Human civilization has always been a kind of tension, akin to the taut string of a lyre, stretched between two essential notes, that being the individual and the collective, the singular voice and the choral harmony. From the campfires of prehistory to the circuitry of the digital age, we have lived in this paradox, needing both solitude and witness, silence and echo. We are creatures who seek to be ourselves, but on a fundamental level to not to be alone. In my mind, no age has leaned so heavily into the self as the modern West. Particularly in the long shadow of the Enlightenment, the Western world began to exalt the individual not merely as a person, but as a principle. Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am; this statement is now less a philosophical proposition and more a civilizational compass.
The self is now sacred, autonomy a moral imperative, liberty an unchallenged god. Reverence for individualism was braided into the architecture of Western society, be it into the machinery of liberal democracy, the mechanics of capitalist exchange, and the marrow of Protestant theology. It is no accident that Protestantism emphasized a direct, personal relationship with the divine. Nor that capitalism canonized the notion that one’s worth could be measured by what one produced. These systems coalesced into a single script, etched invisibly across generation, that you are what you make of yourself. You are your resume, your discipline, your earnings, your exceptionalism. A script that seemed at first to offer freedom. It told us we were no longer bound to caste or crown, that we could ascend by will alone, that salvation could be earned through effort. To be an individual was to be sovereign, and sovereignty is freedom to a populace that has never experienced it.
When I look to liberation, I see an ideal that has slowly curdled into exile. The exaltation of the self became a kind of severance, from history, from community, even from the inner self that could not perform endlessly for the market or the gods of achievement. The modern citizen became a kind of wandering star, drifting through systems designed to reward autonomy, yet indifferent to belonging. We became strangers not only to one another, but to the vast and silent questions that once tethered us to meaning. We find ourselves here, in a society surrounded by others, but unheld. We fear hyper-visibility in an increasingly digitized world, but often feel unseen. And I find the more empowered we feel, the more the anxiety creeps in. It is a world that sings the hymn of the individual louder than ever, and yet it feels too many are quietly breaking under the weight of our supposed independence.
The myth of selfhood, once our torch in the dark, flickers in what might be labeled winds of loneliness. The great negotiation between self and society, between the I and the we, begs to be rewritten, and by my view it shall not be as a contract of domination,. A civilization that cannot reconcile these two truths will never heal. Emile Durkheim gave this unraveling the name of anomie, a word that sounds like wind through a hollow room, like something lost more than something wrong. It describes a state not merely of lawlessness but of moral drift, where the compass by which a people once oriented their lives spins uselessly in place. It is not chaos in the streets that defines anomie, but a quiet, interior unraveling. A forgetting of how to belong. A melancholic word of which stirs my soul, by way of both poetic inclination and bittersweet relatability.
As the ancient scaffolding of human coherence begins to rot, our inner worlds lose their architecture. Where once was union, now stands contradictory scripts shouting through static. Each institution by which we must stand offers its own gospel, and none seem to speak the same language. The result is a civilization in psychic disrepair, a cultural fever dream in which our collective mental health is fraying, an altogether ambience by which our individual lives are illuminated. We see it in every overmedicated child, every adult who cannot rest without distraction, every aging soul who wonders when life became a blur of scrolling and noise.
We see it in the schisms of culture wars, in the hunger for conspiracy, in the spiritual burnout of a world that no longer believes in anything it cannot monetize. “Truth”, what might be seen as the old torchbearer of the human project, has shattered into warring shards. Children are now raised inside rival cosmologies, ideological fiefdoms, religious silos, digital rabbit holes, each proclaiming its version of what is real, each hostile to the others. This is right. That is wrong. Believe us. How might the mind take root when the soil is disparate, a melting pot in which each particulate holds ill will towards those different. The children we uphold as our most valuable possession grow crooked, or not at all, victim too to the negligence by which larger structures of society is governed.
For all our claim to sophistication, humans are still deeply tribal creatures. We are born into relation, not into solitude. We require mirrors in the eyes of others to know ourselves. We are written jointly by biology and biography, by neurons and narratives, by the stories we inherit and the structures that house them. Social creatures, we are oft labeled. This is the paradox of our species, a collective of individuals shaped by socialization, yet often unable to choose the hands that mold us. We are taught not only how to act, but who to be. When the world that raises us is fragmented, we internalize the fracture.
The splinters are lodged in our psyches whether we recognize or not. I claim recognition of this flaw of the system, yet even I all too often mistake distortion for design, and then we pass it on to those I love. I sometimes feel as if I am breaking in silence, just as I know others rage without knowing why. Entirely too many people around me live entire lives trying to piece together what was never whole to begin with. The danger of anomie is not that it makes people lawless, but that it makes them lost. It tears the stitching from the soul’s fabric until the self begins to feel like a stranger in its own skin. I am haunted by the ache of disconnection, not merely from others, but from meaning, from myself, from the invisible threads that once bound us to a common sky.
This is a three-headed hydra threatening to swallow us whole; spiritual, structural, psychological. It rises in crowded apartments where air grows heavy with silence and the unspoken, as Wang and Liu (2022) observe in their study on residential crowding and depressive symptoms. It festers in the widening canyons between rich and poor, where inequality grows, as Tibber et al. (2022) demonstrate in study of how income disparity corrodes the mental fabric of nations. And it flares in the aftermath of pandemics and policies, where public health initiatives fail to reach the most fragile; where Campion and colleagues (2024) argue that implementation failure is not technical, but moral. Beneath these surface tremors churn deeper, slower forces, be it the slow erosion of trust in institutions, the everyday trauma of perceived discrimination (Pascoe & Richman, 2009), or the cruel arithmetic of weathering in which individuals age with the toll of being unseen (Geronimus et al., 2006).
As Horwitz (2010) explains, what we once called anxiety has collapsed into depression because our ability to metabolize its contradictions has faltered. To understand the full weight of this unraveling, I believe the twin landscapes of sociology and psychology must be traversed. Pilgrim’s Key Concepts in Mental Health (2019) offers us the necessary language to navigate this terrain: stigma, normalization, deviance, power. Meanwhile, Aneshensel and Phelan (1999) guide us through the sociological scaffolding of mental health, mapping its links to structure, status, and stress. I find the work of Rosenfield (1997), analyzing the the personal aftershocks of labeling, to be of particular interest, as with Kessler et al. (2005) who looks at the epidemiological contours of disorder. Additionally, Taylor and Brown (1988), examine a paradox we dare not ignore, that well-being often depends on illusion, on just enough softness between self and world.
There is undoubtedly a historical drift that severed the individual from the collective, in which Western ideologies of individualism planted the seeds of psychological alienation. Perhaps a new ideological framework is needed, post-capitalist, post-religious, emotionally grounded system of governance and care. Because it is increasingly difficulted to navigate the algorithmic labyrinth of social media, echo chambers, and artistic longing, and to properly analyze how modern technology both fractures and offers a glimpse of reconnection. For I would argue art remains our last, luminous language of belonging.
I would argue to my dying breath that art is not simply what we make, but more so how we become. It is how we smuggle our inner life into the outer world and beg the void to echo something back. In the act of creation, regardless of its form, whether we sketch in charcoal or sing alone in the shower, whether we sculpt cathedrals from stone or build trembling sentences on a dim laptop screen, we are performing what I would call the most fundamentally human quality, that being we are giving form to the formless. We are taking what would die inside us and translating it into something that might outlive us.
