Something feels wrong about modern life. I see it everywhere—we’re constantly curating ourselves for social media, job interviews, dating apps, even therapy sessions. We’ve learnt to present simplified, coherent versions of ourselves while our actual inner experience remains messy, contradictory, and complex.
This isn’t just individual anxiety. It’s what I call “conditioned superficiality”—a cultural system that demands we perform consistency while punishing authentic complexity. We’re taught that being “together” means never showing confusion, that success requires a clear personal brand, and that mental health means eliminating all internal contradictions.
But what if our multiplicity isn’t the problem? What if the demand for constant coherence is what’s making us sick?
Our education system trains us early to give expected answers rather than ask real questions. Standardised tests reward memorisation over creativity. Students learn to suppress curiosity that doesn’t fit curriculum requirements, so much so that many have lost touch with their natural learning instincts.
Teachers face impossible pressure to “teach to the test,” narrowing what they can explore with students. Interdisciplinary thinking—connecting ideas across subjects—gets eliminated despite being essential for understanding complex real-world problems. We fragment knowledge into isolated subjects, training students to think in silos rather than seeing connections.
Much of mainstream therapy has become another system demanding performance. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy focuses on eliminating “wrong” thoughts rather than understanding why someone might think them. The psychiatric system often treats reasonable responses to unreasonable circumstances as individual pathology.
Consider how we pathologise dissociation—the ability to mentally step away from overwhelming situations. This capacity helped humans survive trauma for millennia, yet it’s treated as dysfunction requiring elimination. What if the problem isn’t that people dissociate, but that they live in conditions requiring such protective responses?
The modern workplace demands emotional performance regardless of how we actually feel. Customer service workers must smile through abuse. Professionals must network constantly, turning every relationship into potential career advancement. Social media requires everyone to maintain a “personal brand.”
LinkedIn exemplifies this perfectly. Users must present consistent success stories while hiding struggle, learning, or human uncertainty. The platform rewards content projecting expertise and motivation while penalising anything suggesting vulnerability or authentic growth.
The rise of gig work intensifies these pressures. Uber drivers depend on customer ratings, forcing emotional performance during every ride. Freelancers must constantly promote themselves through social media. Even traditional employees must cultivate their “brand” to remain competitive.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok reward simplified, emotionally stimulating content while penalising nuance. Mental health advocacy gets reduced to motivational quotes over sunset photos. Complex therapeutic concepts—”boundaries,” “trauma,” “self-care”—become hashtags stripped of their deeper meaning.
The result is what philosopher Rick Roderick called “performed authenticity”—carefully curated vulnerability designed for consumption. Users must reveal genuine struggle but package it for engagement metrics. Real spontaneity becomes impossible when everything is content.
When we constantly perform versions of ourselves that feel foreign, our bodies keep score. Chronic tension, digestive issues, sleep problems, and autoimmune conditions often reflect the stress of living split between authentic self and performed identity.
The body holds wisdom that rational mind cannot access. It knows when we’re safe or threatened, when relationships feel genuine or performative, when work aligns with our values or violates them. But we’re trained to override bodily intelligence in favour of mental control.
People from marginalised communities face additional pressure to perform “respectability” in professional settings. Black employees often experience chronic stress from code-switching between authentic cultural expression and white-normed professional behaviour. This constant translation requires enormous energy while limiting access to community connection and cultural resources.
Women navigate impossible double binds: be confident but not threatening, successful but not aggressive, nurturing but not needy. The “girl boss” mentality encourages individual optimisation within systems that weren’t designed for women’s success rather than questioning those systems themselves.
When we spend most of our energy maintaining performances, little remains for discovering what actually matters to us. Many people report feeling successful on paper while experiencing profound emptiness. The metrics of external achievement—salary, followers, degrees—replace internal measures of meaning and satisfaction.
Physical practices offer powerful alternatives to cognitive control. Yoga, martial arts, dance, and breathwork create opportunities to experience ourselves beyond social conditioning. These practices access forms of knowing that haven’t been colonised by performance demands.
Athletes demonstrate this beautifully. Peak performance states—being “in the zone”—emerge when players access something beyond individual control. Michael Jordan’s accounts of time slowing down, or team sports where players report feeling connected to something larger than individual skill, suggest ways of being that exceed performance anxiety.
