Warhol turned a soup can into art; the modern awareness industry has turned depression and anxiety into “content”.

We have finally won the war against silence. After twenty years of campaigning, nobody is afraid to talk about their mental health anymore. The only casualty was the ability to have a bad week without filing it under a diagnosis.

Lucy Foulkes and her intelligent colleagues recently published a review in Nature Reviews Psychology (2026), in which they set out to study whether mental health awareness efforts (designed, they write, to “decrease stigma, increase help-seeking and improve mental health literacy”) might also be doing something less flattering. Their answer arrives bubble-wrapped in academic caution but upon unboxing is, really, a confession: these campaigns may be “contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems”. They give the phenomenon a wonderfully clinical name, the “prevalence inflation hypothesis”, which is a polite way of saying we may have talked ourselves sick.

Consider the mechanics. The authors describe a study where people shown a post that “normalised anxiety” were “more likely to report that they might have an anxiety disorder”—while their actual anxiety levels didn’t budge at all. Read that twice. Their reported stress stayed the same. We offered a clinical term for the baseline struggle of existing, and they readily adopted the language to describe their own lives.

This is the “nocebo effect”—the placebo’s spiteful sibling. Tell someone a condition is real, common, and waiting for them, and the mind, ever obliging, sets about manufacturing the evidence. The review notes that informing people about “wind turbine syndrome” was enough to give them the symptoms of wind turbine syndrome. Our brains, it turns out, are less truth-detectors than suggestion-boxes that always say yes.

The young, naturally, are the most enthusiastic adopters. The authors observe that adolescence is a period when identity is “still in flux”, which makes it the perfect soil for what they delicately call the “unwell persona”—a self built not from experience but from diagnostic vocabulary. We told a generation that it was brave to name your pain, and they heard, correctly, that the surest way to be somebody is to have something.

But here is the part that the article almost whispers. The researchers aren’t even sure their own subjects believe what they’re reporting. The participants might just be “good participants”, parroting back the expected answers “owing to transient demand characteristics and the desire to be a ‘good participant’”. Good grief, sit with that. The scientists worry that people in a lab are performing illness to please the people in charge… and seem not to notice they’ve just described the entire culture outside the lab. On social media, in the classroom, in the open-plan office: being a “good participant” now means having something to disclose. The study captured the spirit of the age, and then apologised for it.

The proposed cure? My favourite line in the whole document. To undo the damage of teaching people too much about disorders, the authors suggest teaching them about the nocebo effect—what they cheerfully call “nocebo education”. LMAO. Seriously. Read plainly, this is an institution announcing: We made you a hypochondriac by lecturing you, so we will now fix it with a further lecture explaining why you shouldn’t have trusted the first one. The therapeutic establishment has discovered that its product causes harm and has responded by launching a second product to manage the harm caused by the first. (Somewhere, as always, a VC economist is taking notes.)

To their genuine credit, the authors end by asking the only question that matters: whether the benefits are “sufficient” to “tolerate the amount of risk”. It is a careful, footnoted way of asking the thing that no awareness campaign has ever printed on a poster: Are we helping, or are we teaching healthy people to audit themselves for defects until they find some?

They close, as all such papers must, by insisting that “more research is urgently needed”.

Perhaps it is. But the proper conclusion never makes it into the abstract. We set out to teach the world that it’s okay not to be okay. We succeeded so completely that we forgot to mention the other option—and a generation grew up believing that being okay was the only thing left to be ashamed of.

Excellent.

Source:

Foulkes, Lucy, Isaac Winterburn, Dasha Sandra, Michael Inzlicht, Jack L. Andrews, and Carolina Guzman Holst. “The psychological consequences of mental health awareness efforts.” Nature Reviews Psychology 5 (2026): 173–184. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00532-7

👉🏻 Direct author-hosted PDF (full formatted version matching the published paper, no paywall) https://static1.squarespace.com/static/550b09eae4b0147d03eda40d/t/69e646ad5dbf246e1f90aa8d/1776699058188/The-psychological-consequences-of-mental-health-awareness-efforts.pdf

The modern liturgy. We no longer confess our sins to a priest; we diagnose each other’s pathologies over flat whites. The vocabulary of the clinic has escaped its sterile confines to now prowl dating apps and dinner parties—a set of polished, impenetrable shields for the emotionally unarmed.

