Montaigne left such pursuits behind in the 1560s, at age 38, when he retired from public office to embark on a life of contemplation, thanks to which we have his published work. In solitude, he gave himself over to the world and his own mind — his “back shop”. He was there for the weeds.

A similar gardening metaphor appears in the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s recent book, Vita Contemplativa. Like Montaigne, Han, the author previously of the bestselling The Burnout Society, has left behind an active life of status and striving to dwell in the inner sanctum of his mind. According to a profile in El Pais, he writes “just three sentences a day”, devoting most of his time to his plants and classical music. His latest book is a paean to contemplative inactivity, which he correctly sees as “not just the absence of activity but a capacity in itself”.

Think of the difference between paddling upriver and floating downstream. Tranquillity — what Han calls the “freedom from purpose and usefulness” — is the end toward which activity ought to be directed. That is the “basic formula for happiness”. Aristotle, Epicurus and others arrived at similar conclusions over 2,000 years ago, but the insight bears repeating in a culture that has grown ever more obsessed with “purpose”, particularly of the professional variety. This has happened not despite the escape from poverty and material constraints, but because of it. The cliche now runs that many workers no longer want to just do work — they want to make the world a better place. Judging by a recent Time magazine profile of young, purpose-oriented professionals, this can mean working as a branding manager at a yoghurt company that is taking pains to decarbonise its supply chain (while also still upholding its fiduciary duty to maximise value for shareholders, of course). Set against such a culture — it is basically Calvinism without the theology — the Hans of the world seem destined to constitute a small minority.

I do not mean to belittle those who demand that their job be more than just a job. It is a reasonable request, given the circumstances of contemporary economic and cultural life. But put aside the fact that “meaningful” jobs allow those employers to get away with paying less. The more fundamental question is how we arrived at such an impoverished search for meaning. Now that we are in another wave of hype about technology and its potential to cause widespread job displacement (AI-powered “brand management” is already here), age-old arguments for the vita contemplativa — an obvious substitute for delusional workaholism — take on a new urgency.

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How universities killed the academic

By Kathleen Stock

Enlightenment, Kant proclaimed early in the Industrial Revolution, is the “courage to use your own understanding”, not only to think for yourself, but to do so publicly with neither fear nor favour. For too long, the bulk of humanity had outsourced this quintessential human capacity, deferring to clergy on matters of religion, to physicians on matters of health, to princes on matters of state, and so on. But even a pastor must mind his church’s teachings in his ministrations, and members of any profession must conform to certain expectations. A priest qua priest “is not free and cannot be such because he is acting under instructions from someone else”, Kant writes. But who, then, is free? Even the most senior priest is ultimately subject to “someone else”. The same goes for any professional, any employee, and any boss.

No; for Kant, only someone fulfilling the role of a scholar (even if merely temporarily) is completely free to “use his own rational capacities and to speak his own mind”. The vast majority of us must fill prefabricated roles that then become our identities, dictating what we ought to say, do, and think (a predicament that of course afflicts scholars, too, nowadays).

The result is a society of dissemblers, the denizens of LinkedIn who doth insist too much that they are “passionate” about digital marketing, sales portfolio management, or “leveraging data to help clients achieve their goals”. These are the lies we live by, and one is reminded of the Athenian Apollonius: “To speak falsely is the mark of a slave.” Enlightenment is available only to select members of those societies that satisfy certain basic conditions of freedom. But satisfying such conditions requires no shortage of unfreedom. The beating heart of it all, Kant believed, is mankind’s “heartless competitive vanity” and “insatiable desire to possess and to rule.” Without such appetites, humanity might have remained no different from its beasts of burden. It would have fallen short of its true and natural purpose, which is to develop its capacities, ad infinitum.

Kant’s understanding of progress as capability-building has obviously prevailed, culminating in the present age of endless hype about world-changing technologies, Mars missions and digital platforms to connect all of humanity. Yet one can still question his conclusions about human nature and the purpose of society. Though developing our capabilities does allow us to develop ever more capabilities, surely it also could allow more of us, someday, to get off the train. The fact that we dare not, Han believes, is a product of our economic system: a “hell of unbridled competition”, performance, and achievement, where the only constants are “hyperactivity and hyper-communication… Capitalism is nurtured by the illusion that more capital creates more life, increases the capacity to live.”