What else is there, truly; what else might justify the strange gift of consciousness. What else might ease the pain of this great curse of consciousness. Science might explain the stars, but art gives them names. Religion attempts to offer salvation, where art offers recognition. In the absence of gods that speak clearly, it is the song, the poem, the painting, the movement of the dancer’s body that gives shape to the questions we dare not ask aloud. To create is to commit true miracle, to give breath to that which did not exist before you, and through it, to tether your brief and flickering life to something larger, more enduring.
In creation we exteriorize the soul. It is expression of feeling and emotion in its rawest form, the sewing of memory into observable matter. The idea that we might offer the cosmos a reflection of its own mystery is beautiful to me, that with ever brushstroke, every verse, every melody there is an echo of the ineffable made visible. To make art is to imprint the universe with our humanity. We take silence and bruise it with meaning. A colonization of a cold, uncaring world, breathing ghosts into that which transcends us. I always seek to bleed light into it. And to my knowledge, no other creature does this. Or to more aptly word it, no other creature needs to do this.
Art is how we survive not death, but life. For even in my short existence, I have found that life unmediated can be unbearable. The rawness of grief, the enormity of joy, the vast shapelessness of longing, all of which are feelings that cannot live inside us unspoken. I would know, as should they be withheld they serve only to suffocate from the inside out. Thus arises the idea that they might be housed in that which must be shaped. Without creation, they calcify into pain. Without creation, we do not, we cannot, endure ourselves.
And when we share what we’ve made, when another person looks at what we’ve poured out and says, “That’s me too,”, then creation becomes communion. It becomes the opposite of despair, but rather a proof that something unspoken within you has resonance in another. In this way, art bridges the fundamental solitude of existence, the way in which we speak across centuries. The dead speak, just as the unborn are sung into being. And in turn we might truly see our inner selves reflected in another.
This is why I truly believe civilizations rise with art at their center and fall when they forget it. I theorize it is not coincidence that tyrants fear poets, that conquerors burn libraries, that colonizers erase songs. They know that to kill a culture’s art is to silence its soul. Because in the end, art is not just something we do. It is what survives of us, a way to leave behind not data, but presence. Monuments to our individual and collective ambition. Echoes of the essence of humankind, made plain. I understand art as not just an outlet, but an organ of the psyche, as essential to human development as memory or language.
To make art is to wrest identity from ambiguity, to sketch the outlines of the self where no one else has drawn them before. In my own moments of unformed chaos, be it adolescence, trauma, transition, I have drawn comfort from seeing myself in the work of others, from feeling less alone when I felt so lonely. And now, I want not only to find beauty of others, but to create works of which in turn others might see beauty, might see a part of themselves in this fragmented world and feel a little less alone.
It is no wonder that research in mental health points again and again to the necessity of narrative and expression for emotional regulation. Pilgrim (2019), in his synthesis of key sociological and psychological concepts, reminds us that mental health is shaped not merely by pathology, but by the availability of symbolic systems through which to make sense of our experiences. Art is precisely that, a symbolic system born of devotion. In creation, we externalize rage, we metabolize sorrow, we hold grief long enough to understand its shape.
Pour the emotion onto page in a way that we might give it name. An alchemical engagement in which we do not run from that which frightens us so. How the “soul” processes what the body cannot bear alone. It is all too easy to fracture under the weight of feeling in our current climate, yet art serves as mirror to see ourselves truly. In this internal space, the act of creation offers a coherence. A peace of self, in that what tortures us exists outside of us now, no longer festering inside. And in that externalization, we begin the slow work of healing.
Yet this is only half of art’s power. For if the act of making is how we discover ourselves, the act of sharing is how we find each other. Socially, art is the great equalizer of feeling. It creates a bridge between inner lives that might never otherwise touch. We do not need to speak the same language or share the same history to be moved by the same ache. A painting from a war-torn century can wound us, just as a song from a stranger can feel like home. In this way, art functions as a shared emotional vocabulary, a way of saying, I have felt this, when ordinary speech would only betray the depth of the feeling. This capacity is profoundly neurological, as Thoits (2011) and others have shown social support and shared affective understanding are not luxuries of well-being, but mechanisms of it.
Empathy, when mediated through storytelling and art, does not merely make us kinder; it regulates the nervous system, lowers stress, helps us survive. To witness another’s truth rendered in true vulnerability is to feel momentarily less alone in one’s own. In a world increasingly saturated with spectacle and irony, authentic aesthetic experience cuts through the static. It gives us intimacy when we are used to only information. I find its most profound lesson to be that it teaches, through resonance, that another’s pain is not foreign, but familiar.
This is what I believe to be the most vital work in an age of anomie, fragmentation, and digital alienation. We are so tainted by larger society, guilty of an inherent cynicism that has leeched into all of us in differing capacities. This feeling that every institution feels brittle, every ideology suspect, and every platform performative. Here is where I find comfort in art, an almost joyful simplicity in how it offers a space where truth may still arrive, where two people who have never met may still say, I recognize something in you.
Then there is the other half of this undeniable dyad. Science is, along with art, our species’ most miraculous discipline. It is the lantern we carry into the vast dark, illuminating the mechanisms of the cosmos with astonishing precision. Science gives us language to explain the observable world, to engineer safety and medicine, to delay death, to understand the forces that hold the stars in their cradle. And yet while science is how we survive, it is not why we survive. For all its brilliance, science cannot tell us what to love. It cannot explain why a single line of poetry might reduce us to tears, or why we return to old songs like homes we once lived in. It can tell us what a heartbeat is, but not why we listen for it in another. Might measure time, but not the meaning of a moment. This is where art enters, yet I do not believe in opposition. I think of it as a conversation, an inseparable bond.
Science is the skeleton of reality, whilst art is soul we give it. Mankind has built the world around us through science, yet art reminds us why we wish to live in it. Gave us purpose to push forward when intellectual curiosity wasn’t enough. Together, they form the dialectic of human striving. Knowledge and meaning, a union by which our civilization might be understood I find myself drawn toward both, and yet I hold a certain passion for art. I attest this is not because it offers certainty, but because it refuses to. In its refusal, there is space for ambiguity, a space where the fullness of the human spirit breathes.
The opportunity to embrace emotion, to give in to our human spirit. A gray area of great comfort to me. Yet there are certain ways in which this lack of answers might be used in negative contexts. Traditional religion, while often a source of communal warmth and shared identity, has too often acted as a border rather than a bridge. Religion can unite, but also harden. Its truths are often declared absolute, its mythologies non-negotiable. And where art tolerates many interpretations, religion can punish deviation. Where art inspires dialogue, religion has, at times, justified the great atrocities of human history.
I would argue that the conflicts that arise from art are generative. A painter might challenge a style, a poet revises the canon, a musician remixes history, an animator might create a new style, or a chef might refine a standard method. These frictions push culture forward, expanding its vocabulary, sharpening its vision. What might be understood as contests of beauty and interpretation. But in my experience, it seems conflicts that arise from religion often freeze culture in amber, insisting on fidelity to ideas born centuries ago, in landscapes and moral ecosystems that no longer exist.