A spectacular evasion. A form of linguistic jiu-jitsu that converts simple human incompatibility—I find your laugh rather grating, darling—into a psychological violation. I’m sorry, but the way you mock my interest in Sadie Nardini’s Face Yoga feels… gaslighty. It invalidates my reality. The accusation is instant, terminally serious, and impossible to rebut. To argue is only to prove your guilt. A coward’s checkmate: perfect.

“Gaslighting” is the crown jewel of this arsenal. Once describing a specific, cruel form of psychological manipulation, it now coats any disagreement, any difference of memory, any contrary perspective. Your spouse claims you promised to take the garbage out Tuesday? You’re gaslighting her. It is the ultimate conversational trump card, foreclosing debate by framing dissent as abuse. It pathologizes opposition itself. We have taken a weapon designed to describe malice and forged it into a tool for the terminally self-obsessed.

Then there’s “trauma-bonding.” Particularly rich, this one.

A concept meant to describe the destructive attachment between abuser and victim in a cycle of violence has been downgraded. Now it describes the solidarity of a shared, stressful search for parking.

It is the inflation of shared annoyance into something epic and pathological. The term allows two perfectly ordinary, mildly bored individuals to narrate a lukewarm connection as a grand, dark romance—a saga of mutual survival. It’s not that you have nothing to talk about, darling. You’re trauma-bonded! How thrilling. How profound. How utterly, defensively mundane.

But the mightiest of all: “Setting boundaries.” The ultimate pickup line for the emotionally bankrupt. It sounds so responsible, so adult. In practice, it often translates to: I am unilaterally declaring the terms of this relationship. You will comply, or be labelled toxic. A demand dressed as self-care. I’m setting a boundary that I won’t respond to texts after 8 PM. In the blunt tongue of our ancestors: I can’t be bothered with you in the evenings. The old-fashioned brute would simply ignore you. The modern sophisticate issues a press release, framing indifference as noble psychological hygiene.

This, then, is the perfect social lubricant for a frictionless, commitment-phobic age. It allows us to manage human connections with the cold efficiency of an HR department. It provides a ready-made script for dissolving ties, bypassing the messy, human requirement of honesty. You don’t break up; you “recognize a misalignment of attachment styles.” You don’t fire someone; you “terminate a co-dependent dynamic.”

It is a language of profound mediocrity, allowing the mediocre to feel profound.

We forgo the humble, difficult work of introspection—Good lord, is it his chewing, or is it me?—and leap straight to the diagnostic manual. The problem cannot be my short temper or your appalling manners; it must be that you are a “narcissist” and I your “traumatised empath.” A ready-made tragedy, a pre-packaged epic, with ourselves as the stars.

We are left with the pathologised personality, ‘pathologised’ as both adjective and verb. The quirks and flaws, the petty annoyances that have always been the grit of human interaction, are now mere symptoms. The vocabulary of healing has become a tool to avoid the real work of living with others. It is easier to label someone “toxic” and cut them out than to tolerate imperfection, or, heaven forbid, examine our own.

This lexicon fills a void. As the old frameworks, such as faith, tradition, even simple manners, crumble into dust, we are left clutching not a prayer book, but a diagnostic manual. It is our new secular scripture, offering a taxonomy of sin where every flaw is a syndrome, every conflict a case study. We have traded the soul for the psyche, and the psyche, it turns out, is a bureaucrat.

The straightforward, ugly, beautiful truth, that sometimes people just don’t get along, that love often means tolerating someone’s laugh, that most conflicts are born of petty spite, not deep psychic wounding, is too banal for our inflated self-regard. So we dress petty grievances in the gown of high psychology, performing a grand opera of dysfunction to avoid the final, unthinkable admission: that sometimes the problem is not in our stars, nor in our trauma, but in the fact that the other person chews like a horse, and we cannot abide it.

