I read Carol Tilkian’s interview with Esther Perel in Folha de S.Paulo and stopped at the word captivity. It seemed too large for such an ordinary daily life of messages, commitments, and eyes that barely look up from their screens anymore. I had always imagined captivity as a word made of iron, with bars, a padlock, and someone outside holding the key. Perel was talking about another kind of prison, one that is harder to see because it does not tell us we have to stay. It keeps us busy, rushing from one thing to the next, under the impression that we have freely chosen every step. When I finished the interview, I thought that this might be its most unsettling feature. No one has to lock the door. Life keeps narrowing while we try to keep up with it.
Perel talks at length about couples, although the conversation is by no means limited to them. As I read, I also thought about friendships, everyday encounters, and the intimate, not always amicable relationship we have with ourselves. What unsettled me most was the idea of a self that never stops caring for, watching, and improving itself, hoping that one day it will finally be ready enough to live, to love, or simply to appear before someone else without feeling that something is still missing.
This pressure rarely arrives in the voice of a command. More often, it sounds like encouragement. Take care of yourself. Fulfill your potential. Learn another language. Sleep better. Get your emotions in order. Keep your body moving. None of this is bad in itself. What is curious is that so many different choices all lead in the same direction: there is always something in us that needs correcting. Freedom is still there, but it comes with a kind of obligation to account for how we use it.
That is why I thought of Alain Ehrenberg. Much of his work predates a world in which a watch could grade our sleep, yet the person he describes seems made for the world we live in now. In The Weariness of the Self, Ehrenberg traces a shift in the way individuals understand themselves and experience suffering. The society of discipline, obedience, and guilt has not disappeared; one need only look around to see that prohibitions are still very much alive. Alongside them, however, another imperative has taken hold: take the initiative, choose your own path, find out who you are, and do something meaningful with it.
I do not want to deny the freedom contained in that promise. The ability to choose other paths, to escape the fate that family, class, or birthplace seemed to have laid out for us, has transformed many lives. Yet that same freedom has stripped us of nearly every alibi. When something goes wrong, chance gradually disappears from the story. The money we did not have, the door that never opened, the time we were never given—all of it disappears too. What remains is a question that quickly turns against us: where did I go wrong? Looking back, everything begins to seem preventable. I should have tried harder, understood sooner, chosen better. It is not enough to suffer over what never happened. We also remain indebted to the person we imagine we should have become by now.
I hear this often in my clinical work. Someone talks about a long-standing conflict or a decision that still weighs on them and, at some point, says, “At my age, I should have worked through this by now.” Alongside the sadness, there is often a shame that is difficult to admit—the shame of still being sad, as though every wound came with a deadline for healing and theirs had stayed open too long. The person suffers because of what happened and then blames themselves for not having learned how to get better in time.
I know this firsthand. I used to count my steps and track my sleep on my watch. I don’t do either anymore, though I still set reading goals for myself. The goals themselves are not the problem. What I keep thinking about is how easily measuring becomes a habit, until a fitness tracker tells us whether we slept well and a book becomes just another item on a to-do list. Nobody has to make us do it. We learn to keep count on our own.
Studying again, taking care of the body, or entering analysis can open up possibilities that did not exist before. Sometimes, with little warning, that care becomes a permanent demand. We rest while thinking about how much energy we will need the next day. On a trip, part of our attention is spent documenting what is happening while already imagining how we will tell the story afterward. The pleasure is still there, but it does not seem to be enough; we want it to yield something, some proof that the time was not wasted. It is as if we were living with one eye already on what the experience will become on a screen, while the experience itself unfolds, to some extent, without us.
We do not turn into products overnight. It happens through small gestures, almost without our noticing. We tidy up our career story so that it appears to have followed a coherent course, even though we know how many detours have been left out. We choose the photograph in which we look most like the person we would like to be. Even what we call vulnerability is usually groomed before it reaches anyone else, prepared to look sincere without doing any damage. The mess is still there, living inside us. It simply has not been given permission to appear.
