When people buckle under the pressure of contemporary life, when they feel unworthy, anxious, burned out, or unable to locate any clear sense of what their lives are for, they are typically offered an individual solution to what is at least partly a collective problem. Therapy, medication, mindfulness apps, productivity systems, self-optimisation regimes. These are not worthless, but they address symptoms while leaving the conditions that produce those symptoms entirely intact.

It is, as I have said elsewhere, like handing out inhalers in a room full of toxic fumes. The breathing improves slightly. The fumes remain.

The philosophical cost of this misdiagnosis is significant. When structural conditions are consistently narrated as personal failures, people lose the capacity to think clearly about their actual situation. They internalise the system's account of their suffering as their own account. They become, in Han's terms, their own exploiters, driving themselves harder in pursuit of a standard of self-realisation that the system has defined and that serves the system's interests rather than their own.

What is needed is not a better self-help framework. What is needed is what philosophy has always been at its most honest: a practice of seeing clearly, naming accurately, and deciding deliberately how to meet the actual conditions of actual existence rather than the idealised conditions that official culture keeps promising are just around the corner.

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