People are not individuals

At work, fellow therapists believe the shallow culture: You can deep-breathe your way out of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and anxiety. You can say to yourself: This is not “pain,” it is “discomfort,” thereby making yourself a lot better. A symptom or a behavior should be the focus of psychotherapy, not the active origin of it in one’s history.

People accept that eating many courses of traditional food on a holiday is meaningful, that all this weight and variety is meaningful.

They swallow their parents’ religion. Or they absorb the implausible idea of a first thinking and feeling cause of the universe and that it should be worshipped.

They allow themselves to “believe” ideas, smorgasbords of disparate statements of a political ideology or party, as if these were found in nature or discovered by genius.

They do not question their global prejudices – hates and loves – that their country or their father or their neurosis fed them. Good – patriotism and self-sacrifice; bad – political incorrectness. Women are sex objects. Women are “strong.” Men are the handlers of tough situations. Men with money is a Collective Unconscious good, carved on Mt. Olympus.

They believe in “good” and “evil” as entities or products of God and Satan, when it is clear that the ocean is made of grey, context, and the deeper meaning of a behavior.

We are the mesmerized audience to other people’s need for an audience, and we believe the show is important: pet rocks and boy sorcerers and reality television and youtube stars and the bling-y rappers and café troubadours who take all their sturm und drang from the communal well.

I think the reason people are not individuals is that life is a ride that we need to be easy because it is hard. Life is hard for the human mind so we sleep, find desserts where we can, symbiote and clash with others to not be alone with our thoughts which, alone, settle into an unaccustomed reality.