I just got back from filming with Chris in Austin for Modern Wisdom! We spoke about my new book, some of the interesting Goodreads reviews…and what’s behind the rise of “angry young women”.

You can watch the full episode here:

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and travelling lately, and am really missing writing. But I have a long list of ideas, and thoughts that didn’t make it into the book, so I promise more essays coming soon!

Also: GIRLS® is out in the US next week!! (May 5!) Thank you to everyone who has been so enthusiastic and excited to read it, it really means a lot. If any of you are in NYC, I’ll be doing a launch event with on May 13—there will be cocktails, book signings and a chance to chat in person! Would love to see some of you there. Details and tickets here.

Thank you, as always, and more soon,

-Freya x

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Something feels painfully familiar about the way we act and communicate online lately. Things feel more petty, catty, anxious, adolescent, as though everyone is more immature, more prone to emotional outbursts. I left my all-girls school years ago. I open X and I’m back.

Helen Andrews recently argued that society has gone through The Great Feminisation, and there’s something to this. I agree that social justice culture has stereotypically feminine attributes, that there has in many ways been a feminisation of the workplace. But I think some of the behaviour changes she describes, especially a rise in emotional reasoning and covert competition, are the result of something else. The problem is not that women entered the workforce or certain professions. More than that, in the early 2010s, we all entered social media.

For years I’ve written about how these platforms exploit girls’ and young women’s vulnerabilities for profit. And how they exploit our vices too: passive-aggression, reputation-destruction, social exclusion, vanity. I argue that social media rewards stereotypically feminine traits, that features on apps like Instagram and TikTok tap into and amplify them. For a long time, I thought this was a problem for girls.

But now I think things are worse than that. These platforms encourage everyone to act this way, tempt us all toward this behaviour. More than wokeness, more than left-wing or right-wing, something is happening in all online circles, in every direction, to all different types of people, to every kind of influencer. It’s happening, in short, to people who use these platforms.

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According to “The Women Leaving the New Right,” a viral piece by Sam Adler-Bell in New York magazine, the movement has “dropped the pretense of protecting women” and gone full mask off, revealing what was always underneath: cruelty, contempt, and, most of all, misogyny.

I find this framing frustrating. It’s familiar to me: I’m often accused of only pretending to care about girls and young women because I have conservative instincts. These are incompatible, apparently; any compassion I have for girls must be a front for an evil political agenda.

My problem with the piece, then, and with this way of thinking generally, is that it never stops to examine why young women are joining the right in the first place. It just has to be irrational, an error of judgement. We can only be conservative if we have been duped, or are desperate for male attention, doing what one source describes as “the typical right-wing female thing where all these men will kind of pat you on your head for saying the edgy thing.” Maybe we like being the “rare self-aware member of the female sex”—a strange quote to include in a piece implying that women who walked away from the right are awake and enlightened, the rest of us still under its spell.

But are young women joining because they have been misled? Are they doing it for male approval, for the “aesthetic”? Some, I’m sure. But I also think there are legitimate reasons for us to be drawn to conservatism, deeper moral reasons…

This is an excerpt from my latest piece in First Things. You can read the rest here!

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Ah I feel so lucky. The UK launch of GIRLS® has been amazing! I don’t usually post updates here but it’s been such a surreal week that I didn’t want to miss marking the milestone. So a few highlights:

The Free Press also kindly published an exclusive excerpt of the book, adapted from the chapter Detached. Here I talk about divorce, dating influencers, and how my generation was ultimately raised to doubt love:

The Free Press

The Generation Raised to Doubt Love

“No one talks about how your childhood affects your relationships. Fear of abandonment and overthinking about people leaving you all the time sucks,” says the caption of a TikTok with 3.4 million views, in which a girl films herself crying…

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2 months ago · 110 likes · 251 comments · Freya India

There are a lot of other things I’d like to say about the last few weeks. Talking to the mainstream media has been an interesting experience…

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Online relationship advice is making us worse at love. It’s making it harder to date, more difficult to stay together, training us to be unforgiving and inhumane.

There’s just so much of it now. 5 SIGNS your partner is SECRETLY toxic. NEVER say THIS in a relationship. ALWAYS REMEMBER this rule. THIS is the RED FLAG you’re missing. Why you are WASTING TIME with the WRONG PERSON. Everything is so confusing and contradictory: never ask a guy where your relationship is going; ask immediately or you’re doomed. Never move in before marriage; you must move in before marriage. If your boyfriend doesn’t do this, he doesn’t love you. If she does this, run immediately. Careful with moving too fast, careful with moving too slow, careful careful careful. You are reckless, crazy, done for, if you date someone with any differences, with any past, with any complexity, here’s why you are making a HUGE MISTAKE.

I think this is popular because people are desperate for rules, for guidance. We occupy our own moral universes now. There is no shared path, there are no rules to follow, but we need rules, desperately want direction, so we binge TikTok and YouTube podcasts and X threads to know what’s right, to conform somehow. It seemed as though this would make relationships easier, us all being free to choose what we want. But that’s not how humans work, so that’s not what happened. We need to know what’s normal. Without any sort of script, with all other authority undermined, there was one place left to go. Now we get our guidance from the market, from industries and influencers, from places where it is mostly useless.

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Just sharing my latest conversation with Konstantin and Francis on ! We spoke about my new book GIRLS®, covering everything from soaring mental health diagnoses among young women to what online porn has done to my generation.

Here’s the full conversation:

Would love to hear your thoughts!

- Freya x

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Why is my generation so miserable?

Why is the generation loudest about self-love and body positivity suffering from record rates of eating disorders, battling body dysmorphia, and driving demand for cosmetic surgeries? Why is the generation most open about its feelings, which has fought stigma like no other before, facing the worst mental health crisis on record? How come the generation with infinite dating options, unashamed about hooking up, is having the least sex, dating far less, and losing faith in love itself? And how is it that a generation of young women raised on slogans like The future is female, reminded that they could be and achieve anything, is anxious, risk-averse and afraid of the future?

My debut book GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, answers all of this and more—and is out today!

If you have resonated with my essays over the years, or have more questions about why we document everything online, why nobody has a personality anymore, or how the mass trauma of porn played out, this book is for you.

But it’s not just for girls and young women. It’s for parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, anyone who cares about what happened to my generation and how to protect the next. If you’re a father of girls wondering what Facetune is, a teenager sick of being bombarded with BetterHelp ads, or a young man wondering why so many women have lurched to the left politically, I hope this book will help.

You can order a copy here from Amazon, here from Waterstones, or listen to the audiobook here on Audible, read by me. Leaving a review on platforms like Goodreads also really helps, and please share with friends and family!

Here are some early reviews:

“Quite suddenly, in the early 2010s, the mental health of girls collapsed. Researchers scour datasets and argue over what caused it, but Freya India has given us an explanation from the inside, one that is far more compelling and compassionate than a thousand studies. Anyone who cares about the girls and young women in their lives should read GIRLS®. The book is disturbing but the writing is gorgeous. India is the most powerful voice of Gen Z yet to emerge.”
―Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation

“Freya India is one of our sharpest, smartest young writers. A superstar in the making, her writing is the opposite of an Instagram filter―suddenly, you can see everything more clearly.”
―Helen Lewis, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of The Genius Myth

“Freya India is an essential voice on Gen Z. This is her first book, of many.”
―Scott Galloway, author of Notes on Being a Man

“Freya India has written the definitive analysis of a generation of young women. With terrific reporting, sharp analysis, and some unforgettable sentences, she explains how female insecurity has been captured, branded, and sold for profit by companies and social media platforms. If you want to understand America’s psychological crisis, India argues, we have to understand the economics behind it. She’s absolutely right.”
―Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance

Finally, a note for US readers: the book comes out in America on May 5th! In the meantime, you can pre-order a copy here from Amazon, or here from Barnes & Noble. Events and podcasts in the US coming soon!

Thank you, all of you, for making this possible. I had the idea for this book back in 2021 and have had it pounding in my head ever since, through so many seasons and phases of my life, that it feels strange to finally let it go. I started writing it as a barista in a café, got my first book deal as a waitress in a cinema, and finished it as a staff writer for Jonathan Haidt. It’s been a crazy time, and it’s all I have thought and cared about for the past five years. I really hope that shows.

More soon,

- Freya x

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Hi everyone,

Last year a few people shared a clip of me talking about online communities. Some asked for more context, so I thought I’d finally share the longer video and full debate here.

I talk about how the only world my generation has ever known is one where we can have pretty much everything we want without human interaction: social media, delivery apps, dating apps, self-service checkouts, online porn, online lectures, online therapy. We have so little familiarity with real community that online forums are considered a “lifeline”. I find this tragic.

The collapse of community and the substitutes we were sold are also a core part of my upcoming book GIRLS®, which is out this month! (Feb 26 in the UK; May 5 in the US). You can pre-order here:

UK: Amazon / Waterstones / All retailers

US: Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Bookshop.org

More soon,

Freya x

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I’m always being told not to turn the people I love into my therapists. There’s a lot of worry about emotional labour these days, about overburdening people. Our loved ones should not be expected to provide excessive emotional support. Your friend is not your therapist, we are warned. Your partner is not your therapist. Your parent is not your therapist.

But something we forget, I think, is the inverse. Your therapist is not your friend. Your therapist is not your partner. Your therapist is not your parent.

One in four Gen Z adults went to therapy as teens, including 31% of young women. This compares to only 10% of Gen X, and 4% of Boomers, at the same age. I’ve spent a long time wondering what changed. Of course some of us are suffering and need professional help—but others talk to their therapists like friends, texting them obsessively. And lately I see something deeper happening too, something parental. I notice young people treating their therapists like family, going to them for praise, approval, affection, the things children need from parents.

Today we can text our therapists anytime. We can message them about our day, tell them anything on our mind. They are available 24/7. They are here to take care of us, finally someone who wants the best for us. We love when they praise us, like us, tell us we are beautiful. Some wish their therapist would adopt them; many want to be their favourite. That’s what therapy is, to more and more young people, a place to hear that someone is proud of them, to be checked in on, to be told they are doing great.