—
© 2025 Tomasz Ferdynand Goetel. All rights reserved. This work is the intellectual property of the author.

Prologue: The House in Exile

It’s so beautiful and intellectual here. Tree-lined streets, almost no traffic, lots of birdsong. Hampstead Garden Suburb, in the part of Hampstead known as Frognal. Feels very safe, must be staggeringly expensive. One of the classic “dream” London neighborhoods for people who want a big house with a garden and Hampstead Heath on the doorstep while still being 15–20 minutes by tube from the West End, the cabbie told me.

A soft, pricey gleam shone from the brass plaque: 20 Maresfield Gardens. A fine, red-brick, late-Victorian villa nestled into the green, under grey skies. The building carried the air of a distinguished refuge, a piece of Viennese furniture salvaged from the Anschluss and reupholstered in English restraint. My arrival followed a London conference on “European Memory,” a two-day exercise where non-governmentally organized women securitized the past, treating collective memory as a toxic asset. I folded my umbrella and shook it off as I crossed the threshold from sterile NGO debates and walked into the Freud Museum’s hushed, carpeted silence. This was like moving from the accounting department to the corporation’s inner chapel. What a funny thought.

Inside now. One does not visit this place. One submits to it. The air is thick with a secular piety, the kind of reverence once reserved for reliquaries. A small handful of rich-looking visitors moved in a slow, funereal procession, speaking in the hushed tones of a library or a clinic. Theirs was the gaze of the pilgrim, come to pay homage at the source of the modern soul. My gaze was that of a coroner, come to perform an autopsy on the worldview that had killed it. Reverence in me I had none.

The Sanctum: A Theatre of the Interior

The study, the inner sanctum, confounded expectation. This was no sterile white clinic but the gloriously cluttered den of a 19th-century scholar. Bookshelves rose like a fortress wall, laden with a lifetime’s plunder bound in leather. Your Goethe and your Shakespeare stood shoulder-to-shoulder with dense archaeological texts. The room revealed its first clue immediately. Freud saw himself as an archaeologist of the past, didn’t he, digging through the stratified debris of the individual mind with the same fervor as Schliemann at Troy.

Antiquities crowded every surface. Nearly two thousand Egyptian bronzes, Greek torsos, and Roman glass fragments served not as decoration but as the core tools of his trade. Each figurine, each scarab, acted as a totem for his method. He believed the psyche was a ruin, and these objects were his spade and brush, representing a digging downward, a conviction that truth is always buried, always subterranean. I knew because I read him. No oceanic feelings here, his was a methodology of profound suspicion.

Oh, shit, look. The couch. Sigmund Freud’s most famous instrument sat at the room’s heart. This 19th-century lit de repos—a “resting bed”—was generously draped with a deep-red Iranian rug and a jumble of cushions. It resembled a well-appointed divan more than a scientific instrument. True power resided in the chair placed discreetly behind it, positioned outside the visitor’s line of sight, a throne for the high priest of the interior. Here lay the arrangement’s genius. The analysand would recline, staring at the ceiling, the books, the antiquities, projecting their interior world onto the clutter of history and culture. The analyst, unseen, became a disembodied voice, a god of interpretation. The entire room engineered an inward gaze. Behold the altar upon which the modern self was laid bare… I really should be writing this down.

Well, back to the couch, so to speak. It’s smaller than you imagine. I watched a woman in a tasteful Prada linen shift gaze upon it, her face a mask of earnest contemplation. She was, I presumed, communing with the spirit of her own introspection.

The Absence: The Repressed Urn

A little bored now, from looking at that woman. My eyes scanned the room, searching for the narrative’s culmination. I was looking for the urn, the famous Greek funerary krater given by his disciple Princess Marie Bonaparte, the vessel meant to hold the master’s earthly remains. I expected this sealed container to be the centrepiece. But it was not there. A check of the guide pamphlet confirmed it. The ashes of Sigmund and Martha Freud reside at Golders Green Crematorium, miles away.

