The Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burnout, and Loneliness

Let’s talk about our dirty little secret—and not just any old secret, but the deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret of our stress, strain, trauma, anxiety, depression, imposter syndrome, burnout, and loneliness.

That’s a long list of suffering, and we could add even more to it. That’s why the self-help-industrial complex is humming—in its personal and professional versions (both of which you will find on platforms like this one). Estimates vary, but we’re talking about a projected $13.2 billion in 2023—and that’s looking narrowly, at a small range of personal self-help books, programs, courses, and so on. In terms of revenue, personal self-help, narrowly considered, does better than major league baseball, and it’s darn close to the NFL. 

But we can broaden our view. Consider psychedelics alone, which isn’t included in that figure. In 2022, the psychedelics industry was valued at around $4.8 billion, and is projected to exceed $11 billion before the end of the decade. 

Yoga is typically part of the self-help-industrial complex, and it alone is worth upwards of $30 billion a year. Much of the wellness industry is part of the larger self-help industrial complex as well, and in the U.S. alone it may exceed $1.2 trillion in 2023, and almost four times that much globally. That makes it larger that the global tobacco industry. 

And then we can consider all the coaching, consulting, and training in the business world that effectively amounts to self-help. Professional versions of self-help exist in so many forms we might not initially see them as self-help, but sales training, culture development, executive coaching, leadership training, and more amount to nothing more than self-help. 

So we need to include much of what gets sold and promoted on platforms like this one, and elsewhere over the internet and social media, under the guise of “business”—including as its audience people working in positions from sales to C-suite, along with a wide variety of schemes for those who want to be self-employed or start a business. 

Countless “thought leaders” of the business realm essentially function as self-help gurus, with well-dressed versions of self-help geared to executives, entrepreneurs, corporations, and other organizations. It’s all part of the self-help catastrophe, no matter how “no-nonsense,” “evidence-based,” and “bottom-line business sense” it sounds—or, how “vulnerable,” “brave,” and “spiritual” it sounds. 

In so many of its forms, the self-help catastrophe says the following—sometimes in language that masks this deeper message: “You suffer as you do because you want to win this game. Follow these tips and tricks, and you will finally succeed! And then you will feel happy! We can take you from zero to dangerous, from broke to bad-ass, from quiet desperation to financial independence, from burned out to reinvigorated, from full-on sloth to 10x productive, from self-doubt to the self-confidence of your inner sage who braves the wilderness and dares to lead. You can have it all, and we have the secret you long for.” 

But our real secret—the soul’s dark secret—is that we don’t want to play this game. It’s not that we want to become lazy anarchists or idealistic socialists. Rather, our inner dignity and wisdom rejects the whole game, the whole swindle in its current form, because the better angels of our nature know it won’t ever make us truly happy, truly at one with our fullest potentials and with the sacred mystery itself—and those better angels know we can do better. 

Moreover, those better angels know the logic of the game doesn’t change a bit if we run it on solar power. Solar-powered samsara does just as much harm to our soul and the soul of the world as fossil fuel-powered samsara. 

The currently dominant game is unhealthy; it’s wearing out the world we long to love, and wearing us out too; and when we experience it wearing out our world, wearing out our own heart, mind, and body, wearing out the bodies, minds, and hearts of our fellow beings, our soul hungers for truly wise people to come forward and say, 

“There are major problems with this game we’ve all been playing. It doesn’t accord with wisdom, love, and beauty. It doesn’t accord with sacredness and with reverence for life, and it keeps us out of attunement with spiritual and ecological realities. Let’s talk about how to stop the insanity. Let’s talk about how to heal ourselves and the world at the same time, how we can evolve ourselves and our society and cultivate the whole of life onward. We can do all we manner of things to adapt to our suffering, but we can’t truly heal until we transform the causes of our suffering.” 

We long to hear this, because the soul has begun to groan and even to get feisty in reaction to the bit and bridle of the deranged rider who tries to gallop us into oblivion. Each of us may have slightly different experiences of this, and slightly different exposures to the supposed benefits of our “civilized” lifestyle. But, in general, something in the soul wants us to free ourselves from the burdens of ignorance and walk a noble path of wisdom and wildness. We want to sleep again, dream again, dream bigger and better—not merely to dream for ourselves, but to dream the whole world onward, tapping into sacred powers and inconceivable causes that have no real place in our contemporary context. 