Where artistic conflict produces innovation, religious conflict too often produces fire. I do not say this to diminish the faith many of my peers hold, despite my lack of subscription towards it. It is that I believe that art contains within it a faith without dogma, a transcendence without exclusion. It allows us to connect across time and difference without demanding sameness. In a better world, one shaped not by conquest but by communion, art could become the spiritual architecture that holds us in our individual complexity. Yet in envisioning a better world, we must first look to the issues that plague our present existence.
The modern mental health crisis is not a private affliction that visits the unlucky or the genetically predisposed, despite what some might suggest. And it is certainly not a moral failure, nor a biochemical quirk, nor a flaw of will, all of which detestable beliefs of which fill me with anger. The rising tides of anxiety, depression, loneliness, and suicidality do not mark an epidemic of individual pathology, but rather a mark of the collective collapse of meaning. We are taught to pathologize these feelings. To locate them neatly in the brain, as if despair were a solitary misfire in the neural circuitry. To treat them with pills and silence. But the truth is more terrifying and more tender, these conditions are perfectly sane reactions to an insane world.
We are living in systems that no longer recognize us as human. Systems designed for productivity, not poetry. How might we survive as systems designed for output, whilst limited in how we might reach for belonging. When the soul begins to fray under these pressures, we medicate it into compliance. We call it dysfunction, when in fact it may be the only honest response. As Pilgrim (2019) writes, “Mental health cannot be understood in isolation from its social and cultural context.” It is not a sealed-off zone in the individual mind, but a reflection of the society that cultivates, or corrodes, it. The symptoms we see at the clinical level are often the psychic residue of social structures that fail to nourish our most basic needs.
Consider the world we’ve built, on in which time is money, where community is optional, where identity must be marketed to be affirmed. A world where children are taught to strive but not to feel, to perform but not to reflect, to compete but not to grieve. What emerges from such soil is not mental health, but soul fatigue, a quiet, persistent unraveling of coherence. And let it be understood, coherence matters. Humans, as Pilgrim reminds us, are meaning-making creatures. When the threads that tie our story together snap, when we can no longer see ourselves in the world we inhabit, we begin to disintegrate from the inside. Depression, then, is not only sadness; it is a loss of narrative. Anxiety is not only fear; it is the terror of floating unanchored in a world that moves too fast to hold you. There is little point in romanticizing suffering, when time might be spent locating it, by recognizing it. We must we stop treating mental health as a private problem with private solutions and instead recognize it as a public barometer of moral design.
What enrages me most, what makes my hands tremble with something between grief and fury, is not that this suffering exists, but that we knew, and we did nothing. Or worse, we built entire industries around managing the fallout while refusing to touch the root. We call this an epidemic, yet continue to mass-produce the conditions that cause it. We speak of awareness while monetizing attention. We draft policy while people bleed in the quiet corners of their own minds. We fund studies, but not sanctuaries. We expand insurance codes for “treatment,” but never redesign the environments that break us.
We ask the anxious to breathe deeply while we flood their lives with insecurity. We tell the depressed to reach out while gutting public health infrastructure. We whisper of resilience while surrounding the lonely with ghostly digital facsimiles of connection. We offer affirmations where what is needed is systemic protection. And then, when individuals collapse under the weight of a structure never meant to hold them, we label them ill. Yet I wonder, who is truly ill here. Is it the child who can’t sleep because his parents work three jobs and still can’t afford rent. The teenager who cuts her arms because the only language her body has left is pain. The man who can’t cry in public because masculinity has been twisted into armor. Or the system that allowed, no, allowed, these stories to be ordinary.
It is a betrayal. It is a betrayal of decency, of the very idea that civilization is meant to shelter us. We were promised progress, and instead were handed performance. We were told we were free, and yet everywhere, we are measured, medicated, and managed, not with care but with convenience. Even our suffering is subjected to productivity, how quickly can you return to work. How quietly can you carry your despair. And I am tired, so very tired of language that reduces trauma to a trend, that repackages crisis as content. Tired of politicians who cite mental health only after a tragedy, as if sorrow were an anomaly, not a daily condition for millions.
Tired of corporations that paste “Mental Health Matters” on their logos while engineering burnout into every metric. Tired of schools that preach self-care but teach obedience. Tired of governments that see suicide rates climb and respond with budget cuts. It is enough. What enrages me beyond policy failure, beyond funding gaps or administrative cowardice, is the theater of concern our governments perform while the soul of the public is left to rot. They wear the language of compassion like a costume, pulled out during mental health awareness months and crisis headlines, only to be hung back up once the cameras stop. They host summits while closing clinics. They light buildings green for mental health but extinguish every torch that might guide us through the dark.
It is utter hypocrisy. And yet their hypocrisy is not benign, and certainly not harmless. It is a violence of neglect, dressed in the vocabulary of care. Because they know, they know that the crisis is real, that the pain is rising, that the data has outpaced denial. And still, they choose optics over overhaul. They send condolences instead of counselors. They pass bills that whisper of hope, while behind closed doors, they ensure that suffering remains profitable, manageable, invisible. But perhaps more bitter still, somehow, more corrosive than the cruelty of power, is the quiet cruelty of the people beside me.
Of my fellow citizens, of classmates, of neighbors, of coworkers, of strangers online, of ones who should understand, who should feel. And yet too often, do not. Who have the audacity to not reach out, instead choosing to mock, to dismiss, to blame. I scream out, how did we get here? How did we become a species that laughs at the vulnerable and scorns the broken? How did we become so spiritually malnourished that we flinch at the sight of someone crying in public and call it weakness? That we diagnose others with laziness, sin, or victimhood rather than asking, what weight are they carrying that I cannot see?
There is a hollowness in the public soul now, a kind of empathy famine, and it disgusts me. We’ve learned to ridicule the very qualities that once made us noble. We champion cruelty as realism, meanness as strength, indifference as wisdom. And when someone finally breaks under the impossible weight of modern existence, we do not mourn. We whisper they were weak. I at times do not think we do not care for the wounded. We crucify them for bleeding. And in this, I feel not just sorrow, but resentment. A resentment that simmers like grief’s older sibling. Because I know we are capable of more. I know it in my bones that people, at their best, can be luminous with empathy, cathedral-like in their ability to hold another’s pain.
But too many choose comfort over conscience. Too many are complicit in a culture that teaches children to hide their hurt and rewards adults for stepping on others to feel tall. It is not just that the government fails us. It is that the people around us, people who could, who should, be sanctuary, so often become another kind of exile. And I do not know what breaks the spirit more; the institutions that abandon us, or the neighbors who pretend not to see. There is a rot beneath the surface of this civilization, and it is not just structural. It is moral. It is cultural. It is personal. And until we name it, we will keep watching the most sensitive among us collapse under a burden they never asked to carry alone.
We need belonging without conformity, a place where we are not loved because we fit a mold, but because we are. Because we are flawed, radiant, growing, strange. So much of our suffering stems from the fear that who we are is too much, or not enough, for the world around us. We contort ourselves into acceptability, slicing off the parts that do not please, hiding the wounds that do not heal cleanly. But true belonging does not ask us to shrink. It holds space. It says: You don’t have to earn your place here. This is what Thoits (2011) identifies as the core of mental resilience: not individual toughness, but social integration, networks of mutual care, identities affirmed not through sameness, but through relationship.