This absence shouted louder than any presence. The museum offered a perfect metaphor, entirely unwitting, a masterpiece of institutional unconsciousness. The man who dedicated his life to exhuming the repressed had his own most fundamental reality—his death, his ashes, his corporeal end—subjected to a final, posthumous repression. The institution had tidied away the messy, biological truth. The beautifully curated interior world of the study could not accommodate the plain fact of the funerary urn.

The Diagnosis: The Theology of the Self

Dismissing the entire therapeutic endeavour would be a caricature. One must grant its initial, seductive appeal. Who does not wish to be understood, to have their private pains acknowledged and named? Its best, most disciplined forms, like cognitive-behavioural models aiming for function over endless excavation, offer tools for managing the unbearable weight of a consciousness that knows it will die. For a moment, standing there, I felt a pang of sympathy for the project. Mapping the interior world represents a profoundly human ambition, a secular successor to the examination of conscience.

But this disciplined tool has not triumphed. A cheap, mass-produced ideology has replaced it. The modern world has strip-mined Freud’s intricate architecture for its most marketable components, leaving a populist liturgy for a post-religious age. The people of the so-called Western Civilization, myself not counting myself among them, inherited not a careful science but a swamp of “therapy-speak.” This mutation’s primary function has shifted from understanding to a vast, soft, totalising act of repression. A tool for denying reality, not navigating it. Was I mumbling to myself? Did the other visitors hear this? I hope not. I want to stay a bit longer.

The “therapy-speak” in its pathological form seeks to repress my reality’s very substructure. I no longer have sinned; I have a syndrome. I don’t have conviction; I have trauma. I don’t have enemies; I have triggers. Grief is a condition to be managed. Ambition is a pathology to be examined. A love for one’s own people, their history, their genetic and cultural continuity—the most natural and fundamental of human impulses—is diagnosed as the vilest neurosis, a primal sickness to be purged. The language of the couch has become the language of the public square, and its primary function is not liberation, but a vast, soft, totalising repression. I’m not impressed.

Most insidiously, it pathologises the natural human impulse—the love for one’s own people, the desire for one’s children to inherit their demographic and cultural space—labelling it a primal sickness, a “phobia” to be cured. The so-called “Great Replacement”, from a conspiracy theory not long ago, emerged as an observable demographic trend. The hysterical reaction to its mere mention invites in me a perspective: a civilisation that has therapized itself into believing its own dispossession constitutes moral and psychological hygiene.

And they call this emancipation. They plaster the lyric everywhere, a hollowed-out mantra for a hollowed-out people: Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. Bob Marley, a man rooted in race, nation, and spirit, would spit at what they’ve done with his words. The modern conception of freedom is this: to be acutely, perpetually aware of your own brokenness. To be liberated is to be fully cognisant of your triggers, your neurodivergence, your trauma, your place in the vast intersectional hierarchy of victimhood. Your salvation lies in the endless consumption of therapeutic services and pharmaceutical products, in a lifetime of validating your own diagnosis. What kind of freedom is that. This is the most sophisticated form of slavery ever devised. Convince the prisoner that the walls of his cell are the boundaries of his own complex mind, and that the jailer is his saviour.

The Descent: The Basement and the Polish Truth

Have had been lost in thought there for a moment, yes. Now my gaze drifted from the rug’s intricate patterns down to the floorboards, to what lay beneath. Ah, the basement. My central metaphor risks misunderstanding as a crude biological determinism that ignores culture’s profound role. That would be its own folly. The relationship is hierarchical, not binary. The salon and the basement represent different levels of a single structure, not separate, warring realms.

