We once repressed our desires, channeling energies into capitalist production and some neurosis or dysfunction.

Yet to liberate those desires is to offer them more fully to manipulation and cooptation by Capitalism. Today your freed desires feed the machine that once repressed you.

In this sense, there is no more prolonged repression to access and no angst or will to motivate sublimation: we have released the slight whim, the smallest grain of sand before it truly aggravates. Each urge is liberated instantly through desire and consumerism. And yet, we are still troubled, aggrieved, and chaffed.

The reaction is a resuscitated burrowing into stoic asceticism, where self-governance is a fad amongst the most hedonistic.

We now look to rediscover how to control and repress ourselves to build up the tension: a recognition of internal pressure as power.