychologized, nor will it be spiritualized: another escape route that bypasses material conditions for cosmic consciousness. It won’t be optimized, life-hacked, or self-helped into existence. These are all variations on the same theme: individual solutions to collective problems, personal transformation as political substitute.

Gil Scott-Heron knew the revolution would not be televised because television was the medium of spectacle, not transformation. Today, we might say it won’t be psychologized because psychology—at least as currently practiced—has become the medium of adaptation, not revolution. (On the other hand, possibly contradicting myself, my (post-)activism only emerges after analysis.)

This isn’t an argument against seeking help or caring for our mental health. It’s an invitation to question how these pursuits might sometimes serve the very systems that damage us. It’s a call to recognize that some forms of healing might actually be forms of harm, that some cures might be part of the disease.

Perhaps the real therapeutic act is to refuse the demand for constant self-improvement, to resist the pressure to optimize our way out of structural problems. Perhaps it’s to recognize that our distress might be appropriate, our dysfunction functional, our failure to adapt a sign of health rather than illness.

The revolution might come not from fixing ourselves but from recognizing that we were never as broken as the system insisted we were. It might come from understanding that our individual healing, while necessary and valuable, will never be sufficient. Not while the structures—societal, corporate, economic, or even civilizational - that wound us remain intact.

In the end, the revolution will not be psychologized because revolution requires something beyond therapeutic insight. It requires collective action, structural transformation, a willingness to imagine entirely different ways of being together. It requires us to stop asking only “What’s wrong with me?” and start also asking “What’s wrong with this?”

The revolution is still not being televised. It’s also not being processed in fifty-minute sessions, packaged in self-help books, or optimized through cognitive restructuring. It’s waiting for us to recognize that some problems require more than psychological solutions. They require new worlds altogether.

This essay was adapted from notes originally written in Portuguese, exploring the intersection of psychological language, therapeutic culture, and political possibility. In translating these ideas, I’ve tried to preserve their essential provocation: that our solutions sometimes become part of what they claim to solve.

1. As I explored in “On the Value of Conversation,” we’ve increasingly transactionalized human connection, turning even dialogue into a commodity to be optimized rather than a space for mutual discovery. ↩︎
2. This concept resonates deeply with themes I explored in “No, This Is Not Normal,” where I examine how damaging conditions become normalized through their persistence. ↩︎
3. This phrase has become something of a mantra in post-activist circles, suggesting that our urgency itself might be part of what keeps us trapped. As I explored in “Do This One Thing: Nothing,” sometimes to refuse the demand for constant action is to be radical. ↩︎
4. See Merve Emre’s “The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence” (The New Yorker, 2021), which examines how EQ has become a tool for corporate control rather than genuine understanding. ↩︎
5. In “A Cartography of Tiredness,” I explored different forms of exhaustion. The tiredness that comes from constant self-improvement might be the most insidious—it masquerades as progress while keeping us running in place. ↩︎
6. This fragmentation perhaps stems from Psychology’s confused origins. I once imagined Psychology as the illegitimate child of Philosophy and Medicine - born from their brief, passionate affair. Medicine, ascending in power and prestige, seduced Philosophy despite her fading influence. Their offspring, Psychology, could never quite decide which parent to emulate: the mother who asked deep questions about meaning, or the other mother who promised scientific answers about bodies. Torn between these inheritances, Psychology fragments itself, trying to be both rigorous science and meaningful wisdom, succeeding fully at neither. ↩︎