Over the last few years, working on myself has equipped me with the kind of therapy-speak that impresses even my therapist. In my private world of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and values, I can identify patterns, name triggers and contextualise emotions easily. I know when I’m avoiding something and when I’m “doing the work.”
What I’m less sure of is whether all this language has actually made living any lighter.
My now-abandoned New Year’s resolution is the same as the previous year’s and started as a joke: to keep my mouth shut more often. When a colleague asked me about it, I shared that line half-laughing, and then I was hit with a familiar blow. After almost every quip, comment or opinion, I wasn’t really listening to the response anymore. I was watching myself have the interaction. I register how something makes me feel, immediately question whether that feeling is justified, then interrogate where it comes from, what it says about me and how it might be read by someone else. By the time I’ve reached a conclusion, the moment itself has passed. What’s left is a low-grade anxiety.
Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don’t reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.
To be fair, some of this shift was necessary. Therapy helps. Naming patterns helps. Talking about things publicly has helped people survive things they otherwise might not have. Awareness is progress. My awareness, however, has tipped into surveillance.
Part of this isn’t personal at all. We now live in systems that reward visibility, explanation and moral legibility. Thoughts are posted. Reactions are ranked. Opinions are flattened into screenshots and circulated without context. The pressure isn’t just to think critically, but to demonstrate that thinking in real time.
I saw a reel recently, because of course I did, that said: if you think it’s not that deep, you’re not thinking critically. It hit hard. There are plenty of things in this world that demand seriousness and accountability. War, violence, the steady erosion of rights. But instead of broadening our focus outward, many of us have turned it inward, turning critical thinking into overthinking; hyper-policing our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise. And it’s exhausting.
In moments when collective action is desperately needed, we’ve somehow built a culture that exhausts us before we even get there. If everything requires total moral coherence at all times, participation starts to feel impossible. Silence becomes safer than imperfection. And if you do speak, you find yourself performing and watching it back through the imagined gaze of hundreds or thousands of people, tweaking it as you go.