Eva Illouz calls this blend emotional capitalism. In the workplace, empathy, authenticity, and emotional self-control have been turned into skills. In intimate life, the language of negotiation and investment has entered the conversation uninvited. It is common to hear someone say they invested too much in a person, that the relationship yielded no return, or that the two of them were no longer compatible. These expressions have become so ordinary that we no longer find it strange to speak of a relationship as though it were an investment that either paid off or failed.
Dating apps have made this very visible. A person appears as a brief set of traits, photographs, and preferences. Within seconds, we decide whether they are worth getting to know. The internet did not invent this way of choosing, and it would be naive to imagine a past in which love was free of interests, family expectations, or social calculations. What has changed is the scale, the speed, and the sense that another possibility is always waiting just ahead. Faced with so many options, the fear of making the wrong choice ends up taking the place of the encounter itself.
Perel talks about couples who, amid the demands of the household, the children, their schedules, and the bills, become extremely good at dealing with whatever comes up and making it through the week without letting anything fall apart. Almost without noticing, they hand over nearly all their time to what has to be managed, and the relationship starts to resemble a small business. The unease sets in when they find themselves with an evening free of emergencies or practical matters. After spending so long making life work, they may no longer know how to just sit there, face-to-face, with nothing to solve.
I appreciate the way Illouz approaches this process because she does not need to identify a culprit in order to explain it. No one wakes up determined to turn another person into a commodity. Most of the time, we simply want to know whether our feelings are returned and what place we hold in someone’s life. We want some measure of security. But that search can go too far and begin to drive out whatever has not yet found a name. Not every feeling arrives already knowing what it is, and some bonds reveal their meaning only later. When every ambiguity becomes a flaw, a relationship may end before either person has had the chance to discover what it could become.
In 2026, there is another problem: we are surrounded by images that may never have existed, texts whose authors we do not know, paid opinions presented as spontaneous reactions, and messages carefully calibrated before reaching the person they were meant for. We can ask artificial intelligence to write an apology, soften a breakup, or find more beautiful words for a feeling we cannot express. This does not necessarily make the feeling false; the tool may even help someone articulate what they genuinely wanted to say. Even so, something changes when we know that any sentence may have been polished to produce a particular effect.
I do not think we have grown suspicious on a whim. We spend much of the day with messages whose origins we barely know and that often carry an agenda that is not immediately visible. We have learned to verify images, distrust anything that looks a little too spontaneous, and ask what is expected of us. Over time, that caution has worked its way into how we see, and it does not disappear when we put our phones away. It mingles with the way we listen to the people around us, so that a compliment may reach us without our being able simply to receive it, because we are already searching for what the other person wants from us.
As I thought about this, I remembered something said in my office, which I will share without any further detail. Someone described the discomfort they felt upon receiving a compliment. They began to wonder whether the words were true or whether, behind them, there was an attempt to get closer, some ulterior motive they could not yet see. The doubt took up so much space that it left almost no room for the compliment itself.
I knew that reaction reached back much further than that compliment and belonged to a personal history that I could not simply use to explain the era in which we live. If I did, I would stop listening to the person and turn them into evidence for a thesis. Even so, the remark stayed with me after the session and made me think about how often a kind word arrives already shadowed by suspicion, as though it concealed a demand that would surface only later.
When we spend so much time managing the way we are perceived, it seems logical to assume that others are doing the same. If I select words, images, and gestures to produce a certain impression, why would I believe that someone else speaks to me without any calculation at all? Suspicion becomes a form of intelligence. It can also become the only way we know how to listen.
Trust does not require us to turn a blind eye to everything. But if we can trust only after gathering all the evidence, I no longer know whether it is still trust or merely a conclusion. Something about the other person’s intentions will always elude us, and not necessarily because they are lying. Sometimes even they do not fully know what moves them. A compliment can be sincere and still carry a wish for closeness, just as we can love while hoping to be loved in return, or give something while wanting recognition. None of this makes the gesture false in itself. It makes little sense to demand from the other person a purity of motive that we ourselves can rarely sustain.