A future society must be built with these relational sanctuaries in mind, public spaces designed for witness, where difference is not erased but honored, and where emotional labor is shared, not stigmatized. We need meaning without coercion. Too often, we are handed prepackaged lives, scripts written by religion, capitalism, nationalism, and told to recite them with gratitude. But forced meaning is no meaning at all. It becomes hollow, another performance we endure to be acceptable. Meaning must be discovered, not dictated.
It must arise from the intimate dialogue between self and world, shaped by art, story, reflection, and connection. This is where education systems must change. Instead of building obedient workers, we must raise storytellers of the self, children taught to ask, What do I value?, not just What do I do? We must weave philosophy into the curriculum not as abstraction, but as birthright. Let students grow up knowing that meaning is not handed down, but rather it is grown from the compost of memory and longing and contradiction.
We ache for truth without tribalism. In an age where reality is fragmented across ideological lines, truth has become less about what is, and more about who believes it. We are socialized not into shared understanding, but into camps; us versus them, right versus wrong, saved versus damned. But the hunger remains, to know, to learn, to understand this bewildering world we inhabit together. This hunger must be protected. Rebuilding truth means rebuilding epistemic trust, reviving public discourse spaces that are not battlegrounds, but gardens of curiosity. We need journalism that resists polarization, education that prioritizes questions over conclusions, and digital spaces designed not to divide, but to connect.
This will not come from algorithms, it must come from ethos, from a cultural commitment to honesty, to listening, and to the dignity of doubt. And above all, we need expression without judgment. A world where people can speak their truths without fear of exile. Where the inner life is not treated as shameful or indulgent. We cannot heal if we must hide. We cannot connect if we must censor every crack in our voice. The human soul is messy. It leaks. It sings off-key. It forgets its lines. But when we let it speak, and I mean truly speak, we become beautiful again.
Yet the systems that shape our world, the bureaucracy-worshiping temples of the modern West, do not recognize these needs. They stare at the soul and ask for output and scan the body for symptoms and forget the story. They name us only by what we produce, consume, achieve, or fail to achieve. They champion the gospel of the individual, not the sacred, trembling individual of poetry and pain, but the streamlined, smiling avatar of neoliberal fantasy. A self polished into product. A self severed from context. A self that must constantly be built, branded, optimized, and displayed, but never held. And in this machinery, everything we are becomes a liability. Vulnerability is weakness, and liability is failure. Feeling is excess, and rest is laziness.
Grief is indulgent, and sadness is a glitch to be medicated, not a signal to be heard. Capitalism, in its most unrepentant form, does not care for the soul. It has no use for awe or ache. It demands competition, not compassion. It thrives when we are isolated, anxious, always reaching but never enough. It feeds on the myth of merit, the lie that where we land is where we deserve to be. And when we stumble, as every human eventually does, it whispers: You should have worked harder. Fundamentalist religion, on the other hand, demands obedience over exploration. It draws its lines in ancient sand and punishes any step beyond them. It offers meaning, yes, but only in the narrow lanes of certainty. It leaves no room for doubt, for multiplicity, for becoming. You may belong, but only if you perform the right version of belief. You may be loved, but only if you disappear into doctrine. And in that disappearance, something vital dies: the wild, wondering, irreducible self. Enough.
Between these two altars, between market and dogma, the soul is crucified. Torn between demands to succeed and demands to submit, we are left in a space of recursive shame. We hurt, but are told our pain is proof of personal failure. We grieve, but are told to get over it. We are drowning in an ocean that insists it does not exist. And I rage at this. I rage at a world that shames the broken while engineering the breakage. I rage at systems that mutilate the self and then bill us for therapy. I rage at every institution that sees tears as unproductive, softness as unserious, introspection as self-indulgent. I rage because we deserve better, and somewhere deep inside, we still know it.
Human civilization does not progress by maximizing freedom in isolation, nor by demanding obedience in uniformity. It does not flourish when it becomes a tug-of-war between the self and the system, nor when it treats the inner life as private trivia and the public realm as soulless machinery. True advancement, true human flourishing, arises only when we harmonize the emotional truth of the self with the ethical demands of the collective. When we create cultures that do not pit individuality against belonging but fuse them through shared meaning rather than imposed belief. This is not merely a philosophical preference. It is a sociological and psychological imperative. As Thoits (2011) shows, social attachment is vital to mental and physical well-being. We suffer when we are disconnected, but we also suffer when we are told to conform so completely that we vanish. What we require is cohesion with integrity, community without erasure.
The rigidity of most institutionalized religions, particularly in fundamentalist forms, has proven alienating for many, especially the young and the marginalized. As Pilgrim (2019) explains, when cultural and belief systems fail to offer psychological safety and validation, individuals often experience “identity dissonance,” which can lead to emotional distress, internalized shame, and social withdrawal. The remedy is not the abolition of belief, but its transformation into an invitation rather than a mandate. We must cease treating art as luxury and start understanding it as essential psychic infrastructure. Art is not merely decorative, as it is the civic language of emotional integration.
It is how we metabolize the unspeakable. It is how we communicate across chasms of difference without requiring sameness. It is where private trauma meets public witnessing. As Campion et al. (2024) argue, public mental health systems must integrate cultural and emotional context to be effective. And yet most urban planning, policy design, and social systems exclude art from their blueprints entirely. We fund highways, not healing. We build prisons, not poetry halls. The mental health crisis is not a temporary affliction; it is a permanent referendum on the inhumanity of our current systems. It is, as Horwitz (2010) notes, a product not of medical misfortune but of modernity’s failure to support emotional life. If we are to flourish, mental health must be universalized, not privatized.
This means not only universal access to care, but a revolution in how care is understood. Mental health must be integrated into education, employment, architecture, and digital life. It must be de-stigmatized and de-commodified. It must be shaped by inclusive socialization, in which people are raised with emotional vocabulary, communal rituals, and the right to feel. Lund et al. (2018) emphasize that mental disorders are inextricably linked to social determinants, such as poverty, discrimination, disempowerment. Addressing these must go beyond treatment and enter the realm of design: empathetic policy, trauma-informed schooling, housing that heals instead of harms, and labor systems that honor rest as a civic virtue.
We must design governments that do not simply “serve” people, but know them, that create environments of symbolic and emotional reciprocity. A system is healthy not when it commands loyalty, but when it elicits belonging through care and coherence. This means localizing power, humanizing bureaucracy, and embedding ritual and relationality into governance. People must not feel like digits in a census, or strangers in the state that governs them. They must feel held. As McAllister et al. (2018) explain, macro-level structural determinants, like housing policy, labor law, and urban planning, either amplify mental health inequalities or reduce them. The difference lies in how they mediate human connection.