This God-is-dead explanation rings true, but it is incomplete. The problem cannot be only “capitalism”. Socialist regimes, too, fetishise action and champion their respective Stakhanovites. No, the historical transformation of waged labour from an indignity into a higher calling required more than just coercion. Beyond the rise of a particular economic system, we are also suffering the loss of an older sensibility. Those with the privilege to “do good” by “changing the world” simply assume that that is indeed what they are doing. Such conceits used to go by the name of presumption. In the cult of purposiveness, the old wisdom that recommends against hubris is not only ignored but inverted. Nowadays, Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, boasts that: “We are all blessed to have the ability to make the world better, and we have the responsibility to do it. Let’s go work even harder.”

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The enlightened case for being selfish

By Michael Cuenco

Coming from industry leaders, such proclamations will always fit Montaigne’s description of a “fine statement under which ambition and avarice take cover”. But they have also come to reflect genuinely held, quasi-religious convictions. Like traditional religious faith, faith in one’s own purpose serves a consolatory function (especially for the secularly minded), warding off all those usual irksome existential questions about the meaning of finite lives in an apparently arbitrary cosmos. The cult of purposiveness crowds out those concerns by requiring an always-on, all-consuming asceticism, especially among its lower-ranking members.

Yet as Nietzsche — another contemplatavista who disembarked the train early on — understood, an ascetic is a paradox. By taking what looks like the difficult path, he makes “life easier for himself” through a “complete subordination to the will of another or to a comprehensive law and ritual”. By fully embracing purposiveness, and a career through which to realise it, you need not worry about what to do with yourself, or even about taking responsibility for your actions. Even supposing your (or your company’s) plans to change the world backfire and produce malign unintended consequences, at least you tried. Rarely does it occur to anyone to ask whether the world would have been better had more doers with grand designs simply abstained. In the Nineties, charities started paying ransoms to free enslaved people in Sudan; in response, the enslavers rounded up even more victims for a bigger payoff. Such examples are legion. At least they tried.

If one truly wants to make the world a better place, perhaps one ought to give more attention to how things could go wrong than to how they might go right. The problem, as contemplavistas have long known, is that our intentions are rarely as pure as we think. The ostensibly selfless act always offers its own hit of personal pleasure. Pity, as Nietzsche saw, confers a sense of superiority, just as public philanthropy brings recognition, even glory — one of the most dangerous inducements of all. Righteous indignation can veer all too easily into self-indulgence. It is an open secret that some professions and activist groups owe their existence to the perpetuation of the problem they purport to solve. But the dilemma doesn’t stop there. The economists Ruben Andersson and David Keen have documented similar dynamics in the US “wars” on illegal immigration, drugs, and terror. Each has generated its own private industry of contractors and other stakeholders (an overused term that actually fits in this case) who would be out of the job if their “purpose” was ever actually achieved.

That the purpose-driven individual’s motives include not-so-noble elements seems indisputable. That is just who we are. The sheer potency of glory and prestige is what led classical Epicureans to counsel not only retirement from public life but anonymity (though this precept proved too much for either Lucretius or Epicurus or Montaigne, for that matter). They saw the pleasures offered by a hectic, active existence as too fleeting and contingent to be worth the trouble. With wealth, public achievement, or approbation comes the fear of losing what you have won, and fear of any kind is antithetical to the tranquillity that happiness requires. Better to do away with all sources of anxiety — insofar as you can — and embrace the life of the mind (or of therapeutic tinkering, hobbies, exploration, and the like) and the pleasure of good friends. The fruits of the vita activa are perishable, Epicureans observe, whereas those of the vita contemplativa grow only sweeter with time.

Could any ethical tradition be more out of favour today? As ancient philosophies go, Stoicism is the reigning champion, not least among trade publishers and influencers. While sharing some of Epicureanism’s common-sense insights about what really matters, it is easily cherry-picked, and boasts the advantage of being practical for modern career-oriented and entrepreneurial strivers. For those selling Stoicism (a lucrative gig, to be sure), the original school’s rejection of status and other such pleasures tends to be overshadowed by its principles for maximising performance in a workaholic culture. Hence, in its offerings of “ancient wisdom for everyday life,” The Daily Stoic gives us “7 Essential Stoic Productivity Tips (from Top Performers)”. Marketed predominantly to younger male careerists, there is no better pablum to keep noses to the grindstone.