Trauma-informed approaches recognise that healing often happens through the body rather than the mind. Techniques like Somatic Experiencing help people complete defensive responses that got interrupted during overwhelming situations. The body knows how to heal when given appropriate support.
Artistic practices create space for complexity that rational discourse cannot accommodate. Julia Cameron’s “morning pages”—three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing each morning—helps people access authentic voice beneath social conditioning.
Hip-hop culture exemplifies how marginalised communities create alternative spaces for expression. Rap, breakdancing, graffiti, and DJing emerged from urban communities denied access to mainstream platforms. These art forms honour experiences excluded from dominant discourse while developing innovations that eventually influence broader culture.
Community art projects, like Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, use creative expression to develop both individual voice and collective resistance. Participants explore social problems through improvisation and role-play, discovering new possibilities for action.
Democratic schools like Sudbury Valley allow students to direct their own learning while participating in shared governance. These environments demonstrate how people naturally pursue knowledge when not forced into predetermined curricula.
Popular education models, developed through organisations like the Highlander Folk School, integrate personal experience with social analysis. Participants connect individual struggles to larger patterns while developing collective strategies for change.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy recognises students’ home cultures as resources for learning rather than deficits requiring correction. These approaches support academic success while maintaining cultural connection and community identity.
Individual resistance requires collective support. Mutual aid networks create alternatives to individualistic service provision. Groups meeting material needs while building political consciousness demonstrate how communities can care for each other outside market logic.
Support groups organised around shared experience—trauma survivors, chronic illness, addiction recovery—create spaces for authentic expression that challenge therapeutic colonisation. Peer support models, developed by people with lived experience, often provide more effective help than professional clinical approaches.
Time banks, skill-sharing networks, community gardens, and tool libraries create economic relationships based on cooperation rather than competition. These practices help participants experience themselves as contributors to collective wellbeing rather than isolated consumers.
Reclaiming authentic complexity isn’t just individual self-help—it’s political resistance. Systems of oppression depend on people experiencing themselves as isolated individuals competing for scarce resources rather than interconnected beings capable of collective creation.
The Movement for Black Lives demonstrates this integration by addressing both interpersonal trauma and systemic violence. Their platform includes policy demands alongside healing justice practices supporting organisers’ emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Disability justice organising challenges assumptions about productivity, independence, and normative functioning. This work recognises disabled people’s experiences as sources of wisdom about interdependence and alternative ways of being rather than individual tragedies requiring medical intervention.
Climate justice movements increasingly recognise connections between ecological destruction and psychological colonisation. Effective environmental organising requires both policy change and transformation of cultural values driving ecological destruction.
The path forward requires what philosopher Rick Roderick calls “ontological courage”—the courage to be multiple in a world demanding singularity, to be in process within systems requiring fixed outcomes, to trust embodied wisdom over expert authority.
This doesn’t mean celebrating dysfunction or avoiding necessary growth. It means recognising that health itself is complex, that healing rarely follows linear paths, and that our most profound transformations often look like breakdowns before revealing themselves as breakthroughs.
We cannot wait for permission to live authentically. We must create conditions for authentic living through daily practices and relationships. This includes developing somatic awareness that honours bodily intelligence alongside mental analysis, creating spaces for creative expression that bypass social censorship, building mutual support networks that provide alternatives to individualistic competition, practising forms of education and therapy that honour complexity rather than demanding simplification, and engaging in political organising that connects personal healing with collective liberation.
The future emerges through countless small choices to honour complexity over performance, depth over surface, authentic relationship over social networking. In learning to work with our own multiplicity—psychological, creative, political—we participate in creating conditions where others can do the same.
Our individual healing and collective liberation are not separate projects but different aspects of the same emergence. The courage to be authentically complex in our own lives contributes to creating a world spacious enough to hold everyone’s full humanity.
This is the work of our time: not healing by conforming to existing definitions of health but expanding those definitions to include the full spectrum of human possibility. Not adapting to systems demanding our diminishment but creating new systems supporting our flourishing. Not resolving our complexity but learning to dance with it—finding in our multiplicity not pathology but power, not confusion but wisdom, not brokenness but the beautiful, necessary incompleteness that makes growth and connection possible. In reclaiming our right to be complex, contradictory, and fully human, we don’t just heal ourselves—we begin to heal the world.
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.