At its core, the modern mental health crisis is not merely the sum of misfiring neurons or chemical imbalances. It is not reducible to isolated traumas or private failures. It is far more ancient and structural: a profound mismatch between how societies are currently designed and how human beings, in the marrow of their being, are wired to live, love, and belong. A truth supported across fields, from evolutionary psychology to cultural history, and it echoes like a buried scream across centuries of discontent. Human beings did not evolve to function in anonymous crowds, surveilled bureaucracies, or algorithmic mazes. We evolved for small-group cohesion, to live in bands of 50 to 150 individuals where every face was known, every role was interconnected, and emotional reciprocity formed the backbone of survival.
As Robin Dunbar (1992) famously proposed through Dunbar’s number, our brains are built to manage a limited number of close, emotionally resonant relationships. Beyond that, intimacy fragments. Empathy fades. The heart becomes mechanized. In this ancestral context, identity was not a brand. It was a story, woven communally. Meaning was not outsourced to institutions or screens; it was embodied—in ritual, in land, in song, in myth. This is what Emile Durkheim (1912) meant when he spoke of the “collective effervescence” that binds people through shared symbolic experience. Without it, societies fall into what he later termed anomie, a condition of normlessness and despair, when the social fabric fails to guide or hold the individual.
Yet the modern world has torn that fabric. Instead of the emotionally rich, symbolically coherent, slow-paced tribal units our evolution prepared us for, we now inhabit vast bureaucratic megastructures, soulless systems designed not for communion, but for control, surveillance, productivity, and profit. Our cities are swollen, the timelines scroll endlessly, and our institutions speak in legalese. And instead of face-to-face affirmation, we seek recognition in metrics, be they follower counts, salary bands, GPA scores, diagnostic labels. This structural shift has hijacked our nervous systems.
What should be community has become content. What should be reflection has become reaction. And what should be belonging has become branding. As sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983) warned in The Managed Heart, even our emotions have become commodified, as labor we perform for systems that do not love us back. Our evolutionary inheritance cries out for empathy, slowness, ritual, shared myth. Instead, we are offered competition, acceleration, isolation, and infinite choice. And I would argue the result , both philosophically and personally, is psychosocial dysfunction on a planetary scale.
Rates of anxiety, depression, loneliness, self-harm, and suicidality are not anomalies in this system. They are predictable consequences. They are signals from the nervous system of civilization, telling us that we have strayed too far from our nature. As Kessler et al. (2005) documented, the onset of mental illness is increasingly early, increasingly widespread, and increasingly resistant to traditional interventions. It is a failure of culture. Even our truth systems have shattered under this weight. Where once people gathered around shared myths, shared gods, shared stories, we now experience a hyper-fragmentation of truth, a condition philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1994) might call hyperreality.
We no longer experience truth directly, but through simulations: headlines without nuance, identities without context, ideologies without ethics. The self floats through these fragmented semiotic fields, disoriented and exhausted, trying to make meaning in a world where everything has been flattened into image. To me, this fracture is not abstract. It is personal. I feel it in the existential ache of the scrolling void, in the cognitive dissonance between systemic injustice and individual blame, in the longing for belief without dogma and purpose without coercion. I have seen how structures that claim to help often betray those who need them most. I have seen how the pursuit of self becomes a cage when it is forced to happen in isolation.
Sometimes I wonder if we are reaching too far, if we are stretching toward a future not because we are ready, but because we are afraid to look back. We chase perfection like it is a birthright, not a warning. We build faster, think faster, digitize the soul and crown it progress. We wire our cities with algorithms and name the network consciousness. We chase AI as if intelligence alone could redeem us. We speak of immortality as though we have earned it, as though we have earned even this brief flicker of being. But underneath all this acceleration, I feel a tremor. A crack that runs through the foundation of who we are, a species still lost in its own grief, still fractured by history, still tangled in hierarchy, shame, violence, and the hunger to dominate.
And yet we dare to reach beyond ourselves, not to wonder, but to conquer. This is what I fear; not ambition itself, but unexamined ambition, ambition untethered from humility. We dream of becoming gods without healing the child that still cries in the center of our species. We imagine the future as a gleaming monolith, forgetting the rot in the bones beneath our cities. We long for eternal consciousness, even as we fail to treat the mentally ill with dignity. We map the stars and yet do not understand our own loneliness. This is a humanity reaching beyond what it is capable, as finite and mortal beings, trying to transcend into some version of an idealized self/society, a literal and metaphorical recreation of God, but in man.
The pursuit of knowledge has become, for many, the pursuit of dominion. We speak of learning, but what we mean is control. We do not wish to live in harmony with the cosmos, but rather we wish to own it. We do not gaze at the stars to listen, but gaze to mine, to measure, to master. And in doing so, we lose the very wonder that first called us to look up. I see this most clearly in our worship of science, not as a method, but as mythology. We look to quantum theory, black holes, multiverses, artificial intelligence, not simply as frontiers of insight, but as portals to transcendence. We hunger to escape the limits of death, of embodiment, of time. We dream of bending the laws of physics, not to better inhabit this world, but to abandon it, outsmart it, outgrow it.
We mistake curiosity for conquest. We have traced the very fabric of existence, be it of entropy, of spacetime, of random variables such as the Planck length, of the probabilistic indifference of the quantum realm, the enduring impossibility of existence itself. But too often, this exploration is co-opted by a culture that believes that what we can name, we can own. And so we seemingly run forward, blind and breathless, toward a perfection we do not understand, building towers of progress on unhealed ground. We chase the future like a holy war, promising salvation through complexity, abstraction, speed. But beneath it all, the human heart still cracks with the same old wounds: loneliness, hunger for love, fear of death, the need to be held.
I fear we will reach the edge of the universe only to find that we have brought our brokenness with us. That even if we cross the stars, we will still be alone. Still be hungry. Still be us. Because we cannot transcend what we refuse to confront. It is not wrong to reach. But it is dangerous to run when your house is on fire. And our house is on fire. The larger world itself burns. And we are more connected than ever, and yet more profoundly alone. In this paradox lies one of the defining tragedies of our era: that we speak across oceans in real time, transmit images of our lives in curated flickers, and scroll endlessly through the minutiae of others, yet somehow feel less seen, less known, and less held than ever before.
What was meant to connect us has instead begun to simulate connection, thin, flickering echoes of belonging that vanish the moment we look away from the screen. This is not a sentimental lament, so much as a escalating public health crisis. As Thoits (2011) and Lund et al. (2018) emphasize, social integration is a critical protective factor for mental health, and its absence correlates directly with anxiety, depression, and even physical decline. But modern social life, particularly through digital platforms, increasingly offers only the appearance of integration, a phantom limb of community. We may have followers, but not friends. Notifications, but not nurture. Comments, but not communion.
Chronic loneliness has become endemic because of our technological saturation. The architecture of social media platforms is built to amplify visibility, not intimacy. These systems reward performance over vulnerability, curation over chaos, affirmation over authenticity. As Sherry Turkle writes in Alone Together (2011), “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy.” The screen becomes a shield, a curated mask behind which the self slowly starves. In the constant glow of connection, we become shadows, always on display, never truly encountered. And yet, as social animals, we are wired for emotional reciprocity, not digital exposure. As Cacioppo and Patrick (2008) reveal in Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, prolonged social isolation is biologically punishing.