That discomfort in the face of a compliment led me to Vincent Estellon and the title of one of his books, The Terror of Loving and Being Loved. Fear is present there on both sides of love. Loving makes us dependent and leaves us vulnerable to being hurt by the other person, which helps explain why it can be frightening. The second half of the title unsettles me even more, because being loved can also catch us unprepared and, at certain moments, our first response is to retreat.
There is a discomfort in being loved that we rarely confess, because another person’s gaze reaches us and gives us a place we did not build for ourselves. We begin to matter to someone and face the possibility that we may not be able to respond in kind. If that person also comes to matter to us, there is already something to lose, and the autonomy we like to claim for ourselves begins to reveal its limits. Today, needing someone still sounds like a sign that something in us has not been properly resolved.
Estellon uses the term anti-love defenses for certain ways—often far from obvious—of keeping a bond at a distance. Withdrawal and indifference are merely the easiest to recognize; some of these defenses are even admired. A person takes pride in needing no one, finds fault with every move toward closeness, or repeatedly becomes involved with people who will never truly be available. At some point, the defense begins to speak in the first person: I am not ready yet. First I need to work through my trauma, learn to love myself, get my life in order. Before we know it, that “first” has stretched into years, and our love life is still waiting for a version of us that never arrives.
Screens have made it much easier to keep someone around without being fully available. A reaction, a video sent in the middle of the day, or a reply left until later is enough to keep the conversation from dying, even when we do not really want to engage any further. Friendships can go on for years this way, and romantic relationships can too, squeezed between routines that rarely align. I do not think that makes them any less real, although it is hard to ignore the comfort of deleting a poorly phrased sentence, waiting for the irritation to pass, and only then reappearing. When Perel speaks of an “absent presence,” I picture the familiar scene of two people on the same couch, each following their own stream of images and conversations, while the person sitting right beside them gradually recedes to the edge of their vision.
I have the sense that this carefully protected way of being together is leaving us out of practice at living with another person’s contradictions. Sometimes someone says something we dislike, and that one sentence begins to change the color of everything we knew about them, until we start to think we had misunderstood them from the beginning. We end up expecting people to have the consistency of a well-managed brand, as though a single contradiction were enough to discredit everything else.
Photo found via Google Images
Perel suggests that couples start doing things together again, restoring a physical dimension to the relationship. The idea appeals to me, although I can easily imagine two screen-free hours a week blocked off on the calendar, labeled “quality time,” and later reviewed in a conversation about what worked. Intimacy would have made it onto the schedule, but we would still be treating the bond as something expected to deliver results. What I have in mind is an afternoon freed from so much responsibility, one that does not have to save the couple or yield a beautiful memory—an afternoon when the conversation can wander, silence can linger, and no one rushes to chase away the boredom, even if there is no photograph to post on social media afterward.
We spend so much time reviewing what we do—asking whether it is right, whether it could be better, whether it makes us better—that evaluation itself no longer knows where to stop and reaches even what we receive from another person. While we decide whether a word deserves our trust, it does not stand still. It drifts away from the moment and from the person who said it, until all that remains is a sentence used as evidence of what we already suspected. We may even be right about the intention and, even so, never have received the compliment.
The more I think about the captivity Perel describes, the less it seems confined to screens. We can put them aside and continue obeying the same logic, because the demand has already learned to speak in our own voice and arrives offering thoroughly reasonable choices: use our time better, take care of ourselves, make our relationships work. Each is difficult to refuse. Together, they produce a life that cannot be left alone, even for a single afternoon. What kind of freedom keeps us so busy improving our lives that there is almost no time left to live them?
References
Ehrenberg, A. (1998). La fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et société. Éditions Odile Jacob.
Estellon, V. (2020). Terreur d’aimer et d’être aimé: Psychopathologie du lien et de la vie amoureuse. Érès.
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Polity.
Tilkian, C. (2026, 16 de agosto). Produtividade e rotina mediada por telas são os novos cativeiros das relações, diz Esther Perel. Folha de S.Paulo.
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