Biology, blood, kinship, and the innate human drive for belonging form the basement, the foundation. This load-bearing wall, this bedrock, is damp, dark, and unconcerned with the narratives woven in the rooms above. Culture, ideas, art, and conscious thought constitute the salon, where we live and create meaning. A healthy civilisation acknowledges its foundation, maintains it, and builds a noble salon upon it. The therapeutic state perverts this order, attempting to wall off the basement entirely, to decorate the salon with deranged fantasies while denying the foundation, until the entire structure destabilizes.

The basement as a metaphor? For a Polish guy like me, the basement is a memory. The communist-ruled Poland of my youth enforced a grotesque salon ideology of internationalism. A flimsy, rotten superstructure, we used to say. But below, in the damp crypts of churches and crowded apartments, the foundation remained solid. We knew the real from the lie. The state was the lie; the Church, the language, the nation hidden in our basements were the reality. The West now perfects the inverse, building a dazzling superstructure over a basement it has been taught to wall up and forget, to its own profound peril. What a very, very unfortunate state of affairs.

Emancipation: God, Honor, Fatherland, Family

Emancipation, proper emancipation, requires the courage to descend the cellar stairs and turn on the light. One must look at the hard truths of human nature—our tribalism, our hierarchical instincts—and declare them not a sickness, but the raw material—I preached to myself in my head. The goal cannot be to therapize this away, an effort as futile as medicating gravity. The goal is to channel it, discipline it, and build with it. My own people, against every tyranny, have held the answer in four pillars: Bóg, Honor, Ojczyzna, Rodzina. God, Honor, Fatherland, Family.

God offers Catholicism’s concrete framework, a stark diagnosis of Sin, a terminal prognosis of Death, and a supernatural cure in Redemption. We’re dealing with the eternal soul, not the temporal psyche.

Honor provides the antidote to safetyism, demanding struggle, duty, and the courageous defense of what is rightfully ours.

Fatherland affirms a healthy, natural love for one’s own people as the source of identity that gives life meaning beyond the confines of one’s own skull.

Family is the essential vessel, the heroic, civilization-building cell of cultural and biological transmission.

Typical thinking of the Polish generation I was born into, I know, I know.

Epilogue: The Journey Back

Not feeling too good here. I’d rather be in a pub. So I made my way out, backward through the hushed rooms. The London air felt different. The drizzle stopped. The people around me were no longer individuals on their personal journeys of self-discovery. I saw potential fathers and mothers, sons and daughters of nations, members of tribes who had been tragically, systematically convinced that their deepest and healthiest instincts were shameful diseases to be purged. I felt a wave of clarity, not contempt. The path out of this malaise is not more therapy. It is a conscious, deliberate, and profoundly illiberal project of deconsecrating Freud and reconsecrating the eternal truths of the basement. It is the long, hard, and necessary journey back to reality. A 10-minute walk uphill to Hampstead proper. Oh, there’s the pub. The Holly Bush. Afternoon, landlord, please giz a pint of the black stuff.

Don’t want to get into the “Paid” substack subscription? — Buy The Flying Fish a coffee so she can type disagreeable things faster:

BUY THE FISH A COFFEE

—
© 2025 Tomasz Ferdynand Goetel. All rights reserved. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Unauthorized reproduction is a failure of strategic imagination.

Read the room wrong first. Then, watch “psychology” make a mess of it.

The self-appointed custodians of the mind arrive already armed with one neat, all-too-neat, conviction: there is a “mind”, singular and salvageable, parked in every skull like a faulty but ultimately fixable engine. Psychology today is the roadside mechanic industry spawned from that belief, all jack-levers and Eroski coupon-based redemption plans, blithe as Florida Everglades roadside brunch and twice as caloric. Meanwhile, the engine refuses to start, black smoke curls from underneath the dashboard like metaphysical regret, and we still tip the bloke who tightened nothing but our sense of urgency.

First confession: I worked the long aisles of the wellness cathedrals—where we bottled mindfulness like artisanal cologne and my colleagues repackaged trauma for our “guests” as a workshop with complimentary ginger tea. You hand over your trauma. They hand you a script. Both parties are pretending the exchange is therapeutic rather than commercial or instgrammable or both. Result: the trauma, nicely gift-wrapped in positive-psychology jargon and #hashtag, is delivered back to you along with an annual “detox”. I should know—I was on the team getting salaried from the whisked up invoices.