Loneliness activates the same neural pain pathways as physical injury. It increases cortisol, weakens the immune system, and significantly raises the risk of mortality. We are, quite literally, dying of disconnection, while posting daily proof that we are not alone. From a sociological lens, this is more than a personal misfortune, it is a structural design failure. As Pilgrim (2019) reminds us, mental health must be understood within the broader ecology of social relations, institutions, and values. In a society that increasingly prioritizes individual achievement, self-branding, and digital productivity, genuine interdependence becomes a liability. Needing others is treated as weakness. Asking for help is seen as failure. Being emotionally present is often too slow, too raw, too unprofitable. This is the trap we’ve built for ourselves: a world where we can always be reached, but rarely be held.
The tragedy is not simply that people are lonely. It is that they are lonely while being constantly watched, constantly reacting, constantly “connected.” The tragedy is that we are surrounded by feeds, stories, updates, avatars, algorithms, and still, when the silence comes, we are faced with the aching truth: no one really knows me here. And worse still, perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, is that I no longer know myself. Mental illness today is caught in a triple bind, normalized, pathologized, and commodified, each layer of this contradiction deepening the confusion, shame, and alienation felt by those who suffer. We are told that mental illness is normal now, as common as a cold, as treatable as a sprained ankle. Depression is everywhere, anxiety is ubiquitous, trauma is the new vocabulary of identity. This normalization has, in some ways, been a necessary antidote to centuries of stigma. It has allowed people to speak aloud what they once buried in silence, and has given language to what felt unnamable.
But this normalization has come at a cost. Because while we have normalized talking about mental illness, we have not transformed the systems that produce it. We have not restructured the environments, the social hierarchies, the economic conditions that continually grind people into despair. Instead, we’ve simply made the language of suffering more acceptable, without making the reality of suffering more livable. As sociologist Allan Horwitz (2002) warns in Creating Mental Illness, society increasingly medicalizes behaviors that are socially produced, culturally interpreted, and often normative reactions to structural harm. Sadness in response to precarity is not disordered.
Anxiety in the face of climate collapse is not irrational. But in a world that cannot bear the discomfort of emotional truth, these reactions are quickly pathologized, folded into diagnoses, managed with labels, sanitized with clinical distance. This is where the second betrayal emerges: pathologization. We treat mental illness not as a dialogue between soul and world, but as an error to be corrected. This process, as Rosenfield (1997) explored, often strips individuals of agency and identity, replacing their stories with DSM codes and service plans. Suffering and healing becomes statistics. The individual becomes a patient. Their meaning becomes irrelevant. Even this is not the end of the violence.
Because once we’ve normalized and pathologized mental illness, we do what modern Western systems do best; we commodify it. Pain becomes product, and trauma becomes brand. We are sold therapy apps, mindfulness packages, trauma-core aesthetics, and pills to keep us functioning in a world designed to fracture us. The pharmaceutical industry profits enormously from this cycle. As Walker, McGee, & Druss (2015) note, while millions receive diagnoses, far fewer receive holistic care. Instead, many are prescribed medication in isolation, quick fixes for complex social wounds. The system is not designed to heal. It is designed to contain, to manage, to profit quietly from the unresolved. Even identity becomes entangled in this commodification. We are encouraged to curate our disorders as part of our online persona, to be palatable, aesthetic, marketable in our breakdown. A new kind of mask, a new performance of palatable struggle that allows the machine to continue humming while the soul slowly disappears beneath slogans.
It is easy to look back to the past, to falsely believe it was once better. Perhaps in some ways it was, just as it is better now in others. Just as art is subjective, so is much of the modern world. Art was once sacred. Not sacred in the sense of dogma or doctrine, but sacred in its function: as a bridge between worlds, a vessel through which the human soul poured its rawest truths into form. It was an invocation. The cave paintings in Lascaux were not made for galleries. They were rituals of presence, symbols etched into darkness to tell the cosmos: We are here. We feel. We remember.
The sacredness of art lay in its urgency, the necessity of expression, the communion it offered with forces larger than the self, the dignity it gave to sorrow, to silence, to joy that had no language. But today, in this glimmering empire of speed and spectacle, art has often been stripped of that sacredness. It has been recast, not as a spiritual technology, but as entertainment. A product, a distraction, a dopamine hit between ads. The painting is not a window to another realm; it is background décor for brunch. The poem is not a spell; it is a caption. The song is not an invocation; it is algorithmic fodder for the next viral loop. And in this shift, we have lost something essential.
We’ve forgotten that art is not a luxury. It is a survival instinct. As Viktor Frankl argued in Man’s Search for Meaning(1959), humans can survive nearly anything, if they believe there is meaning to it. Art, at its truest, is that meaning. It helps us metabolize the senseless, give form to the formless, and reweave ourselves in the aftermath of fragmentation. But when art is reduced to content, it can no longer perform this function. It no longer heals, but rather it distracts. The neoliberal project has done this with frightening efficiency. Just as it has privatized health, marketized education, and commodified identity, it has taken art, the soul’s last refuge, and made it into a product line.
You do not paint to transcend. You paint to sell. You do not write to reckon with memory. You write to perform relatability. You do not sing to summon something holy. You sing to be streamed. The artist has become an influencer. The mystic has become a brand. And perhaps worst of all, this degradation has rewired how we receive art. We now consume it not with reverence, but with restlessness. We no longer linger. We scroll. We rate. We forget. In the attention economy, the depth of a work no longer matters, only its immediacy, its hook, its viral potential. As Neil Postman warned in Amusing Ourselves to Death(1985), when every medium is reduced to entertainment, even truth begins to dissolve into noise. We have turned the sacred into spectacle.
And in doing so, we’ve impoverished not only the art, but the soul of the culture that surrounds it. Because without sacred art, without spaces where feeling can be alchemized into beauty, we have nowhere to place our grief. Nowhere to honor longing. Nowhere to meet each other beyond the masks of performance. The result is a kind of aesthetic famine. People are starving for depth and don’t know why. They binge content, but remain emotionally malnourished. They listen to songs but no longer weep.
They read poetry, but only in bite-sized platitudes. They attend museums but do not feel changed. It is not that art no longer exists. It is that its context has been desecrated. Once, truth was imagined as a monolith. Solid. Singular. Eternal. It stood like a mountain, unmoved by time, observed from different angles but still there, looming, indifferent, anchoring. And though this was perhaps always a myth, it was a useful one, a shared center of gravity around which dialogue could orbit, rituals could cohere, and societies could align their ethics, however imperfectly. But now, truth has fractured.
Not into diversity of perspective, which is a gift, but into warring epistemologies, each with its own language, its own sources, its own saints and demons. No longer a shared pursuit, truth has become a battlefield. A commodity. A costume. A tribal banner waved in the wind of outrage, claimed not by reason but by loyalty. We have transcended differences, as now we inhabit different realities. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Liquid Modernity (2000), we now live in an age where solidity has melted. Belief, identity, and meaning are no longer anchored to place, history, or ritual, as they are fluid, contingent, marketable.
In this liquidity, truth has become decentralized to the point of dissolution. It is no longer what corresponds to reality, buth rather it is what affirms one’s group. This is what I mean when I say we live in tribal epistemologies. Each digital enclave, ideological cohort, or cultural faction builds its own echo chamber of what counts as real. The left has its data. The right has its experts. The cynic has their satire. The mystic has their cosmic algorithm. The individual now constructs their truth like a playlist, curated, aestheticized, emotionally optimized.