We want to return ourselves to Nature’s rhythms, which operate at a radically different frequency than the noisy pace of “progress”. We want time for real connection—not the substitute “connections” of social media, but time in true togetherness, time for laughing together, creating together, appreciating together, thinking together (not the false thinking of abstractions and commercializations, but the thinking of life). We want unstructured time—in Nature and in nurture. 

We want meaningful work—truly meaningful work that we don’t have to rationalize. We’re done with having to act like a “team player” in a meaningless sport that degrades the conditions of life as it degrades the human spirit. We’re weary from work that breaks down our bodies and minds as it breaks down the wider ecologies we depend on. 

And the work our souls call us to—the real work of our life at a simultaneously Cosmic and community scale—that work gets constrained by the pattern of insanity that covers over what we are, covers over the mystery and magic of life. The terrors and wonders of the holism of the universe get pushed away by busyness and the constant barrage of fear and craving that constitute our political and economic shackles. 

Instead of telling us what we need to hear, what our souls long to hear, the purveyors of self-help chant to us: “Hey there! Look over here! We belong to the [fill in your favorite neurobabble or marketing catchphrase] Research Institute. We research Theory F, and F is for flow and financial freedom,” or, “We teach Process X—and the X is for an extraordinary method for arriving at disruptive insight and moving you and your business forward. Watch our TED talk, and then schedule a free strategy session!” 

This can unfold in variously nuanced ways. For instance, if someone experiences imposter syndrome, the self-help catastrophe will tell them, “Don’t worry. It’s because you need to learn to trust yourself. It’s also because you come from a group who have been silenced and made to feel inadequate. But we can fix that. We will help you get rid of that imposter syndrome!” 

But, if Socrates were alive today, and one of us went to him and said, “Socrates, I feel like an imposter. I think I have imposter syndrome,” Socrates would reply, “That’s very good news! Something in you realizes you lack true wisdom, and it wants you to slow down. Almost anyone who acts like they know what they’re doing in this incredibly complex and sacred world of ours is full of themselves. It’s not because you were marginalized that you now feel imposter syndrome, but rather that you were marginalized because of your sensitivity to all the impostors out there forcing their agendas on the world. Slow down, and trust that feeling of humility. Let it come through. Let’s find out what we can learn from it, and how we can heal self and world together. Let’s walk the path of wisdom, love, and beauty together, and enter the heart of wonder.” 

If we said, “Socrates, I feel burned out, anxious, and depressed,” Socrates would say, “That’s very good news! Something in you doesn’t want to play this game. Slow down. Take care of your soul, and attend to the sacredness of this world. Let the teachings of wisdom, love, and beauty help you to turn away from all this craziness. The great mystery awaits us, and we shouldn’t waste a single moment of our lives.” 

But, here too, the purveyors of self-help do basically the opposite. Instead of helping us end the game—and discover and create a better way of living together—they try to convince us that we only need to get better at playing the game. They tell us we have internal hang-ups, rather than inquiring into the systemic problems that go completely together with all our psychophysical and utterly philosophical symptoms. 

This isn’t a personal attack on anyone. A lot of people playing this game have good intentions, at times delightful ones. On the other hand, we may need to challenge certain ideas and open up a debate when somebody puts their work into the public sphere. And these people’s work is definitely out in public. It’s hard to avoid. 

So is our secret. Paradoxically, our secret is impossible to avoid, and yet, for some of us, nearly impossible to see—hence its darkness. This secret only seems dark and dirty because we’ve pushed it into the shadow, into the unconscious. We’re not allowed to say we don’t like the system, and we take it as a sign of intelligence when someone endorses the system we have, or tells us it’s the worst possible system—except for all the others. 

This makes no real sense. We cannot heal if we don’t stop doing the things that cause suffering, and we cannot experience the most profound and transformative insights if we don’t stop manufacturing ignorance. The dominant narratives make it challenging to see the causes of our suffering and the nature of our ignorance, and in some cases those narratives actually obscure our suffering and ignorance. 

For instance, we don’t clearly see our anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout, and so on as having causal roots in the larger system. This happens in many ways, but even our science tells us that a materialistic culture and the pursuit of material wealth makes us less happy and goes together with all manner of problems. 

