The end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive, super-efficient — and alone. Eventually you start seeing other human beings as distractions. For women, men become obstacles to healing and mental health. For men, women seem like obstacles to ambition and self-development.
==The constant cultural message is that we are better off alone. But loneliness is not empowerment.==
The Optimization Trap
Young men obsess over whether they are doing enough — waking up early enough for stoic journaling, internet-sourced workout routines, ice baths, macro-calculated meal prep, and nootropic supplements, all before grinding their underpaid day job while listening to Andrew Huberman podcasts and thinking about side hustles. Others obsess over discovering whatever laws of science apply to relationships and the female mind, hoping for a leg up in a ruthless dating market.
This is the locally-optimal strategy of the era: replace human connection with systems, protocols, and self-improvement stacks. The system works — productivity goes up, body composition improves, sleep gets optimized. But the system also produces the thing it was designed to avoid: a person so thoroughly optimized that they have forgotten what the optimization was for.
The parallel for women runs through therapy culture and healing language: the pressure to become whole, healed, and self-actualized before allowing anyone in. Both genders arrive at the same destination — alone and perfected, with no one to share the perfection with. This is the same trap described in pressure-to-be-single: the freedom to self-actualize alone becomes the pressure to be alone.
Diagnostic Culture
We are so determined to de-stigmatize mental health issues that we have started to stigmatize being human. Having human reactions to things.
When young people say they feel crippling anxiety or insecurity, we do not investigate further. We do not wonder if the cause is a morally ambiguous world, the collapse of real community, or the feeling that they cannot rely on anyone but themselves. We diagnose them and are done with it. We call this a culture of compassion, but it is closer to a culture of labeling — sorting human suffering into categories so it can be managed rather than understood.
Social media reduces people to identity labels or consumer preferences. Therapy culture distills them into a diagnosis or collection of symptoms. Both fit people into neat categories. Neither asks the question that focusing asks: what is actually going on underneath the label, in the body, in the felt sense that has no convenient name?
The children-as-mirrors principle applies here too: if an entire generation is anxious, the diagnosis belongs to the environment, not the generation. But the culture’s response is to medicalize the individual rather than examine the system.
The Relocation of Authority
Authority has been relocated to the isolated individual, in the name of liberation. Even the state now bases its moral legitimacy on guaranteeing freedom from repression for the self’s desires.
The result is that young people must turn to the internet for the guidance that used to come from elders, communities, and institutions. This produces widespread infantilization — not because young people are weak, but because the structures that would have supported their development have been dismantled in the name of individual freedom.
All that remains are empty platitudes: whatever you want to do, do it, as long as it makes you happy. This sounds like permission but functions as abandonment. It tells young people they are on their own, then calls that liberation.
The Connection to Other Patterns
The puer-aeternus is the archetypal victim of this cultural moment — told to self-actualize indefinitely, given no model of mature commitment, and celebrated for the very provisionality that keeps him from landing. The Ick is the feminine response to men produced by this system — functional but not vibrant, optimized but not individuated.
The non-neediness framework reveals the deeper problem: genuine non-neediness comes from having a secure internal base, which is built through relationships — not through optimization protocols performed in isolation. The culture prescribes the opposite of the cure: it tells people to become non-needy by being alone, when non-neediness is actually forged through the experience of being reliably held by others.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “self-improvement is always good — work on yourself and you’ll attract the right people.”
The midwit take is “the problem is social media — delete the apps and you’ll be fine.”
The better take is that the self-optimization culture is a symptom, not a cause. The underlying disease is the collapse of structures — family, community, religion, shared moral frameworks — that used to provide identity, belonging, and purpose. In their absence, the individual is left to construct all of these from scratch, alone, using YouTube tutorials and therapy apps. The cruelty is not that the tools are bad. It is that the task is impossible to do alone, and the culture insists it must be done alone.
Main Payoff
The soul is not the self. The self is the project — the optimized, curated, diagnosed, labeled version of you that can be presented, measured, and improved. The soul is whatever is left when you stop performing the project. The tragedy of the current moment is that the culture has made the project so totalizing that many people have forgotten the soul exists — and when they feel its absence, they interpret the emptiness as a sign they need to optimize harder.
References:
- The Self and the Soul: A Dialogue — The Upheaval