Therapists online indulge this, too. They speak like parents. “Yes, therapists actually love you” and are “protective af over you”, we’re told. “Yes, your therapist misses you too,” they insist, #yourtherapistcares. Here are “signs your therapist likes you”, that “you’re probably their favourite”! Your family may have failed you, but don’t worry, “This is your reminder that your therapist gets excited to see you, too. The attachment goes two ways. That’s what makes this work so profound & so beautiful.” Then there’s the ads, the companies. “We’re proud of you,” Talkspace tells us, “You are loved.” BetterHelp sees you and hears you because “You deserve all the love and care in the world”. Funny how we worry so much about the rise of therapy-speak in our relationships, but never worry about this weird family-speak with our therapists.

@thetherapyspaceDid any of these surprise you? #virtualtherapist #licensedtherapist #therapytok #onlinetherapist

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There’s all this infantilisation too, this obsession with our inner child. Of course talking about childhood is part of some therapy but I don’t mean psychoanalysis, I mean therapists treating patients as if they are their children. Healing your inner child seems to mean regressing to being a child—being spoken to like a baby, treated like a toddler, paying for attention and affirmation. Therapists are getting attached too, acting like proud parents, posting about missing their clients and how much they love them, crying when they leave, verging on surrogate figures. BetterHelp even offers “reparenting therapy” that literally provides “the type of parenting your own parents were unable to give you in childhood.” And it’s strange because we seem to accept that so many of us feel hurt and abandoned but never go near why, never name the problem. I find this weird, this insistence that we are all wounded children but incuriosity as to what happened, what might have caused it.

This is happening, I suspect, because of family breakdown. For all the discussion about Gen Z’s demand for therapy, something barely mentioned is the decades-long collapse of the family. Divorced parents, single parents, overworked parents. Shrinking and strained and scattered families. My argument here is not only that traumatised children are in therapy to understand problems with their family, but that they are simulating family, with therapists. I’m not sure it’s the therapy part people want. I’m beginning to think it’s re-enacting what we needed in childhood: someone to talk to, to rely on. Of course some young people need serious therapy. But I think many more need parents.

And yes, previous generations had their families fall apart too, but we are the first to have so many simulations, all these replacements. After the weakening of the family came the rise of state and professional substitutes, and with them, the assumption that only the advice of educated experts can be trusted. And so therapists today help with everything. They guide children through coming-of-age, get them through girlhood. They are here to teach them how to date, how to cope with new schools, how to accept their changing bodies, how to handle rejection from a crush. Young adults go to therapy for career advice, for dating advice, for “big life changes” like “adulting” and “heartbreak”. Our parents can’t possibly help with these things anymore; they aren’t professionals. Your dad is just unhelpful, says BetterHelp, and so are your friends. And so that’s what we want, more than anything, not only a psychological understanding of ourselves but advice, authority, direction.

We lowered expectations for parents and raised expectations for professionals. The assumption today is that it’s healthy to rely on experts, unfair to rely on family. Which is why we have a constant cry for more mental health funding and better access to resources, but barely anything for defending families, for expecting parents to stay together or spend more time with their children; that would be backward. Children deserve dependable therapists, apparently, but not dependable families. Children have a natural need for mental health resources, but not for the most natural thing in the world, two attentive parents. And how ironic, painfully ironic, that we have all these therapists telling young people not to be too close to friends and family, never to be codependent, to put up boundaries, to keep a healthy distance from those who love them, to distrust people who are human and disappointing and sometimes hard to understand, but rely completely on someone who needs their card details, who is emailing over invoices, who has to sign out after fifty minutes. We are warned against codependent families while we are encouraged to call and text therapists and trust everything they say.

That’s what bothers me, this emphasis on estranging ourselves. It’s the combination of online therapists telling us to trust them more and more while giving us 6 SIGNS OF TOXIC PARENTS and warning us our families are actually abusive and helping us cut them off. Maybe I wouldn’t mind all this talk about attachment styles if we weren’t essentially encouraging people to be anxiously attached to experts instead. Don’t be dependent on your family, we’re told, but do text a therapist every day. Sorry you have to deal with “certain family members”, why not try Talkspace? Don’t want to talk about your crush or maths test with those who love you? Download our app! To me this feels dangerous, telling a generation to be so merciless with friends and family while insisting that therapists really care.

But now some are realising this is not enough, this is not real, this is like everything else in our world, a simulation. Therapists do not care the way family does; therapists are paid to listen. The whole thing is transactional, transient, time restricted. People worry about attachments to AI therapy bots and what that will do to a generation but I honestly think human therapists are already a concern. Because we have spent so long ignoring the real problem, being sold substitutes for what we lost; in the same way Gen Z got influencers instead of friends and YouTube instead of experiences, we were told to fix the pain with psychologists and #TherapyTok and BetterHelp discount codes, and forgot what we were simulating in the first place.

So no, I don’t believe the answer is as simple as more mental health awareness, more resources, more funding. I don’t think it’s more experts who are more and more available. I think it’s parents trying harder to stay together and to stick around. I am convinced that what so many young people are desperate for here is an adult, just one adult, guaranteed to show up every week, to listen, to care, to tell them right from wrong, to correct and guide them. They are craving the time and sustained attention all humans need, especially when they are young, someone who will not give up and will not go anywhere. And how unbearable that they think the only way to get that, the only way to cope with the uncertainty and anxiety, the only way to say please don’t go and actually be heard, is to pay someone.

I’m sure therapy helps some young people. But when we find ourselves paying a stranger to tell us they are proud, logging into Zoom to be listened to, needing experts to assure us we are enough, we should wonder what we are really looking for, who we really needed to hear this from. We might not be paying for therapists. We might be paying for parents.

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If you appreciated this essay, I expand on my thoughts on the mental health industry in my debut book, GIRLS®, out soon and available now for pre-order!

UK:

Amazon / Waterstones / All retailers

US:

Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Bookshop.org

Rusty Reno is a theologian, author and the editor of First Things magazine. He is always an arresting writer but at his best, I think, when he talks about taking risks and restoring love.

This conversation is about how to stop being afraid to love. We spoke about therapy culture and the line between healthy introspection and risk-aversion; whether we are ever “ready” for a relationship and what we lose if we wait too long; the fear of choosing the wrong person, and how to know the difference between taking a risk and being reckless. I think there are a lot of young people like me who have grown up surrounded by a fear of love, and by older people anxious for them and traumatised by their own heartbreak. If you are tired of red flags and warning signs, if what you need is the opposite—permission to go for it, to follow your heart—then this is for you.

Here’s our conversation, I’d love to know what you think.

Freya India: Rusty, in Return of the Strong Gods, you argue that the post-war consensus taught us to fear passionate loyalties, and to develop a posture of openness and detachment. Our mutual friend wrote earlier this year about the return of American strong gods, a “renewal of strength and vitality”.

But somewhere I don’t see this revival is in relationships. While national loyalties might be returning, interpersonal loyalties seem to be weakening. Among my generation, especially among young women, I think there is a deep fear of wanting too much, of making a mistake, of hurt and heartbreak. And I think a lot of relationships are failing now because of this half-heartedness. We don’t believe love will last, so why take the risk? The pressure today is to pretend we don’t care. Even if we enter into relationships, we are always half-defending against loss, one foot out the door, our hearts never fully in things. Risk-aversion is killing romance.

We are, as you put it, “training ourselves to be loveless.” Yet you warn that “A life without love is a greater evil than a life in which finite loves are made absolute”, and that “We must take the risks of commitment if we’re to revive the greatness of the ­human ­spirit.”

So my question is, how can we learn to take risks in this “love-deprived age”? I ask this not as a writer but as someone of this generation who genuinely needs reassurance and consolation. What would you say to young people like me, who have always been taught to play it safe, and are afraid to love?

R. R. Reno: I suppose the first thing to say is that love is always frightening, because it is dangerous. Achilles loved glory, so much so that he was willing to forsake a long life. Oedipus delighted in knowing, which got him into trouble. Romeo longed for Juliet, and we know how that turned out. And at a more quotidian level, love can be misdirected. We can love the wrong things in the wrong way. This is the essence of idolatry.

So, there are lots of reasons to be anxious about love and its disruptive power. “Love cannot be idle in the soul,” writes St. Augustine, “It must necessarily cause movement.” In small things, that’s not a big deal. I love a good cup of coffee, so I rouse myself to go to the kitchen. But in more consequential matters, love moves us toward something unknown. I love my country, so I go into battle, not knowing my fate. Or I fall in love with a woman–or God. Who knows where that will take me?!

In Return of the Strong Gods, I tell a story about the political and cultural anxiety that has shaped so much of our lives. Deeply affected by the unprecedented violence of the two world wars and fearful of ideological passions that can so easily become deadly, after 1945 leaders of the West counseled a coolness of heart that too easily slides into nihilism. If nothing is worth fighting for, nobody will fight–that’s an alluring promise.

There were other factors as well. Modern science and technology has given us a sense of mastery over the contingencies of life. Why not extend this mastery and achieve control over society and our turbulent inner lives? In the United States, the 1950s was a time of great confidence in the power of social science to deliver new and effective methods for organizing and managing society. It was hoped that this would replace the always uncertain (because human) give-and-take of partisan politics. In that decade, Sigmund Freud and other psychological theorists became extremely influential. They promised great advances in the management of our souls.

In this technocratic and therapeutic world, which has only grown more powerful and all-encompassing, love’s uncertainties, its power to propel us toward destinations unknown, can easily seem reckless, foolish, irresponsible. Better to live a carefully “curated” life, or so we imagine.

But there’s something deeper going on. When I was a young college teacher, I pondered the risk-aversion of my students. I read Lucretius and Epictetus. They formulated an ideal for life: ataraxia, which can be translated as “calm”, “peace of mind”, “serenity.” We achieve this condition when we still the impulses that rouse us to pursue ideals, ambitions, and loves.

We should not underestimate the appeal of ataraxia. It allows us to be quiescent and without care (“carefree”!), safe and at peace with our lives. Self-acceptance, self-care, and other therapeutic exhortations aim at this condition. Love, therefore, becomes an enemy, for it dislodges and moves us. Of course, to live is to change. Thus we opt for something akin to peaceful immobility, which is tentative and careful movement through life.