The same goes for many diseases. We don’t often enough see our cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, device addiction, and so on as having causal roots in the larger system. It’s always, “I have cancer,” or “I’m an alcoholic,” and never, “This system we all perpetuate has gotten really good at creating cancer, anxiety, addiction, depression, trauma, burnout, and aggression.” We don’t have to swing from one extreme to another, in a way that denies our agency. But we do have to arrive at a clearer view, and enter into the greater mysteries of freedom and agency. 

The ignorance of the system current system drives it to actively seek profit everywhere, even in places a sense of sacredness or a semblance of wisdom would keep us from sticking our narrow agendas. Thus the system constantly invents interventions and extractions that become money, and these interventions and extractions bind our agency as they create negative side-effects in our hearts, minds, bodies, and world. 

Among other things, this means, for instance, we don’t eat what Nature provides. Rather, we eat what capitalism provides, even if we shouldn’t call it food. If degrading ecologies, creating disease-inducing junk food, or intervening in the genetics of plants and animals means profit, then we will do it. 

Similarly, it means we don’t usually get exposure to wisdom, love, and beauty, but instead get exposure to the fragmented and degraded forms of these the marketplace will allow. At times, the situation appears tragic in its irony. We pave over some wonderful, wild place, then the people living there go to airports (also formerly wild, wonderful places) in order to fly somewhere far away, to look at “nature” or to take a psychedelic or yoga retreat. 

We should emphasize here that what we refer to as science goes fully together with our reflections. Science, technology, politics, and economics all go together with the degradation of our ecologies and the limitation of our potentials. 

And they create a context in which we don’t fully sense and understand the suffering that comes from our disconnection from spiritual and ecological realities, which includes the loss of species, the degradation of landscapes and breakdown of the ecologies we depend on. When we get out of balance, that being-out-of-balance becomes the framework for all our thinking, which means all our thinking has a certain lack of attunement with reality. It’s part of a most fundamental philosophical error, which we could call the error of context. 

The context of the dominant culture—a context of disconnection from wisdom, love, and beauty, including disconnection from Nature—that context presents us with a story that we have two and only two options: We either accept the political, economic, scientific, and technological system we have, or we must consign ourselves to insanity (usually likened to Stalin, Mao, or some kind of chaos). This makes it impossible for us to criticize the insanity of the system we have, and to think wisely, compassionately, and creatively together so that we can arrive at far more vitalizing alternatives. 

We take this in en masse. It becomes part of our psychological and philosophical milieu, the water we swim in, the soil we grow in. And thus it becomes off-limits to critique the pattern of insanity, and to confront the scary questions we need to confront about what we must renounce in order to help the whole world heal, ourselves included. Doing so feels, to many of us, like speaking the name Voldemort, recognizing his evil presence in the world, and contemplating all we might have to endure to rid ourselves of that evil. 

Many of the most new-agey self-help gurus, who otherwise say all sorts of warm and fuzzy things, fail to question and may even actively embrace the system we have. They may tell us that they, too, once had their doubts about capitalism and money. But, after riffling through the akashic records and consulting with their spirit guides from the Pleiades (or even consulting with the divine!), they now understand that they secretly hated rich people, and secretly believed they didn’t deserve money. Now they adore rich people, they have abundant self-love, and they understand that money is just “energy,” and to master it we only need to “raise” our “vibrational frequency”. 

The more frightening truth: Rejecting the pattern of insanity somehow seems like a greater sin than many other things we might find in our shadow. The only thing bigger than science in our culture is capitalism, and so the only sin bigger than being woo-woo is being a rebel against the economic system. And many of the people who like things our science considers woo-woo also like things capitalism sees as wonderful—like flying thousands of miles to conduct or to attend self-help programs, and in general spending and trying to make as much money as possible. 

Rejecting the dominant culture’s central game amounts to an incredible taboo, one that (we imagine) comes with a scarlet letter of ignorance, since only fools would suggest we have an ethical obligation to come up with something better than the pattern of insanity that has us all in its grips. 

And so our deepest, darkest secret stays way down in the shadow, with an aura of the forbidden. We suffer. The world hangs by a thread. 

There’s a surprisingly simple solution to all of this: We can get together and start talking about how to walk away from all these games. We can start to listen to our own souls and to the soul of the world. We can start to take back our time and our sanity, and let ourselves be nourished by the most incredible natural resource we have: Our interwovenness with each other, our capacity for true friendship and love, and the wisdom traditions that teach us how to realize our fullest potentials, beyond all the insanity.