I have the impression that we are living in a time when no one seems allowed simply to exist anymore. A person wakes up and is already in debt to something: they should drink more water, sleep better, work out, follow a diet, work, produce, study, meditate, read, answer messages, take care of the house, take care of the body, take care of their mental health, be a good father, a good mother, a good child, a good student, a good professional, a good partner, a good friend. And, as if that were not enough, they are also expected to look well while trying to keep up with all of it.
The list is endless. Every era has had its demands, of course, but ours seems to have turned life into a kind of script for success. There is always some formula in circulation: the right habits, the right routine, the right body, the right career, the right emotional intelligence, the right way to suffer, to overcome, to love, to age, and even to rest. As if, by following the script properly, a person could finally secure something: recognition, stability, beauty, admiration, followers, belonging, perhaps even a silent promise of happiness.
Byung-Chul Han helps us think about this exhaustion. It is not only a matter of working too much, but of living under a permanent demand for performance. The pressure no longer comes only from the outside. It enters the mind, the body, the schedule, the way each person evaluates themselves. Alain Ehrenberg also touches on something important when he shows the weight of an autonomy that has become an obligation. The contemporary subject does not suffer only because someone tells them, “You may not”; they suffer because they must constantly prove that they can, that they can manage, that they choose well, that they are administering their own life properly.
And then there is the spectacle. Guy Debord perceived something that seems even more evident today: the image has ceased to be merely a representation of life and has begun to organize the very relationship between people. It is not simply that we show more. It is that, little by little, we have learned to look at ourselves as if we too were an image to be maintained. A person works, loves, travels, grows old, suffers, and recovers almost always before some kind of audience, real or imagined.
In this context, it becomes difficult to accept any experience that does not come with control, usefulness, or an acceptable appearance. Sadness must pass quickly. Grief must teach us something. Failure must become a lesson. Rest must be productive. Love must fit into a presentable narrative. Even vulnerability, which could open a space for something true, risks becoming a performance of sensitivity.
The problem is that real life does not fit so neatly into this script. It brings loss, waiting, frustration, illness, separation, aging, ambivalence, desire, fear, tenderness, anger, hope, and helplessness. It cannot be fully managed. And perhaps this is precisely where some people begin to defend themselves against living. Not because they do not desire life, but because, somewhere within them, they know that everything alive can also come to an end.
Freud touches on this point beautifully in “On transience.” He begins with an apparently simple question: does something lose its value because it ends? Is a landscape less beautiful because it will disappear? Is a flower worth less because it lasts only a short time? Does a love, a friendship, a stage of life, an experience lose its importance because it is not eternal?
Freud’s answer is precise: no. Transience does not necessarily diminish the value of things. In many cases, it intensifies it. What passes is not worth less simply because it passes. Sometimes it is valuable precisely because it cannot be possessed forever. The difficulty does not lie in the brevity of the experience, but in our difficulty tolerating the fact that what we love is not guaranteed.
I remember once hearing someone say they did not want to have a dog because dogs live shorter lives than we do. The statement came with an apparently sensible conclusion: “When he dies, I will suffer too much.” At first, it sounds prudent, almost rational. But if we listen more carefully, there is an enormous renunciation hidden there. To avoid the future pain of loss, the person gives up the present joy of attachment.
A dog does not offer eternity. A dog offers presence. A dog offers routine, mess, care, expense, concern, walks, hair around the house, surprise, laughter, tenderness, impatience, companionship. A dog enters someone’s life and changes the rhythm of the home. It makes a person notice schedules, small signs, needs that are not only their own. It forces a movement out of oneself. Anyone who loves an animal knows that this love comes with a kind of anticipated grief. Even so, it would be a poor conclusion to say that because it ends, it is not worth it.
The sentence about the dog seems to me a very clear image of something that also appears in the consulting room. Some people, after important losses, disappointments, abandonments, or frustrations, learn to protect themselves. And that protection, at some point, may have been necessary. No one becomes hardened by accident. Sometimes hardness was the only possible way to go on.
The problem begins when this defense ceases to be a response to a specific pain and starts organizing the person’s entire relationship with life. The person begins to desire less in order not to be so frustrated. They expect less in order not to be disappointed. They love with reserve in order not to depend. They give themselves only halfway in order not to fall apart completely. On the outside, they may continue to function very well: they work, respond, solve, organize, comply. Inside, however, something becomes narrower.
This emotional economy may seem protective, but it comes at a high cost. The person suffers fewer particular pains, but also loses certain joys. They protect themselves from abandonment, but lose encounter. They protect themselves from frustration, but lose desire. They protect themselves from grief, but lose love. Little by little, the attempt not to suffer produces an excessively managed life, one in which almost nothing surprises, almost nothing disrupts, and almost nothing truly touches them.
Grief, when it can be lived through, does not erase the loss. Nor does it return a person to who they were before. This matters. There are losses that change us. There are pains that leave a mark. Working through a loss does not mean emerging from it unscathed, nor quickly replacing it with something else. It means being able to recognize that something has ended without concluding that one’s capacity to love has ended with it.
In clinical work, something sometimes begins to change when a person realizes that their defense, however understandable, has also become a prison. What once protected them now prevents them from coming closer. What once prevented a fall now prevents any possibility of flight. And this is not about convincing someone to throw themselves naively into life, as if vulnerability were a beautiful word and that alone were enough. It is about gradually building some trust in one’s own capacity to go through what cannot be controlled.
There is an important difference between functioning and feeling alive. A person can function very well and still remain distant from a genuine experience of existence. They may have a correct routine, an admirable image, strong performance, intelligent speech, an apparently organized life, and still feel that something in them is merely acting. Acting out success, acting out maturity, acting out lightness, acting out independence, even acting out spontaneity.
Perhaps this is why the idea of authenticity needs to be handled carefully. Authenticity is not doing whatever one wants, nor turning one’s own desire into an absolute law. Charles Taylor helps us think about this when he distinguishes a life of one’s own from a narcissism disguised as freedom. To be authentic is not to retreat into the self. It is to be able to respond to the world in a way that is less automatic, less defensive, less governed by the need to appear as something.
Psychoanalysis, especially when it approaches a Winnicottian sensibility, also reminds us that living creatively does not necessarily mean producing a work of art. Creativity, in this sense, is a way of being in the world. A conversation can be creative. A bond can be creative. A way of caring can be creative. A way of going through grief can be creative. Even loving a dog, with all that it involves of joy and loss, can reopen areas of presence, playfulness, and tenderness that had fallen asleep.
In the end, perhaps the question is less “how much are we willing to suffer?” and more “how much of life are we willing to lose in order not to suffer?” Because finitude should not be used as an argument against love. The fact that something ends does not prove that it was useless. It proves only that it was alive, that it had duration, presence, body, intensity, history.
To love a person, an animal, a city, an idea, a stage of life, or any experience at all is to accept that no presence comes with a guarantee of permanence. This does not make the bond smaller. It makes it more delicate, more demanding, and, in many cases, more true. Whoever defends themselves against every loss ends up defending themselves against every encounter as well. And a life excessively protected from pain may end up being too protected from life itself.
References
Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle. Zone Books.
Ehrenberg, A. (1991). Le culte de la performance. Calmann-Lévy.
Ehrenberg, A. (2010). The weariness of the self: Diagnosing the history of depression in the contemporary age. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Freud, S. (1957). On transience. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 14). Hogarth Press.
Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford University Press.
Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Tavistock Publications.
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