It is not surprising that Han is better known in continental Europe than in the Anglo-Saxon world — especially the United States. There has always been a strain of European radical thought that sees through the cult of purposiveness in affluent, “post-scarcity” societies. In Vita Contemplativa, he echoes (largely without attribution) post-war European Situationism, whose exponents argued that the neuroses of affluent societies lay in their ideological underpinnings, implying that no amount of policy tweaking would get to the root of the problem. Instead, more people first would have to abandon the presumption of purposiveness in roles where it holds no purchase. That may seem unlikely — not everyone wants to sit in an armchair next to the fireplace — but contemplation need not be as narrow as it sounds. Freedom from tormenting demands — not least those we place on ourselves — is what matters.

The irony is that these “inactivities”, too, would be productive in their own way, creating the conditions for the art, fellowship, and social cohesion that make human lives human. We should not wish for everyone to give up on purposiveness, of course. Large efforts are underway to commercialise solar energy and battery storage, even as others are making progress against hitherto incurable diseases. But millions of others are just fooling themselves. Another piece of “ancient wisdom for everyday life” warns that you can always have too much of a good thing. Purpose may now be one of them.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, given that we can’t accuse a virus of transphobia, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included: 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid, and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reporting the symptoms of long Covid is only moderately associated with a prior Covid infection. In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before getting Covid almost doubled the chances of reporting long Covid.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s response to Covid and lead to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no evidence that anxiety or depression alters the body’s immune response to the virus. A much likelier explanation could be that, since symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking psychological distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

This is part of a broader phenomenon. Young people are reporting despair and distress at an unprecedented rate, and this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society — a society that is making people sick, by teaching them to feel sick. The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond reports of long Covid. Consider the surge in cases of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) increased by over 2000%. If the increase were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, it wouldn’t be mostly restricted to a single sex and age range, but it has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

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Mental illness doesn't make you special

By Freddie deBoer

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — appears to be the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. This is also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another illness.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems that young people, and their doctors, are viewing personal issues as medical disorders: we are living through a pathologisation pandemic.

Why are so many people confusing sadness for sickness? It’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do this would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologisation can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that could be exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. As the arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters ramps up, natural bodies seem ugly by comparison. This “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 people found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with poorer mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

The real reasons may be deeper. One idea, more than any other, underpins the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, backed by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasises the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasising the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as hapless puppets has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their problems are not their own fault, but rather the product of various systems beyond their control. These systems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly, they are medical. A common example is “trauma”, a psychiatric term that has become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused that even clinicians fear it has lost its meaning. Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

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By Sarah Ditum

Pathologisation is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’s are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatise mental illness can end up glamorising it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing”, a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses”, fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, or “part of my dating appeal”.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologisation by influencers is causing unintentional pathologisation among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomisation makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologisation pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

Medicalisation — the tendency for clinicians to recategorise ever more things as medical issues — occurs because clinicians are just as human as their patients, and are therefore just as influenced by culture and their own personal biases. The 1973 Rosenhan experiment showed that psychiatrists who have been told that a healthy person is insane will begin to reinterpret that person’s ordinary behaviours, such as note-taking, as manifestations of their mental disorder. We saw this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous Gids clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

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The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep occurs largely due to the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetise you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income. In the States, the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to have a lucrative annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicised by the media, people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems. In so doing, they began to conform, wittingly or otherwise, to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to do just that. Some even suddenly “remembered” being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, but clinicians’ diagnoses also influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by a hyperconnected world, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

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Who decides if you're mentally ill?

By Hannah Baer

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth has created a new illness: puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasises human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements such as: “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me”. They concluded that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls. Further, when the self-worth of teenagers was mapped, using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful”, the data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

And thus, as society has liberalised, and medicalised, young people have lost both self-belief and resilience. Many have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, and pathologise it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologisation and more distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalisation; society is teaching kids to develop real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologisation pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their immunity to everything else.

If there’s a vaccine for the pathologisation pandemic, then the best candidate is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is a form of talk-based treatment based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Contrary to modernity, it teaches that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. The aim is to reframe harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more accurate, agentic, and soluble. So, instead of “The world sucks”, one could think “I feel like the world sucks right now”. Where pathologisation places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologisation bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

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No form of psychotherapy has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurisation and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT”, are the opposite of classic CBT because they seek not to cultivate strength but to validate feelings.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which has helped everyone from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who governed Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton”. The ultimate cure to rampant pathologisation is to prepare the young to do battle against their greatest foe — their own minds — and to teach them a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: you are more than the things that happen to you. And you have as much control over your life as you believe you do.

Many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, but if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. Look within for the causes and, most times, you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, of course, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, could be a Hell in Heaven, or a Heaven in Hell.