How do we escape this condition? Perhaps the first step is to look around. I live in New York. The city is full of men and women, especially women, who are the age of grandparents, but who glide along the sidewalks dressed like teenagers. Isn’t the sight pathetic? To pretend against the realities of embodied life as we move toward the grave? Or just take in the sadness, the depression, the addiction, the loneliness, the aimless wandering that seems endlessly circular. Do we really want to live this way?

The next step is to venture something for something or someone, which means taking a step away from ourselves. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates describes a “ladder of love.” We can seek the first rung, the music we love, the poem that moves us, the place that tugs at our hearts, the craft or sport or hobby that commands us and demands our free time.

When I was 18-years-old, I went to Yosemite to go rock climbing. It was there that I learned about love, the desire for mountain adventure that dogged me for decades, claimed the lives of some of my friends, and gave me incalculable joy. And while pursuing this passion, even in its first stages, the stern goddess who demanded so much from me–mortal danger!--whispered often, “Love me, yes, but seek more.” She sent me up the ladder of love.

The wounds of the heart cut more deeply than those of the flesh. Loss, abandonment, and betrayal hurt deeply, sometimes more so when we are the ones who abandon and betray. I don’t want to make false promises. But of this I am confident: Love will not leave you alone. It will spur you, drive you, pull you. It delivers you from captivity to yourself. If you wish to go anywhere of consequence for the soul–and I do not mean to Paris or Mallorca–you must risk love.

That’s such a beautiful way of putting it. It also touches on a theme you keep returning to in the book, that risk-aversion is against our nature. That “the deepest failure of the postwar consensus” is that it teaches us to be “something less than human.” That even if we make a mistake, “to love wrongly is dangerous, but however debasing, it is human.”

Something I also find deeply inhuman is the therapeutic culture that has replaced these strong loves. In the book you argue that in place of “passionate loyalties” we developed “a spirit of critical questioning.” Today that spirit is turned inward. We are encouraged to interrogate everything about ourselves: every emotion, thought, memory, decision, personality trait, has to be scrutinised and examined. This is Lasch’s “culture of narcissism” - as the world feels more unstable, and long-term commitments feel out of reach, we retreat inward.

You also write that “Liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.” Into that void, I think, has rushed therapy-speak and psychological jargon. Our commitments and devotions are now framed as pathologies and deficiencies. Strong loves become attachment issues; sacrifice and compromise become “people-pleasing”, “emotional labour”, or evidence of our failure to “set boundaries”. The same way strong loyalties to place and tradition are reflexively labelled as backward and bigoted, strong loyalties in relationships are pathologised as “insecure” or “codependent”.

So, I wonder, do you see the rise of therapy-speak and this constant self-scrutiny as a continuation of the post-war consensus, an attempt to avoid the dangers of strong commitments by turning inward? How much of this therapeutic culture do you think is useful? And where, do you think, is the line between introspection that helps us love better, and introspection that keeps us from loving at all?

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I keep hearing about how there’s too much pressure to settle down. Apparently everyone wants to know when you’re getting married, when you’re having kids. Being single is stigmatised, shamed, pitied. We supposedly feel so rushed to find partners that we choose wrong, and that’s why relationships are failing. It’s this pressure to couple up, this fear of being alone. This pressure, on young women in particular, is “overwhelming”, a “violence”, a “cruelty”.

But this has never been my experience. My whole life I’ve only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is though: the pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early. I’m sure in some cultures, some families, there is still pressure to find someone. But I have felt rushed to do many things in modern life, and settling down has never been one of them.

If anything, I think young women feel this pressure to be single more than men. In a recent podcast Emma Watson said that women are made to “feel like they have no worth” or “haven’t succeeded yet in life” until they settle down. But I have such a hard time understanding this. In my world it’s the opposite: the young woman who settles down has always been seen as wasting her potential; the single, childfree, even divorced woman is strong, wise, knows her worth. Most of the time people aren’t wondering why young women aren’t having kids but why we would at all. Nobody really mentions it, let alone pushes it. And I’m sure it wasn’t always like this, but lately I see young men praised for committing, while young women are warned. We are proud of young men, we pity young women.

Parents worry about their daughters, too. I see this all the time. If you meet someone too soon, fall for them too fast, that’s when your family worries for you. Parents are judgemental only when it comes to commitment. They worry about their daughter closing down options; they feel she is too young to commit, even when she is the same age they were, sometimes older. Announce you’re getting married in your twenties and complete strangers will rush to tell you horror stories about affairs and divorce and heartbreak. Why would you do that to yourself? Don’t do what I did, throw those years away. We don’t scrutinise the 25-year-old who is still single but the one who settles down. In fact this feels like the only life decision left to disapprove of, the only one acceptable to judge. Wanting to commit is the one desire that is discouraged, treated with suspicion, the only thing in the modern world we are ever told to delay.

So now we have to break the news to our parents that a relationship might be, God forbid, serious. It feels like a betrayal almost, a betrayal of endless possibility. You get the feeling you have consigned yourself to something, surrendered somehow. Commitment comes with all these caveats and disclaimers: don’t worry I won’t lose myself, no I won’t fall behind with my work, yes I have escape plans and exit strategies. We explain ourselves, defend ourselves, plead for permission to take responsibility. Because the conclusion our parents drew from failed marriages was that they got together too young, that commitment itself is dangerous. And so not only do we have to push past the trauma of our parents’ divorce, but brace for their projection and resentment, their dread and disappointment, the fear we are repeating their mistakes.

Hard to blame them, though. This is the culture they were formed by. Fundamental to liberalism is a suspicion of restraint, which inevitably becomes suspicion of human relationships. It promises liberation from every last tie until we are free of everything, including each other. The position we idolise is one of being permanently suspended, in time, in place; voluntarily stepping out of that state and making yourself vulnerable is suspect. Both sexes feel this, I think, but because women were seen as having more to be liberated from, our devotion in particular became dangerous, a liability.

The dominant pressure in liberal culture, then, is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available. We are permitted only one loyalty, and that’s to ourselves. The longer you stay single the stronger you are; the women with the most worth keep waiting. Partners are acceptable so long as they are accessories, add-ons. Otherwise it’s irrational, embarrassing even. And yes of course young women are still getting into relationships, still want to meet someone, but even those who desperately want commitment feel pressure to suppress this, to apologise for it, to allow their time to be wasted, to pretend they are fine alone.

The pressure is getting to us. More people are single than ever; more of us are living on our own. And there is a growing gap between men and women. Single women are much more likely than men to say they aren’t dating because they have “more important priorities”. Over half of young single men are open to dating, compared to only 36% of young single women. And while 38% of women under 30 think marriage is outdated and old-fashioned, only 29% of young men do. Even teen girls are now less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday. By 2030, 45% of women in the U.S. between 25 and 44 will be single. And so if there is overwhelming pressure to settle down, if this is a violence and a cruelty inflicted on us, then we are very good at ignoring it.

I’m not saying we need to rush into things that aren’t right. I am saying we need to have a more honest conversation. We are arguing against a problem that hasn’t been true for a long while, not for my entire lifetime, not ever in my world. We have talked to death the pressure of getting married young but we never talk about what this pressure does, the pressure to delay, the pressure to keep searching, the pressure to do life alone. The pressure not to fall too hard and too fast, not to intertwine and entangle, never to lose control, to keep lives and hearts uncrossed. This impossible tightrope we are trying to walk, this vain attempt to fall in love while still standing perfectly upright, without ever losing our footing, depending on someone without losing an inch of independence. The pressure and pain of holding each other at arm’s length at all times, our lives perfectly partitioned, the stakes permanently low.

And pressure to do what instead? To do this impossible thing, to self-actualise alone. Pressure to become whole, healed, enlightened. Pressure to get comfortable alone, to learn how to be happy alone. Pressure to love ourselves, pressure to solve ourselves. Pressure to become the “right version” of ourselves. Pressure to delay, pressure to distrust. Pressure to leave people behind, pressure to take them for granted. And we have to talk about what we miss here, what we are deprived of and restricted from, what the freedom we are really gaining is, is it just the freedom to give up on each other.

This, I think, is what women like Emma are really describing. They do feel pressure, but a different kind, this new kind, of course they feel rushed and hurried because our culture tells them they need to cram a lifetime of self-actualisation into their twenties before they commit to anyone or anything. There is a gnawing feeling now, but it’s mostly that we are wasting time with someone, losing potential and opportunities, hemming ourselves in for no reason. The overwhelming fear is not that we might not find someone but that we might not find ourselves. And so we have this urgency, this constant compressing feeling that time is closing in on us, that there is all this to achieve and discover and understand about who we are, and so we are terrified of getting older, terrified of getting trapped, because we have all this to do, all this personal growth and self-discovery to get through before we take on a single responsibility.

But we can’t self-actualise alone. We become ourselves through other people. Happiness comes from caring for others yet we are telling a generation to put that off for as long as possible, to arrange their lives so almost nothing is ever asked of them. And relationships are failing, yes, but not because we are rushing. Even with all this freedom and so few expectations dating feels harder than ever, so we pretend the original problem is still there, the problem of pressure and obligation, when for the most part it isn’t, this is new. Something tells me relationships are failing now because we are spending too long learning to be single, getting used to being alone, living for ourselves, this utter deviation in human history. And because we got it wrong. We thought the answer to the failed marriages and broken families and mess we made over the past few decades was less commitment when it was clearly more.

I think we need to change things for the next generation. For girls growing up today, we should try to lift some of this pressure, relieve some of this freedom, liberate them to feel, to love, to follow their hearts. Give them permission to stop if someone gets in their way, if love interrupts their plans, and help them to see that as a gift. They deserve the freedom to be tied, the freedom to be bound. Because what this pressure to be single really is, what we are really inflicting on young people, what really is a violence, a cruelty, and what this has been a euphemism for, all along, is the pressure to be alone.

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If you appreciated this essay, I expand on my thoughts on modern dating and relationships in my upcoming book, GIRLS®, available now for pre-order!

