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Tag: mental health

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    Paralysis of Indecision

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    1–2 minutes

    While some stress stems from overcommitment and limited time, much arises from suspended decisions.

    Lingering uncertainty—not merely circumstance—drains mental energy. The inability to prioritize concerns (or relinquish control over uncontrollable elements) leads to a piling of unresolved tasks, each demanding attention until anxiety swells.

    Stoics advise understanding your agency (what you can control or change) to make better choices about what can reasonably be solved, then taking action, which relieves the stress of deliberation (procrastination) and turns it into a path to liberation.

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    Anchoring in Material Reality

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    1–2 minutes

    Emotional turbulence often distorts our sense of life’s trajectory. Amid conflict or disappointment, it feels as though everything is unraveling.

    Yet our material conditions—home, income, relationships—remain largely intact. The storm is internal.

    Suffering often persists not from real change but from emotional magnification. By reorienting toward tangible stability, we regain footing. Pain is real, but often temporary; our reality is less fragile than it feels.

    Perspective becomes a tool of survival: remembering what endures while waiting for what hurts to pass.

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    depressive hedonia

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    1–2 minutes

    Depressive hedonia, as Mark Fisher observed, is not an absence of pleasure but an enslavement to it.

    Trapped in compulsive enjoyment, one feels something vital is missing—yet cannot look beyond the pleasure principle to find it.

    This mirrors the hedonic treadmill, where pursuit replaces purpose. Acceleration becomes its own end, masking emptiness with motion. To stop invites existential anxiety; stillness feels like exile in a society wired for relentless forward thrust.

    Thus, we treat symptoms with therapy and medication, but the core remains: despair disguised as pleasure, urgency masking absence.

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    utopia: no psychoanalysis

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    1–2 minutes

    Todd McGowan argues that psychoanalysis opposes utopia (the good or perfect place), as an ideal society would eliminate the central antagonism between individual and society, rendering therapy unnecessary as we would be untroubled.

    Yet, many attempt to “therapize” society into a utopia. By normalizing discontent (shifting perspective to become comfortable with your distance from a good place), we foster empathy and wisdom, seeking a communal collective that labors to tolerate dysfunction.

    However, the structural, historical inversion of “the good place” reasserts itself: materialist corruption perpetuates alienation (Marx), ensuring psychoanalysis remains essential for populace pacification.

    In short, therapy cannot create utopia—only structural transformation can eliminate the need for therapy.

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    we are depressed, not repressed

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    1–2 minutes

    Today we suffer from depression rather than repression.

    No one reading this is repressed despite the popular psychotherapeutic convenience of thinking so. Over the last 100 years, we have deconstructed and expanded "normalization" and "freedom," replacing both with a narcissistic psycho-politics of persistent self-evaluation and optimization.

    We can do anything but are so burnt out that we collapse under the extreme freedom of choice, which never leads to restoration.
    (idea from Byung-Chul Han )
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    To be good protect your romantic idealism

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    1–2 minutes

    To be a good person, you must be idealistic (and romantic) despite reality’s indifference and institutional antipathy.

    We struggle to shape our world and its institutions according to our values – justice, loyalty, and consistency. Yet, we encounter their twisted opposites: greed, manipulation, and fickleness.

    Institutions champion sociopathy, and our failure is to consider them communities and strive to reshape them, or shame them, into responsibility.

    Depressingly, "goodness" is a manipulative lever for assholes, and yet to relieve ourselves of idealistic values (to be practical) is to become what we despise.

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    Enjoy your “symptom”

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    1–2 minutes

    Lacan’s jouissance is paradoxical enjoyment that reaches a painful, disruptive state: not necessarily ecstatic, but destructive pleasure.

    Such a state can be neurotic: compulsively scratching your "itch" both soothes and traps the individual in a repetitive cycle (hoarding, grooming, sex, counting, organizing, procrastination, work-a-holic).

    This "symptom" (Freud’s term) is an early compromise of conflicting desires manifesting in a distorted manner, a sign of unresolved unconscious issues. Yet, Lacan says we can recognize—and accept—our unconscious satisfaction gleaned from our symptoms: it is not merely a problem but a meaningful expression of the self.

    Žižek

    takes it further, saying ideologies are a collective "symptom" offering what feels like pleasure/enjoyment while masking deeper issues and contradictions. (For example, consumerism provides satisfaction and alienation; politics is often about tribal affiliation and winning over moral motivation.) Like Lacan, Žižek is not interested in eliminating the "symptom," which only moves the symptom elsewhere, but in learning from it.

    To accept that our pathology is linked to—integral to—our identity reveals our uniqueness as "symptomatic" of our inability to handle conflicting desires: jouissance reveals our sickness, which is our identity.

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    The joke is already there

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    1–2 minutes

    Halloween coincides with National Mental Health Day.

    You don’t have to try to be funny; just be observant.

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    Rage is articulate

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    1–2 minutes

    Happiness is an emotive well-being, perhaps chatty but primarily a glowing emanation content in quietude. Depression stifles language, muting the desire to express.
    Rage, on the other hand, manifests as an expulsion of incisive expletives targeting idiocy and injustice. Extreme anger becomes intellectual and cerebral, arming itself with honed arguments and tactical acumen as unknown linguistic prowess shapes words into weapons.

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    Society: solving Repression leads to Depression

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    1–2 minutes

    Freud would say our problem is repression. Byung-Chul Han says our problem is depression.

    Over 150 years ago, people knew who they were in society: a body with a job.
    Most of our work was labor, from which the body might suffer but could recover with a short break. Our stratified placement limited the mind, so ambition and possibility were limited, implying reduced cognitive anxiety and strain.

    People were likely to repress ‘delusions and abnormal behaviors’ under authoritarian control. Still, they were not responsible for self-optimization, perpetual fear of not meeting your potential, or the imperative to fulfill and achieve impossible dreams.

    Now that we are free of repression, we have burnout and depression.