Second confession: I also dealt casino cards beneath chandeliers to men in bespoke suits who swore that the mastery of self was merely arithmetic—risk, odds, split-second emotional calculus. They calibrated their cortisol like Blackjack chips on felt, only to discover that the equation they worshipped added up to nothing more than a conviction that they were smarter than the game, itself smarter than them. The house was the casino, yes, but really the house was their sense that probability could be charmed by willpower.

The truth is simpler: no psyche exists in the way the textbooks insist. It’s not a coherent sovereign seated on a throne behind your eyes, issuing edicts, needing only “therapy” to polish the crown. Don’t believe me? Try this after three stiff drinks: stare into a mirror, let the room breathe. You’ll meet a parliament of partial selves voting on impulse, rehearsing old debt arguments in the cloakroom, bribing memories for scented favours. Every so often a lobbyist called Desire shouts loudest and we mistake the moment for identity.

Psychology, in its urge to professionalise intuition, has become the official grammar of this hallucinated inner court. Instead of describing what flickers, it trains us to narrate what should be there: resilience, attachment style, growth mind-set, codependency. Fictions polished into governance. The result resembles a music review that scores silence instead of sound.

Take the PTSD diagnostic checklist: a tidy eight points that reads like sad staccato haiku. Now watch a car backfire in Bangkok one February midnight; the entire taxonomy collapses into one sweaty, mutinous body that will not, in fact, be itemised into neat columns. The theory, so hygienic on paper, is impaled by lived, indifferent sensation.

Or the mindfulness scam—yes, scam, I called it—where “be present” has become fiduciary (is that even a word?) jargon for employees who must now withstand twelve-hour Slack tidal waves without drowning. We are told to cultivate stillness while quarterly reports colonise our pulse. Tranquillity becomes merchandise for the perforating stress it claims to heal. A brilliant circular economy of neurotic revenue, collected by the Church of the Self-Scanning Soul.

Here’s a modest counter-proposal: psychology might serve us better if it conceded that the mind is less an engine than a Phuket beachfront during riptide season—shape-shifting, indifferent to the lifeguard’s whistle. We might gain more by learning the poetry of inconsistency, the tactical surrender to incoherence, than by polishing narrative coherence for insurance claims. Let therapy be the bruised territory where we admit we make it up as we go and sometimes make a mess of it. That is a confession worth paying for, because the confession is the therapy.

Nor should we forget: the Spanish Inquisition never left the room. The medieval index returned wearing the pilled sweater of DSM, still demanding we purge heretical feelings to preserve communal hygiene. Self-help is the new auto-da-fé, but kinder, no scorched flesh but scorched dignity negotiated via picturesque payment plans.

The shortest route to clarity is acknowledging the primordial fog. Behind each behaviour sits a knot of contradictory motives so tightly Verdunnen they dissolve before language arrives. Screw them diagnostic codes. Confess the knot and keep it loosened by astonishment. Then drink, gamble, love, grieve, let go, stretch hamstrings past reason, because that constellation is more honest than any manual’s map and life is short.

Final wager: the next bored somatic announcement you catch yourself making—“I am healing,” “I am stuck,” “I am, therefore I eat chicken fried rice”—pause. Note how quickly the pronoun outgrows the moment. Bursts like a soap bubble. Leaves nothing behind but a smear on the sink.

Excellent.

Don’t want to get into the “Paid” substack subscription? — Buy The Flying Fish a coffee so she can type disagreeable things faster:

BUY THE FISH A COFFEE

—
© 2025 Tomasz Ferdynand Goetel. All rights reserved. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Unauthorized reproduction is a failure of strategic imagination.