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Roger McFillin is a clinical psychologist and author of the Substack Radically Genuine, where I would recommend starting with What the Hell is Society Doing to Adolescent Girls?, The Medication Generation, and his piece about our last conversation, Losing the Language of Suffering.

Roger is uncompromising in his critiques of the mental health industry and helps us remember what it means to be human. We had a pretty disturbing conversation about things I’ve felt for a while, but he has seen first hand in his clinical practice. We spoke about the medicalisation of the female experience, the pathologisation of certain personalities, and how parents can protect their daughters.

Paid subscribers can access the full conversation, where we go on to discuss how therapy-speak and moral relativism make us easy to manipulate, somehow covering everything from Nazi Germany to Emma Watson’s latest podcast appearance. I hope you find it interesting as I did; I would love to hear your thoughts.

And please, subscribe to Roger here:

Radically Genuine

Radically Genuine exposes the ugly truth behind psychiatric diagnoses, medications, and therapy culture that create lifelong patients. If you're ready to question everything you thought you knew about living well, this is your starting point.

By Dr. Roger McFillin

Freya India: Roger, as you know, I’m suspicious of the mental health industry. I’ve argued that therapy culture is actually worse for girls and young women, since we already tend to internalise our distress, and are now endlessly encouraged to do so. We are told to look inwards instead of outwards. And I’m amazed that this isn’t more of a feminist issue. Instead of labelling women as “hysterical”, now if they have a strong reaction to anything we say they are anxious, autistic, neurodivergent. In fact, we’ve got girls calling themselves that, declaring themselves sick and irrational for being thinking, feeling human beings.

“The mental health crisis is disproportionally impacting Generation Z girls,” you have written. “Doctors are more likely to pathologize the normal and expected emotional reactions that young girls and women experience during adolescence compared to previous generations. Girls are more likely to be prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs in response to these episodes. Girls are more likely to be psychiatrically labeled.” You warn that victims of sexual trauma are being diagnosed as bipolar or BPD, that girls suffering mood changes from contraception are met with more drugs, and that their experience of puberty itself is medicalised. Personality traits, too—you write that those who are sensitive, empathetic, experience emotions strongly, and are attuned to the feelings of others, are more likely to be pathologised and drugged. (Which is a little worrying, since that’s my entire personality…)

As you put it, “Seems like being female is under attack.” Can you expand on this? Should girls and young women be especially vigilant to the mental health industry, and how easily it can convince them they are sick? Parents of teenage girls read this Substack; what should they be watching for, and how can they protect their daughters?

Roger McFillin: You’re absolutely right: this is an attack on girls and women, but more fundamentally, it’s an attack on life itself.

We’ve created a medical model where emotional numbness equals mental health. The treatment goal is simple: feel less. The more disconnected from your inner life, the more “recovered” you are. This is emotional lobotomy disguised as care. A person who feels nothing isn’t mentally healthy. They’re barely alive. Yet that’s exactly what the system calls success.

Females and males are biologically different in how they process emotions, not as a flaw but as evolutionary design. Boys are more likely to externalize distress (dismissed as “boys being boys”), while girls internalize and express through tears and verbal processing (immediately labeled as symptoms). Female puberty’s complex hormonal cycles produce emotional range and responsiveness that psychiatry mislabels as instability rather than recognizing it as biological wisdom and developmental imperative.

Girls are also more likely to seek therapy, encouraged by a culture that tells them talking about feelings is healthy. They arrive ready to explore their inner worlds with rich emotional vocabularies. Yet psychiatry, which claims to be a medical science, has no blood tests, brain scans, or biological markers for its diagnoses. Instead, a girl’s words become her pathology. The more articulate she is about her pain, the more symptoms get documented. Her nuanced descriptions become diagnostic criteria. Her emotional vocabulary becomes evidence of severity. “She has such insight into her depression,” therapists note, not recognizing they’re witnessing emotional intelligence, not illness. Within sessions, she inadvertently provides all the ammunition needed for psychiatric labels and medication.

Boys who can’t or won’t articulate their distress fly under the radar. Girls who eloquently describe theirs get diagnosed and drugged. This is why females are medicated at more than double the rate of males. We’re punishing women for the very verbal intelligence that makes them exceptional at understanding and navigating emotional complexity.

My deepest concern is for adolescent girls, who deserve protection during their most vulnerable developmental years, not from their emotions, but from those who would medicate them away. When we pathologize female sensitivity and prescribe emotional blunting, we’re attacking capacities that only develop through direct experience. Girls need to feel these emotions fully, learn to understand their messages, and develop their own ways of navigating them. Adolescence is a crucial developmental stage when the brain undergoes massive reorganization. The emotional intensity and variability of female puberty isn’t random chaos; it’s necessary training.

Those sometimes overwhelming feelings teach them to track multiple emotional states simultaneously, read social micro-dynamics, and develop the sophisticated processing that allows adult women to later sense infant distress before symptoms appear and detect social tensions before they explode. By medicating these natural developmental surges, we’re interfering with millions of years of evolutionary programming. We’re disrupting nature’s design for creating emotionally sophisticated adults.

We intervene precisely when girls are navigating crucial developmental learning and label them as disordered if they happen to encounter the wrong clinician during a challenging life event. When a fifteen-year-old’s emotions are blunted by SSRIs, it disrupts the emotional development essential for healthy adulthood, with consequences that extend far into her future.

Critics will say “depression isn’t just sadness.” But by pathologizing emotions, we create depression. When we tell someone emotional distress is a “chemical imbalance,” we teach them to fear their emotions rather than read them as signals. They no longer recognize emotions as valuable information about their lives and relationships.

This is the ultimate invalidation: teaching a girl not to trust her own internal guidance system. Once she believes her feelings are symptoms rather than signals, she loses the ability to navigate life using her own emotional compass. That disconnection transforms temporary sadness into chronic fear and helplessness. A culture with language for heartbreak and rituals for grief produced resilient people. A culture that medicates every tear produces psychiatric patients.

The financial incentives are real. Every diagnosed girl is worth a fortune in lifetime pharmaceutical profits. But this goes deeper than money. This is spiritual warfare. A woman connected to her emotional power is independent and ungovernable. She is connected to a greater divine intelligence. A woman convinced she’s mentally ill never realizes her power and becomes a patient for life. We’re severing women’s connection to life force itself, breaking the bonds that hold communities together.

The ultimate expression of this antihuman agenda is what we’re doing to the unborn. We prescribe antidepressants to women of childbearing age at unprecedented rates, knowing these drugs cross the placental barrier when pregnancy occurs and permanently alter fetal brain development. Studies show increased autism risk, developmental delays, and neonatal withdrawal. Infants exposed in utero show altered stress responses and disrupted sleep patterns persisting into childhood. This withholding of informed consent isn’t accidental. It’s a systematic attack.

It’s always our most sensitive, creative, and emotionally gifted girls who get caught in the psychiatric web. The girl who feels deeply, who absorbs others’ pain isn’t sick. These are gifts that, when understood and nurtured, become her greatest strengths. Yet the earlier she gets caught in the hormonal birth control and SSRI trap, the more medications accumulate. What starts as one prescription at fourteen becomes three to five different drugs by the time she reaches adulthood.

The psychiatric system’s response to trauma, particularly sexual assault, represents its most egregious failure. A girl’s normal trauma responses (hypervigilance, rage, dissociation) are evidence of a functioning survival system. Yet psychiatry transforms these into “bipolar disorder” or “borderline personality.” The drugs don’t help process trauma. They prevent it. SSRIs blunt emotions that need feeling. Antipsychotics suppress rage that needs expression. Years later, the trauma remains unprocessed while she’s dependent on multiple drugs and convinced she’s broken rather than injured.

When a girl accepts any psychiatric label, she accepts a limited life. “I have anxiety” becomes her reason not to take risks. “I’m bipolar” becomes her explanation for every emotion, every enthusiasm dismissed as mania, every sadness as a depressive episode requiring medication adjustment. “I have borderline personality disorder” becomes her identity, teaching her that her very self is disordered, that her feelings are too intense, her relationships doomed to fail. “I have depression” becomes her story, and she stops believing happiness is even possible. These diagnoses don’t just describe temporary states; they colonize identity. She starts introducing herself by her disorders, planning her life around her limitations, choosing smaller dreams that won’t trigger her “symptoms.” These labels become prisons. She loses trust in her emotional responses, which for a woman is like losing her GPS system.

For Parents: Your daughter’s concept of “normal” is being deliberately shaped by forces that profit from her self-diagnosis. TikTok algorithms funded by therapy apps teach her every emotion is a symptom. Influencers normalize taking five drugs by twenty. School counselors trained by the mental health industry refer students for normal reactions.

Watch for these warning signs: She identifies AS a psychiatric diagnosis (”I have anxiety” not “I feel nervous”; “I am depressed” not “I feel sad”). She learns symptoms from social media and arrives at appointments already scripted. Doctors suggest drugs after fifteen minutes without asking about diet, lifestyle, the birth control pill or life circumstances. Schools refer her for crying about friends. She weaponizes therapy language to avoid challenges.

How to protect her: Guard her language. When she says “I’m depressed,” teach her to say what she actually feels. Be skeptical of hormonal birth control (it can triple suicide risk). Most importantly, teach her what every generation before us knew: difficult emotions are temporary visitors, not permanent residents. “This too shall pass” contains more wisdom than any diagnostic manual.

When she’s sobbing, don’t immediately suggest therapy. Sit with her. Share your own teenage struggles. Teach her what traditional cultures understood: adversity builds character. Emotions require witnessing, not fixing. Sometimes the bravest response is simply to endure. Previous generations called this resilience or grit. They knew that learning to tolerate discomfort without immediately seeking relief creates strength.

Help her see emotions as information, not illnesses. Sadness about a toxic friendship signals needed change. Anger at injustice fuels action. Anxiety before performance sharpens focus. These aren’t symptoms to suppress but messages to heed. After feeling them fully, she can return her attention to what matters: her goals, her values, her growth. This is ancient wisdom that therapy culture has forgotten: you don’t need to solve every feeling, sometimes you just need to outlast it.

