Talk Therapy Overload

Hi there,

Lately, I’ve developed a strange new hobby: eavesdropping.

Not intentionally. But it’s hard not to when the world has turned into one giant group therapy session.

Just last week, I was at my usual Barnes & Noble bookstore, the one where the self-help section stretches on like a hallway of mirrors, and I overheard two girls curled up in leather chairs, basically co-leading a masterclass in Instagram-Accredited Psychology.

“I had to set a boundary with him,” one said, sipping her iced matcha. “His avoidant attachment was triggering my fawn response.”

The other nodded, solemnly. “Totally. That’s just your nervous system protecting you.”

Later that day, I set up shop with my laptop at a café down the street. The guy next to me sighed into his phone, “Babe, I’m not stonewalling. I’m just emotionally dysregulated.”

By the time my cappuccino arrived, the girl behind me was dumping her latest relationship woes on her friend, “I don’t know if I like him or if I’m addicted to the cortisol.”

Same day, just hours apart. Three public spaces turned into pop-up therapy clinics.

And I thought: what in the BetterHelp is going on?

When Self-Awareness Goes Wrong

At first, it was amusing. Like the whole world had collectively taken Psych 101 and decided to speak only in trauma-informed riddles.

But the more I kept hearing it, the more I raised an eyebrow.

Because underneath the buzzwords: “boundaries, dysregulation, attachment wounds” I wasn’t hearing people talk about themselves. I was hearing them recite symptom checklists. Everything was filtered. Everything was labeled. And every human moment was flattened into a neat framework or diagnosis.

What used to be endearing or eccentric or deeply human is now a pathology. You’re not scattered, you have ADHD. You’re not guarded, you have avoidant tendencies. You don’t have a crush, you’re trauma bonded.

We’ve lost the language of personality. And worse, we’ve replaced it with the language of pathology and illness.

Somewhere in all this brutal self-knowing and self-analysis, we’ve lost the plot of what it means to live fully as a messy human.

When Everything’s Explained, Nothing’s Experienced

I don’t think this is just a generational quirk or a TikTok trend. I think it’s a deeper cultural shift. We’ve turned to psychological explanations not because they’re healing us, but because they help us control what feels chaotic.

The world is becoming more complicated by the day. We take comfort in knowing 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 anxious, confused, commitment-phobes who are depressed and lonely.

On the flip side, 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 without all the introspection and self-analysis.

We don’t know how to sit in the mystery anymore.

When everything becomes an explanation, we lose the experience. When everything dissected into pieces and parts, we lose the person.

And the more I listen to these conversations around me, the TikToks, the therapy memes, the Barnes & Noble brain dumps, the more I worry that we’re forgetting how to simply be people.

Messy. Inconsistent. Illogical. Late sometimes. Quiet sometimes. Loud in love. Confused in grief. Alive in ways that don’t need to be examined.

Not disordered. Just human.

What Happened to Personality & Character?

I think that is the quiet engine behind so much of the misery. We’ve taught a generation that the meaning of life isn’t something you live out in the world, it’s something you decode in your own head. Like if you just dig deep enough, analyze hard enough, connect every dot back to childhood, you’ll finally feel okay.

I think we’ve forgotten how to hold the unknown.

We want to know so badly. What it means. Why we are the way we are. How to fix it. And the internet, with its diagnostic quizzes and algorithmic therapists and influencer shrinks in claw clips, tells us: Yes, we can know! We have a label for that. We have content for that. Just scroll. Just search.

But the truth is, there are parts of you that aren’t meant to be known.

They’re meant to be lived.

We also underestimate how brutal that kind of self-examination can be. I feel for young people who are still living their childhoods while simultaneously dissecting them like case studies, shoving every ounce of joy, grief, confusion, and longing into diagnostic buckets labeled “trauma response.” It’s heartbreaking to see them hide away from life, from relationships, and from all the uncertainties that make life worth living.

We didn’t hand them a roadmap. We handed them a magnifying glass and told them to go hunting for what’s wrong. No wonder they’re exhausted. No wonder everything feels like a crisis. They’ve been taught to see their lives as a puzzle to solve instead of a story to live.

Just like no one is allowed to have a personality anymore, we also can’t talk about character these days. No one’s generous; they’re a people-pleaser. No one’s vulnerable; they’re anxiously attached. No one is romantic; they’re co-dependent. You can’t be driven; you’re an insecure overachiever with a trauma-fueled productivity loop.

God forbid you just care about things. Or love hard. Or work your ass off. It all has to be explained. Diagnosed. Deconstructed.

We’ve stopped seeing people. We only see pixelated parts and patterns.

Final Thought

I don’t think I believe it anymore: that we’re more emotionally evolved than generations past. I’ve lived across continents and cultures, and I’ve seen what real emotional intelligence looks like. And let me tell you, it doesn’t always come wrapped in language. It comes through action. Through presence. Through people who don’t need to narrate their growth to live it.

We’ve mistaken introspection for transformation. But insight without meaningful action is inert. And the truth is, some things aren’t meant to be explained. Some parts of being human are supposed to be messy, unknowable, unresolved. That’s not dysfunction, that’s life.

We keep being told the bravest thing is to “do the work.” But I think the real courage is in not turning everything into work. In releasing the need to fix, to label, to make sense of every emotion like it’s a spreadsheet error. In accepting that we won’t heal our way out of being human.

Because if you analyze long enough, you’ll find a pathology. If you dig deep enough, you’ll lose yourself.

At some point, the wiser move is to stop digging.

Live. Laugh at yourself. Love someone without decoding it. Let the mystery stay a mystery.

You won’t find yourself in your inner child’s trauma file or a DSM bullet point. You’ll find yourself in how you show up.

So let’s all be brave enough to be ordinary. Be wise enough to be unsolved.

You are a soul with a messy, winding story. You are a little bit magic. And God help the world if we lose that. Because all that’d be left is robots and roaches.

With you, unsolved,

Shakila

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