“Read the room”. I must have mumbled it aloud somewhere between the fifth gin tonic and the tall Isaan mamasan just about to put her chubby younger “sister” in my lap. The phrase kept floating back, like a half-remembered Air Asia advert jingle one can’t quite expel, or was it a chorus of a Rihanna song, the sort that later colonises the inside of the skull when the lights come on to signal the Amnesia Bangkok nightclub clientele it’s time to pack your girls and your memories and leave because the room is meant to sleep.

Yes, I had come to Spain with a pocketful of diagnostics and a lanyard that said something like “Certified Inner Navigator”—both purchased in bulk like knockoff sunglasses on a beach. The room, meanwhile, was different this time: an ex-restaurant dining hall reeking of recent Lidl-grade air refreshener and stale vegetarian cuisine submissions. After years and years of voluntary absence, I’ve involuntarily come to a “yoga” class. We are standing to attention on yoga-mats the colour of bruised figs, eyes politely glistening; the facilitator (a woman whose dreamcatcher tattoos seemed more earnest than first-wave feminism) has just asked us to “summon the wounded inner child through the soles of the feet”. This one I shall leave without a comment.

I failed at room-reading, spectacularly. Instead of tuning into the collective mood of vaginal near-future euphoria, or, near-future vaginal euphoria, I noticed the scratched varnish on the parquet, the fluorescent glow of a lava lamp in the corner stuttering in Morse code: run-run-run. My inner parliament—all hung-over from the rum-soda night before—simultaneously voted stay, if only to see how badly my cheap metaphors could mangle themselves. The child, for all she/her he/his they/them injuries, stayed curled in utero somewhere beneath the collapsed ankle bone, refusing induction into the grown-up séance of Gaia-friendly self-improvement.

You’ve noticed, too, if you’ve been to a 2025 trauma-informed yoga class lately, that the clinic’s newest hymn—“Hold space for your nervous system”—arrives wrapped in a font so relentlessly cheerful it ought to be prescribed as a cocaine-derivative-but-legal upper. Would you confess you tiptoe past such platitudes like a cat that’s recently been startled by its own reflection? Half-ashamed, half-entertained? If so, is the embarrassment “almost medicinal” for you, dear? But I digressed.

You know how it ends: my skinny self and twenty-three (I counted, an old professional habit) almost naked wimmins attempting to breathe in unison, their iPhones on Do Not Disturb but vibrating against Ikea hardwood, a low percussive tremor of incomplete Instagram notification pings. Psychology, in its merciful way, recorded no casualties: merely another “incomplete”, another invoice. I left clutching a New Age affirmation card proclaiming I Am Enough the dreamcatching goddess gave me against my semi-polite refusals. Within a day the card, left on the rubber floor inside my car, curled at the edges like neglected lettuce. Using it as a bookmark inside Houellebecq’s Platform straightened it out.

The larger mess reveals itself later. Back at the bar—because there must always be a bar—old Juan with the drooping eyelid explained, slurring in his just-for-me Spanish he uses coz I don’t have any Catalan, why trauma cannot be outsourced:

“No puedes cambiar tu cerebro por una bolsa de tela, chico”.

Translation: One cannot exchange one’s brain for a cotton totebag and a Spotify tantra mantra playlist. I laughed so hard the foam of the Frigola came out my nose.

Psychology, bless it, had promised us redemption coupons. But every redemption booth I approached turned out to be a pop-up stall already folding into a suitcase, wheels spinning towards the next conference centre. Meanwhile, the psyche—if one still insists—was busy elsewhere given a puff of hasheesh: in the memories of the precise click of a Nana Plaza bargirl’s handbag snap shut at 3 a.m., in the sudden urge to kiss a tall blonde stranger’s hand at Geneva railway station, in the smell of BBQ baby-back ribs drifting from aircon exhaust of the Port of Miami Joe’s Diner. Busy in places that might have once been almost a home.

We keep calling it “psychological”. It is simply the weather, passing across the face like a squall of warm rain, then disappearing without a syllabus.

Excellent.

—
© 2025 Tomasz Ferdynand Goetel. All rights reserved. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Unauthorized reproduction is a failure of strategic imagination.