Struggle clarifies everything: reveals real friends, shows what she values, teaches what she can survive. Every difficult emotion navigated without medication builds capacity for life’s challenges. Our ancestors knew this. They didn’t have therapists for heartbreak or pills for disappointment. They had community, ritual, and the understanding that suffering is part of becoming. The system is designed to catch sensitive, creative girls and turn them into psychiatric patients. Your job is to be the firewall.

I get the feeling, too, that conservative personality traits are pathologised in our liberal, secular culture. Those who want more from a relationship become anxiously attached. The reserved become repressed. The well-adjusted person is independent, progressive, extroverted, endlessly open to experience, never jealous, not insecure. Growing up, I definitely felt like the more conservative parts of my personality were deficiencies.

My worry is that when morality is relative, therapists become the new arbiters of right and wrong. Maybe you need to get over your discomfort with an open relationship. You don’t need a modest partner; you just have retroactive jealousy OCD. If you dislike your boyfriend watching porn, you are insecure; it’s a trauma response. Whatever you do, do not shame him. Be more tolerant, more open. We pathologise moral instincts and encourage girls to essentially regulate themselves out of them.

Even virtues become suspect. Selflessness is pathologised. Today the psychologically healthy person puts themselves first, prioritises their own needs, loves themselves above all. And so anyone who wrestles with this can feel unwell. In a society geared toward freedom and self-fulfilment, what becomes strange, pathological even, is a preference for stability, predictability, a sense of duty and self-sacrifice.

Part of this is probably ideological bias. Most therapists are liberal: 68% identify as liberal or very liberal, compared to 26% moderate and 6% conservative. Unsurprisingly, conservatives are also less likely to go to therapy, probably feeling that they will be misunderstood or maligned. Neutrality now means liberalism.

So I guess the deeper problem is that these labels reflect the dominant culture. We see this throughout history. In Nazi Vienna, Hans Asperger’s work on autism was influenced by whether children’s traits were useful to the Third Reich; if not they were “uneducable” and expendable. Even today, traits like avoiding eye contact are a symptom of autism in one culture, a sign of respect in another. The irony is that progressives insist everything is a social construct except mental health labels, which are treated as objective truths. But of course they are constructed, these attempts to describe complex feelings and behaviours. The suffering is real, but the categories constantly change.

Today our culture rewards being endlessly interested in and invested in yourself, being liberated from others. But as Erich Fromm warned in The Sane Society, “Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of a number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not that of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.” Fromm was concerned with the “pathology of normalcy.”

Does any of this resonate with your clinical experience? Or am I being biased here?

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I’ve written a book!

It’s called GIRLS® and is the story of a generation being remade. It will be out in early 2026.

GIRLS® is what I believe girls have become in the modern world. We are ornaments on display, filtered and Facetuned. We are objects, shopped for on dating apps. We are brands, managed and monetised. We package up our lives and perform them for an audience. We measure our worth by public reviews and ratings. We have transformed from girls into GIRLS®, from people into products.

But this is not just another book about social media. It is about a vast, interconnected web of industries: the beauty industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the porn industry; the commodification of everything.

Thank you to all of you for making this possible. I first had the idea for GIRLS® back in 2021, when I was scrawling notes on receipts at the café where I worked, writing on my hand between coffees, then rushing home to pour it all into essays, desperate to figure out why I felt so anxious and alone. I decided to test chapter ideas by starting this Substack, and along the way found so many of you who felt the same. So it means more than you know to finally share this here. This crisis, and how to put girls back together again, is very close to my heart. I hope I have done it justice.

You can pre-order GIRLS® here:

UK:

Amazon

Waterstones

All retailers

US:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop.org

More soon,

- Freya x

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is a writer and fashion stylist. She writes the Substack Unravelled, where I would recommend starting with The hollowing effect of applause, Beyond Therapy, and Why I cancelled my book deal.

I’ve admired Ayishat’s thinking for years, so this conversation felt like a long time coming. We spoke about the rise of therapy-speak and how it can make us seem open while actually keeping us closed off, how suffering is performed and competed over online, and how we are forgetting to speak like human beings.

Paid subscribers can access the full conversation, where we go on to talk about our critiques of the progressive left, why online communities are such poor substitutes, and where young people might turn to find wisdom and integrity today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

And please, subscribe to Ayishat here:

Unravelled

Food for thought for the culturally starved.

By Ayishat Akanbi

Freya India: Ayishat, you recently wrote a thoughtful piece called The Offensiveness of Group Speak, about the conformity of our language. One of the examples you give is the rise of therapy buzzwords like trauma, toxic and gaslighting. I’ve written a lot about this too. I’m very sceptical of therapy-speak, unconvinced it even helps us open up. More often I think it actually closes down our ability to have honest conversations.

But you got to the heart of what bothers me about it, the insincerity. If someone tells me about their “fearful-avoidant” attachment style or how they are learning to “hold space” for others, I find it hard to feel anything. But if they tell me about their hurt and heartbreak, or how they are trying to be less selfish, I’m listening. We are talking human to human now.

As you write, “We’re encouraged to describe even ordinary interpersonal conflict in the language of pathology and melodramatic categories. So we start treating every slight like persecution because exaggeration is the only way to make pain legible.”

But I’ve been wondering lately if two things are happening at once. On one hand, we have this therapeutic group-speak, this exaggeration of suffering. But on the other hand, I think we are also losing the ability to talk about actual pain.

The writer Samuel Kronen, in a piece about chronic illness, put it like this: “There still appears to be a lot of unrewarded suffering in the world and our culture can seem pretty cruel and callous toward the vulnerable…If anything, I think our screen-addled, instantly-gratifying, digitally-intoxicated culture actually makes people less sensitive and conscious of suffering in certain ways, contributing to a more casual cruelty.”

I think he’s right. We might pathologise ordinary feelings and exaggerate small slights, but we also seem unwilling to accept genuine suffering. We can’t seem to cope with it. It’s hard, for example, to have a sincere conversation about something like family breakdown. I hear so many young women talking about their attachment styles, about “reparenting” themselves and healing their inner child, but not so much about the pain of divorce. I think this is why, as a culture, we have ended up with so much therapeutic advice and so little wisdom. Because we aren’t speaking about our problems in any recognisably human way. Maybe we are trying to make things easier on ourselves. If you phrase your problem as “anxious attachment”, you need a therapist. If you phrase it as your parents’ divorce, you need a difficult conversation with your dad.

I wonder what you think. Are we talking about our pain too much, or not enough? Has therapy-speak made it harder to talk honestly about our problems? And do you think its rise might reflect a deeper cultural discomfort with suffering itself?

Ayishat Akanbi: There is a way to talk about pain that draws people in and another that makes them glaze over. Therapy speak increasingly does the latter. It has given us a way to say something without really saying anything.

At least this is the strong impression I get when I talk to people. There is now a pressure to be seen as “doing the work” and identifying trauma responses, attachment styles, and renaming all sorts of things as boundaries has become a facade of self-awareness.

Therapy-speak has become what luxury brands are to fashion, a way to signal refinement. It’s meant to suggest you’re doing the work, that you’re emotionally literate, even when the words themselves say very little.

We name behaviours, gaslighting, avoidant, love-bombing, but rarely talk about what actually happened. In fact, asking for clarification comes with the risk of being told you’re ‘invalidating’ someone.

Somehow we’ve come to believe naming the problem is the same as reckoning with it, as if diagnosis is a substitute for dialogue.

We talk a great deal about “mental health” but in a way that feels oddly detached. It’s not the same as talking about pain. People speak openly about depression and anxiety, but much less about how those conditions shape their outlook, distort their sense of self or affect the way they treat others. Those parts tend to be left out.

Probably because it’s harder to be honest about those things and still claim the moral high ground. You can’t have disordered thinking without sometimes behaving in disordered ways.

But most conversations about mental health are outward facing. They are used to control how others engage with us. What they’re allowed to say, how they’re supposed to respond, where our boundaries lie. We invoke mental health to ask for accommodation but rarely to invite self-interrogation.

It’s become a way to set the terms of engagement, not necessarily to deepen understanding of ourselves or anyone else.

So yes, all and all, the rise of therapy speak has not made it easier to talk about pain and suffering, it’s made it easier to pretend that we are being open while still remaining hidden. And perhaps this is because we’ve forgotten or never learned how to share pain in a way others can truly hear.

There’s no way of saying this without sounding cringeworthy, but I also feel you can sense when someone has suffered, sincerely suffered. Not always, but a lot of the time. In my experience they tend to have more grace, and an understanding that each of us is suffering in our own way.

The way I see it, therapy culture increasingly insists that suffering only counts if it comes with a label. If you’re neurotypical, or don’t have a diagnosis, you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be misunderstood, in pain, or an outcast.

I’ve been following you for a long time and I feel like this has been a theme of your thinking over the years, this hoarding of suffering. You once wrote, “The foundation of a lot of conflict seems to be the inability to say, ‘we are both uniquely struggling’ instead people want to claim a monopoly on suffering.” You have said that suffering isn’t a contest, that trauma isn’t a tournament. As you put it, “It’s clear that suffering is written into the small print of existence. What distinguishes us is what we choose to make from misery.”

This feels like the heart of your resistance to wokeness too, this attempt to possess and perform suffering, what you have called “competitive oppression conversations”. I see the same impulse in therapy culture. Wokeness is a competition for collective suffering; therapy culture for individual suffering. I guess my argument is that neither really brings relief. Maybe your pain is worse, maybe naming it helps. But to compete with it, to weaponise it, to package it up and market it, no. You end up suffering all over again every time you try to insist you have it worse. Life can be brutal, but I know people who have been hurt beyond belief and don’t try to compete with their pain, don’t try to own it. They know that there’s a danger in that. We get attached to the things we own, and that includes our suffering.

I wanted to ask you about wokeness because I first found you through your critiques of the progressive left, but I noticed that you also distanced yourself from the anti-woke crowd. I respect that. In fact I’m impressed that you didn’t write your book about the culture war. These days I’m more impressed by the things people choose not to do, the opportunities they choose not to take.