But here is the cost: when every group has its own epistemology, disagreement becomes heresy. There is no longer room for mutual transformation, only polarized self-righteousness. This epistemic tribalism is not just frustrating; it is psychologically and socially catastrophic. As Pascoe and Richman (2009) observe, perceived threat to identity and belief leads to increased stress, distrust, and psychological alienation. When truth becomes a tribal artifact, any contradiction becomes an attack on the self. Dialogue dies. Curiosity withers. In its place, we are left with suspicion, sarcasm, and the cold comfort of being “on the right side.” It is epistemic isolation. And I grieve this deeply.
Because I believe that truth should not be a weapon. That truth is not something to wield against one another, but something to reveal together. It should humble us, not harden us. But our current systems, particularly digital media infrastructures, do not reward humility. They reward certainty, spectacle, and speed. And in the process, we become strangers in our own language, speaking past each other, misrecognizing intentions, collapsing nuance into threat. We mock the other tribe’s delusion, blind to our own. We sacrifice complexity on the altar of coherence, because it’s easier to belong than to think. This transcends politics; it is about epistemic belonging, the human need to know, not in isolation, but in company. We once fulfilled that need in sacred spaces, academic salons, oral traditions, communal rituals. Now we fulfill it in ideological silos, reinforced by algorithms that radicalize belief while deadening compassion.
As media theorist Neil Postman warned in Technopoly (1992), when every idea is flattened into “content,” we lose the cultural capacity to distinguish between knowledge, opinion, and manipulation. We do not merely lose truth; we lose the will to seek it. We stop asking: What is true? and begin asking: What makes me feel safest? What proves them wrong? Just as Marx taught us that economic structures shape consciousness, we now see, with aching clarity, that institutional designs shape not only ideology, but biology. It is no longer a metaphor to say that systems wound people. It is a medical fact, a measurable physiological toll, documented in bodies that carry the stress of abandonment, inequality, and shame.
Psychologists call it allostatic load, the cumulative wear and tear on the body from being chronically out of sync with one’s environment (McEwen & Stellar, 1993). When the world is not built to hold you, when your safety is conditional, your value is transactional, and your identity is policed, the body begins to rot inward. And still we are told, Be resilient. Geronimus et al. (2006) found this effect most devastatingly in marginalized populations, particularly Black Americans, who experience weathering: premature biological aging caused by sustained exposure to racism, poverty, and social neglect. But this pathology is not exclusive to one group. It is the shared inheritance of life inside systems that punish the soul for feeling too much and reward the self only when it fractures into marketable pieces. If I had to summarize, I must do it bluntly: bad systems break people. And we have built entire civilizations upon the breaking.
Capitalism rewards hyper-competition, which breeds anxiety like a toxin in the air. We are taught from birth to run, to outperform, to overwork, to rise above. But in the process, we are consumed by status obsession, forced to measure our worth against impossible standards and against one another. As Pilgrim (2019) writes, mental health cannot be understood in isolation from “the political economy in which it arises.” Capitalism creates winners not through abundance, but through scarcity. It does not ask: Are you well? It asks: Are you better than them? And so we perform wellness as a product, meditated, smiling, balanced, busy, while quietly unraveling beneath the surface.
The late-capitalist citizen is expected to be both machine and monk: endlessly productive, perpetually at peace, never a burden. But peace without rest is delusion. Wellness without justice is performance art for the system. Neoliberalism, that cold theology of the self-made man, preaches self-responsibility while systematically defunding communal care. It tells us that healing is personal, that failure is individual, that salvation lies in the hustle. It atomizes the human spirit and then blames it for being alone.
Meanwhile, as Lund et al. (2018) and Campion et al. (2024) have shown, mental health outcomes worsen in precisely the environments where public goods are stripped away. Housing, education, social support, accessible therapy: these are not luxuries. They are lifelines. But in neoliberal logic, lifelines are inefficiencies. And so, we are left gasping, told to “self-care” our way through systemic neglect. Representative democracy, once the altar of civic dignity, now too often reduces the citizen to a disengaged consumer. Participation is narrowed to voting every few years, where choices are pre-filtered through wealth and bureaucracy. The town square has become the comments section.
The commons has become the algorithm. We do not feel represented; we feel bored, alienated, angry. And this alienation is not incidental. It is structural. As McAllister et al. (2018) demonstrate, macro-level determinants, such as political disenfranchisement, correlate with rising mental health inequalities. When people do not feel seen, they disappear from their own narratives. They dissociate, not just psychologically, but civically. Even organized religion, which once provided shared myth, moral scaffolding, and ritual belonging, often now serves to divide more than unite. Its promises are frequently tethered to conditions: Believe this. Obey that. Exclude them. The sacred becomes territorial. The temple becomes a border. And those who seek transcendence without submission are left with nothing but spiritual hunger and cultural exile.
And yet, people are still starving for meaning. We long to kneel somewhere, not in fear, but in recognition. But too often, religion offers not mystery, but mastery. Not poetry, but punishment. And so we flee. And then we grieve the very unity we were cast out of. The result of all of this is not simply a rise in diagnoses. It is not a matter of increased awareness or better detection. The result is mass psychological deregulation. It is a society that no longer knows how to feel together. We are anxious, yes, but more dangerously, we are desynchronized. No longer attuned to one another. No longer held in the rhythm of a common life. And perhaps worst of all: governments are incapable of addressing this crisis.
Not because they are evil, but because they are built on blueprints written before we understood the human psyche. Before trauma was named. Before neurodivergence was dignified. Before allostatic load had a name. Before we knew that a person could look successful and be spiritually collapsing. We live in the most connected era in human history; and yet people have never felt more alone. There are satellites mapping our movements, phones tracking our steps, and fiberoptic pulses delivering our images across oceans in milliseconds. We are stitched into a global mesh of instantaneous communication. And still, we ache with an emptiness that no notification can fill.
At the heart of this paradox lies social media: a digital landscape that promises community, voice, and belonging, but more often delivers performance, surveillance, and curated solitude. It presents itself as the new town square, the open agora, the antidote to isolation. But this promise, like so many in modernity, is a seductive illusion. Because beneath the interface of connectivity is an architecture built not for intimacy, but for engagement. And engagement, in this context, does not mean meaningful interaction, it means the capture of attention. It means clicks, scrolls, reactions. It means manipulating the most primitive parts of our brains in order to keep us tethered to an endless loop of emotional stimulation and fragmented desire.
As Sherry Turkle wrote in Alone Together (2011), “We expect more from technology and less from each other.” We have come to mistake the ping of a message for presence, the red heart for care, the follower count for esteem. And in this confusion, something sacred has been lost. Because the platforms we use every day are not neutral tools. They are psycho-social machinery, designed to shape our identities, beliefs, and emotional rhythms. Their algorithms, cold, recursive, insatiable, are not trained to surface what is meaningful, but what is profitable. And what is profitable is rarely what is tender. And so, users are funneled into echo chambers, digital cloisters where they encounter only views that mirror their own or threaten them into defensive rage. The world is reduced to us and them, and complexity becomes a liability. As Zygmunt Bauman warned in Liquid Modernity, the self now floats through shapeless fields of half-knowledge and tribal certainty, desperate to anchor itself but unable to find a shore.
