The False Hope of Therapy in a Jam-Packed Culture

Young people need guidance. Therapeutic culture is making things worse.

There’s an old cliché that knowledge is power. This three-word saying is believed to have originated from Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century philosopher and scientist that devoted his life to the pursuit of knowledge, inventing many scientific techniques that allowed us humans to know more about the natural world.

There's never been an age where we know more about things than this one. Not only that, but the arrival of the internet allowed us to learn about pretty much anything in the world at pretty much any time. If you lived three thousand years ago, your world was very limited, and you could learn pretty much learn everything one could know in a few years. Now you can spend your whole life learning new things and not even make a dent in the remaining backlog of things to know.

And yet all this knowledge hasn't made us feel powerful but the opposite: we often feel disempowered by unlimited knowledge. I'm 24 years old. My peers and I grew up in an age where we can know anything by looking it up online. And yet my generation is the most depressed generation ever to exist.

I recently read Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, which I reviewed here. Shrier examines just how the language and practices of therapy have permeated the lives of young people both online and offline. The main point that Shrier makes is that our therapeutic culture actually harms kids more than it helps them—if it ever helped them at all. Shrier is one of the most important cultural commentators today, first with her timely exposé on the rapid onset of rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria a few years prior, and now with her new book on the toxicity and brokenness of therapy culture.

Every chapter of Shrier’s new book pulls back the curtain to the increasing proliferation of therapy-speak: in our schools, on the internet, and in everyday parlance. And the more therapeutic practices used, the more depressed and anxious people get. It's even possible that therapy causes people to develop mental health conditions they would not have had otherwise. Then there's the profit motive: therapists want clients to reframe as many events as traumatic as possible so that clients need to keep going back to “unpack traumas.”

When I talk to middle-class left-of-center people my age, they often talk about going to therapy—sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously. Ask someone who’s been in therapy how they’re feeling and they may reply with something like

As I journey through my inner landscape, I'm carefully exploring the remnants of past traumas that have shaped my experiences. It's like navigating through the depths of my subconscious, uncovering the layers of unresolved emotions and memories. By bravely embracing vulnerability and facing discomfort, I'm slowly untangling the knots of my past. Setting healthy boundaries and prioritizing self-care provide essential support along the way. It's a journey of healing and growth, where acknowledging past wounds becomes a pathway to inner peace and self-discovery.

Basically, therapy jargon with vaguely-New Age sentiment. How did contemporary culture end up like this?

As someone currently in graduate school researching the sociology of religion, I’ve done quite a bit of research on the rise of New Age spirituality in the 1960s, a phenomenon that arose in large part out of the decline of the Mainline Protestant establishment in Western countries. Mainline Protestantism set America’s national morality since our founding, giving moral authority behind causes like the abolition of slavery, temperance, and ending child labor. After WWII, belief in God went into decline throughout the West, but no group experienced decline harder than Mainline Protestants. 

This vacuum led to the rise of many alternative belief systems, chief of which was New Age spirituality, which took Protestant ideas about the importance of the individual (the idea that a person is saved through individual faith alone is deeply Protestant) and created new belief systems that essentially turned humans into their own gods, deciders of their own fates.

While the libertarian choose-what-you-want ethos worked for some people (Burning Man seems to attract big crowds every year), the decline of a national morality has led to many people feeling aimless in life. And this is where one can see how the proliferation of choice has led to more misery, rather than less. Marketers and advertisers all know the paradox of choice: when a shopper is presented with too many options, the shopper is actually less likely to buy something and often second-guesses their eventual purchase. Look at this handy illustration of jam choice:

The same goes for today's never-ending stream of information pouring in from all directions. The average Zoomer grows up carrying around a device that contains all the knowledge ever produced in the world. But humans can't handle all that knowledge. We don't know which knowledge is right or wrong. We went from having to choose between two flavors of jam to having to choose between infinite flavors of jam—and now we’re the ones stuck in a jam.

It's kind of hard to be our own gods when we don't have the powers that are attributed to God. We don't know everything. We're not all-powerful. Is it not a surprise that in an era where we can know as much as possible, we’re actually mentally worse because of it? Keep in mind that some parents will let their kids have unrestricted internet access before they even hit kindergarten. Kids will go from being only given information by their parents to being bombarded with everything, everywhere, all at once.

No wonder my generation is so depressed. Despite all the rah-rah libertarian sentiment about how no one can control us, many people desire an authority that will tell them what to do. We don't need to stand in the aisle forever looking for the right brand of jam if we get someone we trust to pick our jam out for us. This is where therapy comes in. Instead of trying to figure out our problems by ourselves, we outsource authority to a therapist. We pay someone to tell us what to do. But because we pay them, therapists often sugarcoat things for us. They tell us what we want to hear so that we’ll keep coming back. So the paid authority figure isn't even authority figure. It's all fake. We pretend like it's real because of all the fancy jargon being used. It's science! “Trust the science!” 

Knowledge is not necessarily power. The rise of therapeutic culture can be explained in part due to the need for some sort of moral grounding in a world where there are unlimited options to choose from. Throughout the West, there has been a turn away from liberal democracy among young people on both Left and Right. Many people are tired of having to figure things out in an age where there are just too many things to have to figure out. They would rather give up on democracy and hope for a benevolent sovereign to take charge. Forget Plato’s philosopher-king ideal—they want a therapist-in-chief. I don't know if we'll ever reach that point. But what I can say for sure is that the generation that grew up with unlimited amounts of information is also the most anxious and depressed generation to ever exist. Maybe some degree of ignorance was bliss after all.

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