So what made you step back from both sides? There’s this competition for suffering, but what else? For me I found wokeness insincere and often absurd, but I was just as disheartened by how little morality and character was mentioned among anti-woke commentators. Lots of people complaining about culture and younger generations without ever looking at their own lives. Never setting an example and then wondering where the examples went. As you put it, very little self-interrogation. But, as one of my favourite writers Paul Kingsnorth put it, “There is no battling the world, only ourselves.”

Is that how you feel too? Or were there other reasons you held back?

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Hi everyone,

I just wanted to write a quick post because last week GIRLS reached 50,000 subscribers! Which is a surreal milestone, one that I felt I couldn’t let pass by without thanking you properly.

I also wanted to explain that for the past year most of my time and energy has gone into finishing a big project, which I’ll be announcing very soon. I had so much I wanted to write here, but had to resist and stay focused (with the occasional essay sneaking through…) I also recently moved to America, which has been a huge but exciting change. Now that things are finally calming down, I can’t wait to write more regularly here and over at After Babel.

To those of you who continued supporting GIRLS with a paid subscription, thank you. I made the decision not to put my essays behind a paywall, which makes your generosity mean even more. New exclusive conversations are coming soon, but please let me know if there’s anyone in particular you would like me to interview, what topics you think I should cover here, and where you would like to see GIRLS go in future.

Grateful to all of you for being here with me.

More to come,

- Freya x

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Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

@_lauriefaulkner_I spent so long wondering why I was so different…. I didn’t even consider ADHD until my diagnosis! 🤓#creatorsearchinsights #adhd #adhdinwomen #adhdpeople #adhdbrain #myadhd #adhdcheck #adhdawareness #adhdprobs #adhdtiktok #adhdgirlies #adhdbelike #adhdtraits #adhdsquad #adhdprobs #adhdproblems

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We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even helpfully diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. “You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues”. Maybe he reminds you of an early caregiver who wounded you. In fact there are no feelings at all anymore; only dysregulated nervous systems. Every human experience we have is evidence, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore. That we are more enlightened now than in the past, more emotionally intelligent. My grandma is a grandma, a mother, a wife; we are attachment disorders. She is selfless and takes things to heart; we have rejection sensitive dysphoria and fawn as a trauma response. They are souls; we are symptoms. Of course there were people in the past who needed real help and never received any sort of understanding, but that is not the full story; many were also happier, less self-conscious, actually able to forget themselves. I asked my grandparents who have been married for six decades why they chose each other and got a clumsy answer. They had never really thought about it. Maybe I am too nostalgic about the past, but there is something there that has been lost, that in that moment I struggled to relate to, a simpler way of living. And an arrogance to us now, seeing people in the past as incomplete and unsolved, when we are this anxious and confused.

I think this is why my generation gets stuck on things like relationships and parenthood. The commitments we stumble over, the decisions we endlessly debate, the traditions we find hard to hold onto, are often the ones we can’t easily explain. We are trying to explain the inexplicable. It’s hard to defend romantic love against staying single because it isn’t safe or controllable or particularly rational. The same with having children. Put these things in a pro-con list and they stop making logical sense. They cannot be calculated or codified. Ask older generations why they started families. Often they didn’t really think it through. And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.

But of course this generation has a billion-dollar industry involved that wasn’t before. The world is also becoming more complicated; we want control and certainty. We take comfort in the causes of things. And yes there are young people helped by diagnoses, who can’t function and find relief in being understood, but fewer than we think. Many more have been convinced that the point of life is to classify and explain everything, and it’s making them miserable.

I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves. I feel for the girls forensically analysing their childhoods while they are still in them, cramming their hope and pain and suffering into categories, reducing themselves down to trauma responses. It hurts to see this heartbreaking awareness we have inflicted on a generation, whose only understanding of the world is this militant searching, this reaching around for reasons. God, the life they are missing.

Because we can’t ever explain everything. At some point we have to stop analysing and seeing through things and accept the unknowable. All we can ever really achieve is faith. Some humour at ourselves, too. It’s impossible to heal from being human, and this is why the mental health industry has infinite demand. Explain anything long enough and you will find a pathology; dig deep enough and you will disappear.

We keep being told that the bravest thing now is to do the work. But I think it takes courage not to explain everything, to release control, to resist that impulse to turn inwards. And wisdom too, to accept that we will never understand ourselves through anything other than how we act, how we live, and how we treat other people. We are thinking about ourselves enough. We don’t need more awareness or answers. My worry is that after a lifetime spent trying to explain themselves, solve their strong feelings, standardise their personalities, and make sense of every experience, a generation might realise that the only problem they had, all along, was being human.

So free yourself to experience, not explain. Be brave enough to be normal. Do not offer up your feelings and decisions and memories to the intrusion of the market, to the interpretation of experts, to be filed as deviations from what the medical industry decides is healthy. Leave yourself unsolved. Who knows; it’s a mystery. Written in the stars. From somewhere unknown. Holding on to your personality is a declaration that you are human. A person, not a product. No other explanation needed.

It’s often said that my generation has lost faith. We are losing faith in God, losing faith in love, losing faith in the future. But I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Closer to the truth, I think, is we never learnt faith to begin with.

The psychologist Erich Fromm saw faith and doubt as character traits. Rather than having faith in something specific, faith for him was a way of seeing the world, a disposition of the soul, a temperament. For Fromm, faith meant not only religious belief, but a feeling of deep trust in ourselves, in others, and in life itself. This is what my generation did not develop. We are a chronically doubtful generation.

Understandably, since we live in a culture of doubt. Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed. We have everything, except anything that holds humans together. Whatever we try to have faith in is mocked, destroyed, or disappears too fast. And so we doubt. We question everything. We doubt what it means to live, what it means to love, what it means to be a good person, why any of that matters. Nothing is certain. And so, no, we aren’t so much in doubt as to whether we will live tomorrow, but whether there is any point to.

What is it like, to grow up this way? It’s hard to do justice to it. It’s a feeling of constant confusion and indecision. Never knowing the right choice, always unsure of ourselves, checking with others over and over. Immediate distrust of everyone. Suspicious of anything good; hardly surprised by hurt. Heart never fully in things, always holding back. Some of us are stronger in defending ourselves against doubt; others are completely consumed. They doubt everything: who they are, what they want, what they think, what they feel, what they are supposed to feel. Doubt shadows over anything good. Doubt clouds promises or proof. It is draining, exhausting, to exist in disbelief.

We doubt God, for an obvious example. This is the least religious generation in history. Apparently young women have “abandoned” religion, are “fleeing” the pews, and forgetting faith, when really I think many of us never knew it. This is a generation that doesn’t understand how to have faith, never learnt the habit. And adults shrug this off because they think this is simply doubting the existence of God, but no, this is more than that, this is doubting good. This is not just a lack of faith in religion; this is a lack of faith in right and wrong. More and more of us doubting morality, seeing no benefit to being a better person, because why, what does it matter?

Then we doubt our relationships, each other. Young people are crippled by doubt about relationships, utterly crippled. Scroll through the attachment forums, listen to the confessions and conclusions, read about relationship anxiety and relationship OCD, look at the labels and diagnoses, the endless, endless doubt over who to be with, why be with anyone, the agony and confusion. The sexual revolution destroyed trust and now we better be doubtful, how else can we protect ourselves? So we second-guess everything. We hesitate and hold back. And I always think this about falling marriage and birth rates; I am just not persuaded that so many young women object to having families for ideological reasons. We don’t dislike marriage, we doubt it. It will never work, so why try.

And we doubt, ultimately, ourselves. We doubt what we believe, doubt what we see, doubt our own judgement. We wait for influencers to insist on how we should live, experts to educate us on what we should think, activists and algorithms to tell us which version of right or wrong is trending. We doubt everything, down to our deepest human instincts.

So young people haven’t lost faith, but have been trained to doubt. Not only by culture, but by companies that profit from our uncertainty. Industries designed to introduce and indulge doubt. Social media, dating apps, the mental health industry—all promise to solve the very doubt they depend on. For every uncertain feeling the medical industry has a diagnosis, an explanation, an expert at hand. For every doubt about who to be with, dating apps present a new person, a premium package, a faster algorithm. But it is all a devil’s bargain. These industries feed exactly what they promise to fix. The mental health industry promises peace of mind while making us question everything we feel. Dating apps help us find the one while making us doubt they will ever be enough. Clickbait promises the real truth so often we lose faith in truth itself. And now add AI: machines giving us all the answers while making us doubt our ability to reach them ourselves. Doubt your decision. Doubt your wording. Doubt that what you wrote sounds like a normal human, so ask a machine. Without faith we have to depend on these things to think for us, write for us, decide for us, matchmake for us. And it’s the faithless who feel they have to obsessively arm themselves with boundaries and red flags and dating checklists, who retreat from relationships or demonise the opposite sex, not because they are empowered but because otherwise everything feels so hopelessly out of control, so painfully ambivalent, because in a world without faith doubt is our only defence.

We have agency, of course. We aren’t controlled by these companies. But I think we buy into this because we have this delusion that doubt keeps us safe, somehow. That by staying doubtful about relationships, about ourselves, about right and wrong, we are safer, more protected, better prepared for betrayal or abandonment. So we keep our options open, our possibilities endless, our doubts alive. We doubt because to have faith would be terrifying.

And we want everyone else to be uncertain, too. We delight in each other’s doubt. If you have a strong moral conviction people try to talk you out of it, want you to water it down, get you to give in. If you stand up and tell the truth people will start saying there is no truth. If you are sure about your relationship, excited about your marriage, people will worry for you, ask if you have thought it through, help you search for red flags. They will call your hope naivety, your faith in the world privilege, your convictions an agenda, because faith in a world of doubt is threatening. Chronic doubt is contagious. The modern world wants you to delay and question; it wants you to waver and hesitate; it wants you to be anything but sure. Doubt that commitment; doubt that promise you made; doubt the good path you are on; doubt your behaviour is really so bad; doubt that it would matter if you threw it all away.