In this terrain, identity becomes performance. The self is no longer something we grow, it is something we curate. We compose it in captions, filter it through aesthetics, harvest it for approval. And in doing so, we risk losing not only our authenticity, but our interiority. We begin to live from the outside in. Connection becomes quantifiable, flattening the exquisite mess of human emotion into cold digital metrics. We begin to measure our worth in metrics, rather than meaning. We chase virality instead of vulnerability. We become brands, not beings. And even when we try to be real, when we dare to post something tender, something true, our vulnerability is commodified.
It is mined for engagement, for spectacle. Worse still, it is often punished. We are mocked for oversharing, punished for being too much, too open, too raw. The system rewards vulnerability only when it is palatable, aestheticized, marketable. This all results in what I call algorithmic anomie: a digital mutation of Durkheim’s concept of anomie, which described a condition of normlessness, moral disorientation, and social alienation. But this version is not just social or moral, it is informational, emotional, and existential. It is what happens when the self is exposed constantly to curated, performative realities that mimic connection but offer no true recognition.
We are bombarded with fragments of others’ lives, but none of it touches us. It all passes too quickly. And in this rapid flickering, the self begins to erode. We see everything. We feel nothing. We become strangers to our own desire. Spectators in our own narrative. Ghosts haunting a digital world that never learned how to hold us. And it directly impacts us mentally. The modern mental health crisis, particularly the tidal rise of anxiety and depression, is not merely a matter of misfiring neurotransmitters or isolated trauma. It cannot be fully explained through the language of serotonin levels or individual dysfunction.
These are the leaves of the tree, yes, but not the root. To focus solely on biology is to whisper at the edges of a scream. Because this crisis is not simply happening in people. It is happening around them, through them, to them. It is an echo, a psychic echo of cultural disintegration. We are anxious because the world we live in no longer reflects the emotional truths we carry within us. Because we are caught in systems, be they economic, digital, ideological, that demand a kind of presence that is inhuman: always productive, always pleasant, always curated for external consumption. Our inner world is rendered irrelevant unless it can be branded, aestheticized, or turned into content.
We are constantly performing, but rarely being seen. We present our lives in squares and filters, share our joy in digestible hashtags, hint at our pain with poetic ambiguity, just enough to be palatable, never enough to be disruptive. We stage ourselves for recognition, and in doing so, slowly lose the unstageable parts of our soul. We are applauded for poise, but never for the trembling that comes after the applause fades. We are bombarded with crises we can witness but not change, the climate hemorrhaging, nations unraveling, injustice looping in digital cycles of outrage and impotence.
We are asked to care deeply, endlessly, immediately, but offered no rituals, no collectivity, no structure to hold our care. The result is emotional paralysis, what sociologist Kelsey Kretschmer calls “compassion fatigue”, a burnout of the moral imagination. We are told to express ourselves, to “be authentic,” to “speak our truth”, but punished when we are too much or not enough. Cry too openly, and you’re unstable. Say too little, and you’re cold. Suffer quietly, and no one notices. Suffer loudly, and no one believes you. This cultural double bind, as psychologist Pauline Boss describes in her work on ambiguous loss, creates a condition in which grief cannot complete its ritual. The self becomes a riddle with no solvable grammar.
And we live, always, in a world of infinite comparison. We scroll past curated lives: glowing skin, clean apartments, lovers who bring coffee in bed. Meanwhile, our own chaos festers, off-screen, unspoken, unbeautiful. We do not envy others’ joy. We envy the coherence of their presentation. The illusion that someone, somewhere, has figured it out. This is what philosopher Byung-Chul Han names in The Burnout Society (2015): a civilization where the self is simultaneously liberated and enslaved, no longer oppressed from without, but exhausted from within. There is no tyrant in this society, only the internalized voice of endless optimization, whispering always: Be better. Do more. Fix yourself. Smile while you burn.
In such a culture, every failure is personalized, every sadness privatized, every moment of fatigue seen as a flaw of willpower. You are tired? Then sleep better. You are depressed? Then journal. You are anxious? Then meditate harder. Take a break but do it efficiently. Heal, but keep producing. Rest, but only if it improves your performance. Yet this is but capitalized recovery. And the worst cruelty of all? That we believe it’s our fault. That we see our breakdowns as proof of our individual deficiency, rather than as signs that something much deeper is unraveling. What we experience as personal collapse is in truth a collective trauma, disguised in the language of individual struggle.
Against this backdrop, of systems that silence, metrics that flatten, and cultures that commodify pain, art becomes not escape, but remedy. Not a distraction from the crisis, but a ritual for moving through it. Not a luxury, but a lifeline. Art is not always beautiful. Often, it is a howl, a rupture, a scar turned signal. It is what happens when the soul, cornered by the unspeakable, finds a crack in the wall and writes itself out in trembling ink. It is the cry turned chorus, the breakdown turned bridge. And in a world that asks us to be productive more than it asks us to be whole, this act of making, however small, however imperfect, is nothing short of revolutionary.
When a person creates art, no matter its form, they are doing something quietly miraculous: they are externalizing their interiority. They are taking the shapeless ache, the slow-burning grief, the storm of feeling that has no place in modern life, and giving it form. They are refusing to be silent in a world that profits from their suppression. And when someone else encounters that form and says, “I feel that too,”, when a stranger’s pain suddenly becomes your mirror, a sacred transaction occurs. Recognition without judgment. Belonging without assimilation. That moment, brief as a breath, is everything we are missing.
Art, in this sense, becomes a third space between isolated individuals. It does not demand correctness. It does not insist on consensus. It does not weaponize truth. It says simply: Here I am. Does any part of me resemble you? This is how art heals; not as medicine, but as meaning. Not as cure, but as continuity. And in a society increasingly marked by dissolution of self, where identity is splintered by roles, metrics, and economic demands, art becomes the place where the fragments are not just gathered, but woven.
Art de-pathologizes emotion. It lets rage speak without fear of diagnosis, lets sorrow breathe without shame, lets joy and terror dance without explanation. In doing so, it rescues feeling from clinical exile and returns it to the shared human fabric, where it belongs. Art creates continuity. The personal wound becomes part of a larger memory. My grief joins your grief, which echoes an ancestral grief. A poem becomes a eulogy, which becomes a tradition. What once felt isolating becomes connective, cultural, even holy.
Art offers agency. Where trauma takes away choice, art restores it. The canvas, the page, the lens—they are places where we shape what once only consumed us. We rearrange the chaos into beauty, or at least into form, and in doing so, begin to remember ourselves as capable of transformation. Art restores narrative. Depression flattens time; anxiety splinters it. But art invites integration. It helps individuals place their pain inside a story, not to explain it away, but to hold it with coherence. As narrative psychologist Dan McAdams suggests, storytelling is essential to identity. Without story, the self drifts. With story, the self returns. In a society that equates worth with productivity, art allows us to be valuable without being useful. It is one of the only remaining spaces where we can be messy, ambiguous, soft. Where we can be beings, not units. Where we can be felt, not evaluated.
Works Cited
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Harvard University Press, 2000.
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