Which is why what worries me most is not wokeness or progressive politics but this quieter cultural messaging—this soft, cloying liberalism that whispers nothing matters, if you blew it all up who cares, if you walked away who’s to judge, sure your ancestors made it work but what do they know? What’s the harm? Why not?

I worry because young women like me were raised with only one vision of hell. Now our only nightmare is being restricted by religion, by a relationship, or burdened by responsibilities. But what if hell is also the opposite? What if hell isn’t the faith that makes you stay, but the doubt that makes you leave? What if sometimes the devil is not the voice keeping you trapped, but the one whispering that you are being restricted, wronged, held back—deserve a fresh start? Have we ever considered that the most dangerous ideology might not be the one asking us to have faith through hard things but the one training us to doubt what is good, to see something that should be treasured as a trap?

We made a generation afraid of being controlled by faith but not nearly enough of being controlled by doubt. Especially in romantic relationships, where many young women were taught to be terrified of one outcome only: being trapped in an unhappy marriage. But sometimes I wonder if by being raised to never settle, never back down, and always put ourselves first, we have become a generation only good at giving in. Girls grew up being told that an empowered woman is always willing to walk away, until this is the only habit we have, until we only learnt how to leave, and have forgotten that sometimes the strongest people are the ones who know how to stay.

Because the truth is, doubt is far more restrictive than faith. Those without faith can’t be selfless or decisive or sacrifice, because they can’t commit to anything, not fully. They are suspended in doubt. And maybe doubting everything and everyone means you don’t get betrayed as badly or walked all over, but you also can’t be good, can’t be generous, can’t be grateful, can’t be patient, can’t love or fully be loved, because doubt gets in the way of doing anything real. Why be good when you could still get betrayed? Why care for this person when they could abandon you someday? Why sacrifice when they could stab you in the back? Why have children when you might regret it? Why get married when you might change? Why learn this skill when the world will change? Why be honest, why be humble, why have integrity?

Chronic doubt also makes you very vulnerable. Without faith the world can convince you that you are a bad person, in the wrong relationship, wasting your time, at any moment. Without faith you are prey to culture, to clickbait, to industries profiting from uncertainty. Prey to a world that can talk you out of the truth, can make someone who has everything feel that it’s not enough, can convince those who should be on their knees with gratitude to throw it all away.

And we have to ask ourselves, who is it we admire? Who do we want to be? Does anybody really admire doubtful people, or love stories of hesitancy and holding back, yet that’s exactly what we encourage? We celebrate lifelong marriages, we praise decades of determination, but keep telling young people not to do that. Don’t commit too young, don’t compromise at this age, you can never be too sure. We admire the milestone but discourage what it takes to actually get there. And this is cruel, I think, to warn young people away from the very thing we respect. What is love, if not faith and devotion when it seems safer to doubt? What is life, if not risk and courage when you have reasons to hold back? In romantic relationships you don’t commit when there are no obstacles, you commit because there are obstacles, because anything that lasts a long time will come with reasons to leave, because we are all hard to love, you commit to kill the doubt and start the adventure. And the people I admire most in my life are those who were dealt one tragedy after another, but even when the whole world conspired against them, when the cards were stacked, did not fold their hand but had faith. And it’s not luck to be that way, not fortune or privilege, but a disposition, an orientation, a habit, practiced, day by day, in the face of every reason to doubt.

We have not learnt how to live like this. Our doubts and demands get in the way. And this is a very hard thing to admit, how hard it is to be selfless. But I find that to be the case, and I am convinced it is harder for this generation, with the least encouragement, the least stigma and shame about straying, the fewest examples to follow. We are expected to learn loyalty in our late twenties, to teach ourselves the value of compromise and sacrifice or find out the hard way, we are left to learn it from podcasts.

And this is why it kills me when people argue that we all have complete agency and can’t talk about culture. What, the children who grew up on graphic online porn are suddenly going to know how to love someone for life? What, the generation taught to always put their freedom first are suddenly going to be great spouses, not feel terrified and trapped and restricted? What, the generation raised to swipe through each other like objects, consume each others’ lives like content, that won’t affect their character at all? Their ability to love? What, girls who never saw a glimmer of affection between their parents will grow up and magically let their guard down, feel fine to commit and start families? We want change but won’t look at why young people are this way, won’t lead by example, won’t encourage what it actually takes. We tell them to delay commitment well into adulthood, and then expect them to randomly make it work when they meet someone, suddenly able to cope with compromise and sacrifice. No, we cannot wish this world were different without first facing the consequences of what we have done.

Only once we do that, can we make better decisions. And for my generation, I think that means worrying less about finding someone trustworthy and more about our ability to trust anything. Less about whether we will find love, but whether we will be too doubtful of it when we do. Maybe the real nightmare is not that we won’t find someone loyal but we will discover, one day, with horror, that we are only capable of being loyal to ourselves.

Life has always been a battle between faith and doubt. But this might be the defining battle of our age. We have to keep deciding to have faith. And it is terrifying. But we can practice, deliberately, the opposite of doubt, we can try devotion, see how trust feels, attempt certainty, again and again. We can practice faith in ourselves, faith in other people, some cosmic faith that if we act in the right way, if we are honest and good, the world will order itself around us. As Christopher Lasch put it, this is not “a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best”, but a “disposition to see things through even when they don’t.”

We need to teach the next generation not to fear faith but to watch for doubt. That walking away is not always courage but sometimes cowardice. We distrust each other enough now; we don’t need any more red flags or reasons to be suspicious. What we need to learn now is loyalty. We need to work on something more than our capacity to doubt, more than our exhausting ability to detect red flags, to draw boundaries, to criticise and call out. Now is the time to work on our waning ability to love, to depend, to forgive, to stick with it, to have some hope.

Doubt is a dangerous thing, more dangerous than we think. Doubt is the first feeling before the fall, the beginning of destruction. It is what calls us away, tempts us to turn back. So we have to get up every day and kill our doubts. They are not making us safer, or less vulnerable. The devil comes in doubt. And the only weapon we have in this world is faith.

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Most young women I know think of ­Christianity as controlling and patriarchal, if they think of it at all. They see conservatism as outdated and oppressive. For the first time in history, young women are now less religious than young men, and less likely to attend church. Many are moving far to the political left, much more so than previous generations of women.

I think I know why. The right has forgotten feeling.

When I listen to conservative commentators today—columnists, podcasters, media personalities, some older than I am but many my own age—I notice an overreliance on intellect and argument, on numbers and logic. Charts on pornography use; statistics on loneliness; facts about birth rates. But the young women I’m talking about don’t care about your statistics on divorce. I know I wouldn’t have. They don’t feel anything from your graphs on fertility rates. What they care about is the pain of their own families falling apart. They know how they feel, and they are hurting. I knew nothing about Burkean philosophy or social conservatism, but I knew that feeling of loss, knew it intimately. Dry lectures about social decline do not cut through. Describing feelings of hurt and homesickness might.

When I go to religious and conservative conferences, I find little effort to reach girls and young women or attract anyone on the outside. Speaker after speaker recites ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy Ph.D., caring only about impressing an audience who are already convinced. Often it feels like an attempt to close religion off from outsiders, to seal it off, not to open up hearts. I sat at a conference recently listening to an older man lecture about my generation’s neglect of our “moral duty” to have children. Rows of suited men nodded along. I kept thinking about the many young women I know who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart. Who is this meant to persuade? The people the message is supposedly for aren’t even in the room. Those who actually need help will not be reached by theological lectures on marriage or family. What they need right now is someone to give words to the wound of growing up between two homes, someone who dares to talk about the pain.

Besides forgetting how to speak about feelings, the right has forgotten how to listen. Christians wonder why young women aren’t going to church, and conservatives ask where all the good women have gone, but I don’t see much listening. Not sincerely. Few try to understand what young women might be searching for in therapy culture, finding in liberal feminism, hearing from the left—what needs are being met that aren’t met elsewhere. Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary? Don’t we see that many young women haven’t “abandoned” faith, haven’t turned their backs on the sacred, but were born into a world already desecrated? That they haven’t forgotten their worth but were never taught it? And the cruelty is that this caricature of the modern ­woman—this callous, calculated, emotionally detached “­girlboss”—seems to me very often a defence mechanism, a heart hardened to cope with how cold the world is.

Listen to young women long enough, you will often hear pain. They might be brave enough to ask you: Do you know how it feels? How it feels to hold on to hopes of love and loyalty in a world of ­Tinder and hook-ups? How it feels to be reserved and conservative in a world that punishes that, makes you feel pathetic and frigid and childlike? To try to feel beautiful, even just enough, in a world of endless edited Instagram influencers, where hypersexuality feels like the only way to be seen, where humility feels like invisibility? Where if you aren’t sexual straight away you can’t expect him to stay—why would he, with so many other options? The agony of knowing that pretty much every man you fall for has been raised on and is addicted to online porn and watches it behind your back because you can never be enough? The humiliation? How it feels to dream of romance, only to grow up and find it dead? That disappointment?

I can’t begin to tell you…

This is an excerpt from my new essay, published today in First Things. You can read the rest here, or in the upcoming May 2025 magazine issue.

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Just sharing my recent appearance on Modern Wisdom! Chris and I had such an interesting conversation about how therapy culture has become a new religion; Gen Z’s fear of abandonment and where it comes from; why young women might become emotionally detached as a defence mechanism; and how our phone-based world has redefined everything, from friendship to falling in love.

You can watch the full episode here:

Would love to know your thoughts!

- Freya x

A quick note to paid subscribers: thank you so much for your patience while I’ve been quiet over the past few months. I’ve had so many thoughts for essays and things I’ve wanted to share but had to get my book finished! From April onwards I will be much more active here (and on After Babel!), publishing more essays, interviews, and trying out some new features. Please let me know what you would like to see, or what would make a paid subscription worthwhile for you. Thank you.

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Gurwinder is the author of one of my favourite Substacks, The Prism. Every essay he writes is exceptional, but I especially recommend The Perils of Audience Capture, The Intellectual Obesity Crisis, and The Pathologization Pandemic.

I’ve followed Gurwinder for years now and have admired not only his writing, but how he conducts himself online. He is very measured, thoughtful, and selective about what he does. Which is why I was honoured when he agreed to have a conversation with me (and slightly intimidated about trying to keep up with his insights…)

Paid subscribers can access the full conversation, where we talk about how to resist audience capture, why long-term relationships can be a life hack, the pathologisation of not just ourselves but other people, and narcissism as a collective defence mechanism.

Here’s our conversation, I hope you enjoy. And please subscribe to The Prism here:

The Prism

A guide to navigating the digital age

By Gurwinder

Freya India: Gurwinder, you wrote an incredible essay for UnHerd about what you call the “pathologisation pandemic” — people confusing sadness for sickness, particularly young women. Some of my other favourite pieces of yours include TikTok is Time Bomb, and Why Everything is Becoming a Game.

I think a theme here is loss of agency. We rely on the medical industry to tell us what is healthy or unhealthy, depending on psychiatric labels and diagnoses to explain ourselves. We allow algorithms to deliver us our personalities and opinions. We depend on dating apps to find us the right matches, trusting online metrics and scores rather than our own judgement. As we have both written about, this seems to come from—or cause—an external locus of control, this feeling that outside forces dictate our lives. Even if people recognise their lack of agency now, their first instinct is probably to search for influencers or podcasts to tell them how to fix it. Whereas I tend to think most of the answers we need, the wisdom we are looking for, is inside us already. We know what we need to do, what right and wrong is, but we have silenced our instinct and intuition, muffled it with all this noise.

I think this is a defining paradox of my generation: we have this lack of agency, this feeling of powerlessness, but also an outward obsession with agency. Young women often emphasise how independent and empowered they are, how they don’t need anyone.…but the evidence suggests the opposite, almost as if it’s a front for how helpless and out of control we really feel.

I worry about this with AI. My main concern isn’t so much losing human creativity or everyone having AI girlfriends, but that someday we won’t trust ourselves at all. I see a future where young people won’t trust any instinct they have without checking with ChatGPT first. Where they will ask AI to solve relationship problems, to calculate who is right in an argument, to make decisions for them instead of going with their gut. I genuinely believe people are already doing this, outsourcing not only their ability to write or work, but to decide, to act. I’ve seen a few examples of this lately, like people using AI to flirt for them, message their dating app matches, or write birthday cards. We already had a dependency problem before AI—we couldn’t think for ourselves without searching online, without asking forums for advice, without sources and studies…but now it’s getting serious.

The reason I think this is because every time you ask an AI to double-check your text messages, to make sure your email sounds right, to help you flirt with someone, you lose a little more trust in yourself, in your own judgement. I mean, imagine a young woman asking her boyfriend every time she does something, before every email she sends, “Is this okay? Does this make sense?” Eventually someone would say, uh, you’re giving him too much power over you. Eventually she wouldn’t be able to do anything without him checking first, and granting permission. That would be a recipe for a very toxic relationship. And yet I worry that is exactly what we are doing with AI, training young people to never trust their own judgement, until they can’t act, can’t think, without its approval.

As you put it in a recent tweet: “Ironically, the more the world becomes automated, the more important self-reliance becomes. When every task can be mechanized except personal agency, success hinges on taking charge of your life and making good choices.”

So, somewhat ironically, I’m going to ask for your advice…or at least your take on this. If low agency is our central problem, how do we take charge of our life, as you say? How do we trust ourselves to make the right choices, and build self-reliance in an age of algorithms and AI?

Gurwinder: Freya, it’s an honour to have this conversation, as I’m a big fan of the order in which you hit keys on a keyboard. Like you, I’m concerned about the fate of human agency in the age of automation. To me, the greater danger of AI is not that machines will think for themselves, but that humans will cease to.

The age of automation doesn’t just endanger agency, it also makes it more important than ever. For most of human history, the limiting factor in what a person could accomplish was often their intelligence. But now that we can outsource intelligence to machines, the new bottleneck for most people will be how proactively they make use of all that external intelligence.

So our degree of agency will determine our “success” in the AI age. However, the success of the AI age could also determine our degree of agency…

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the invention of writing would cost us our memory and wisdom, because the ability to record knowledge on parchment would keep us from storing it in our heads. It may be true that writing has made us dependent on writing, but it also gave us the printing press, the internet, search engines, CTRL+F, and many other superpowers. So, overall, writing took a little of our agency, and gave us so much more.

The question is, will AI turn out the same way? Will the agency it gives outweigh the agency it takes?

I’d say it depends how much agency one already has, because agency typically can’t be given; it must be grown. Let’s take the example you give: of someone using ChatGPT to write flirtatious messages for them. A low-agency person would simply adopt the first pick-up line the chatbot generated. A high-agency person would give the chatbot multiple prompts and then carefully select the best pick-up line from among them, and in so doing, learn what works. So the low-agency person would use AI to eliminate choice, while the high-agency person would use AI to increase choice. The low-agency person would grow more dependent on the AI to think for them, while the high-agency person would use AI to help them think for themselves.

I therefore see AI as a personality amplifier; it will give more agency to those who already have it, and take more from those who already lack it.

I wonder what the long-term consequences will be of this Matthew effect. In H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, humanity in the far future has evolved into two subspecies, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Eloi live lives of automated bliss, completely dependent on the machinery maintained by the Morlocks, who tirelessly toil underground. Generations of labour have kept the Morlocks sharp and self-sufficient, while generations of idle leisure have atrophied the Eloi’s minds, so that they never care to realise that the Morlocks are farming them for meat.

Since both agency and its opposite will compound in the AI age, it’s wise for people to maximise their agency now, because, years or decades down the line, it could be the difference between being whoever you want to be, and becoming an Eloi.

So how do we maximise our agency? We must first consider why we give it away in the first place. The reason is phronemophobia: humans are naturally averse to thinking.

In 2014, researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia conducted experiments in which they left participants in a room with nothing to do except think or give themselves electric shocks. After just a few minutes, many participants began to give themselves the shocks. They preferred being zapped to thinking.

We’re configured to avoid thinking because cognition eats up a lot of time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources. As such, the brain is not so much a thinking machine as a machine that tries to circumvent thinking—it is calibrated to ration rationality. (This is why even the smartest people are dumb most of the time.)

The side-effect of this aversion to thinking is that people don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts. They’ll spend hours doomscrolling news of horrific tragedies rather than introspect. As Carl Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

The price of this avoidance is steep. Living as a fugitive from yourself makes you forget who you are and relinquish who you could be. Since you’re never listening to your own thoughts you fail to develop perspective, refine your beliefs, and make long-term plans. You cease to be proactive and your life becomes a series of reactions to your immediate environment.

Even worse, the less you think, the harder thinking becomes. All the screentime we engage in to escape our own heads stops us from developing a rich inner world, and with such barren imaginations we become even more dependent on external stimuli to keep us occupied.

So how do we make it easier for people to inhabit their own heads?

The simple answer is practice. To overcome the strain of thinking, do more thinking.

When the Industrial Revolution made it possible to live lives without physical exertion, going to the gym became necessary to stay fit. Equally, now that the AI Revolution has made it possible to live without mental exertion, we need the mental equivalent of gyms to stay sharp.

For me, the best brain-gym is writing—it forces you to shut out distractions and listen to your thoughts. A particularly useful form of writing is journaling, where you basically keep a diary in which you routinely interrogate yourself. What did you learn today? What did you regret? If you had ten times more agency, what would you do? If you did the same thing you did today every day, where will you be in ten years? (For those looking for an intro to journaling, I recommend my friend Elisabeth Andrews’ course.)

A habit of journaling helps you understand what you want (and don’t want), and it nurtures your imagination and acclimatises you to thinking for yourself. Daily journaling also acts as continual feedback by which you can evaluate whether you’re moving toward your goals. All of this brings order to the mind, so that, like a well-tended garden, it becomes a place we want to spend our time in rather than escaping at any opportunity.

So that’s my convoluted answer to your question. Write, even though machines can write for you, because the purpose of writing is not just to produce writing, but to distil your thoughts, refine your beliefs, and maintain your agency.

If Socrates had only spent more time with his pen and parchment, perhaps he would’ve realised that the thing he feared would cost us all our agency might ultimately be the thing that saves it.

That’s so true, what you say about writing as a way to maintain agency. Writing has always made me feel more in control of my life somehow, like I have more command over my thoughts, decisions, and what direction I’m going in. I think it helps you stay on track.

That is, of course, unless you start writing solely to please an audience.

Speaking of which, you seem to resist social media influence very well. I’ve been following you for years, and you are just as measured now as you always have been. You seem very intentional and, like me, you take your time with your essays. I see all these tips and tricks on how to grow a Substack now and I pretty much do none of them—the only thing I care about doing consistently is writing. Some people have told me I’m not doing enough—that I should publish more, react to breaking news, tweet every day, start a podcast. But to what end? More subscribers but less pride in my work? Host a podcast but constantly cringe because it’s not really me?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there seems to be an assumption now that if you don’t maximise engagement by every means necessary, you are slacking—rather than maybe deliberately resisting, doing this careful dance to avoid the abyss gazing back at you. People mistake being vague politically for cowardice, instead of trying to avoid becoming a parody of yourself. Or they assume you aren’t getting many opportunities, not realising you might be turning some down for the sake of your soul.

As you put it, “having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience”. You warn that “being someone often means being someone you’re not, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.” I completely agree. I think if you build an audience but you aren’t being authentic, there’s always some sort of debt hanging over you. Even if you get followers and fame, something has been traded for it. The more you achieve on the outside, the more ashamed you feel on the inside. Because, as Johnny Cash put it, “you’ve still got the devil to pay.”

Anyway I’m interested in audience capture not only from the perspective of public writers, but anyone, particularly girls and young women. You don’t have to be some influencer for it to happen to you. Girls are now shopping online for who to be, funnelled toward the same face, recommended not just products but personalities. Maybe something more like algorithm capture makes more sense here—adapting to who the algorithm “wants” us to become.

So how do you resist this, both as a writer and as someone online? You mention staying deliberately vague, but is there anything else you do in your personal life? And what made you recognise the need for resistance in the first place?

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