Note: All quotes in this articles are from To Those I’ve Hurt, Kanye’s apology letter published in January 2026 in the New York Times

For years, I’ve been trying to write an article about Kanye West.

I’ve written pages and pages, I’ve made road maps that I stuck on my living room walls, I’ve obsessed over what the right thing to say is, and how to say it perfectly. But I don’t think anyone can write a perfect article about a person this complicated, and a story this public, layered, ugly, and unfinished.

I’ve stayed quiet this long because there is too much to say, but also because what I want to say is not neat, and a lot of people no longer seem very interested in anything that cannot be flattened into a clean moral position that makes them feel good about themselves.

For those who don’t know yet: I’m a huge Kanye fan, and I do not mean that in the light, casual, enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy kind of way. To give you an idea: my fandom peaked when I ended up in the 0.001% of Kanye listeners in 2023, which I think tells you less about my music taste and more about my general psychological profile.

And for those who don’t know that either: Kanye just released a new album. And with it, the usual dance began again, praise from the fans who remain, condemnation from everybody else; the same tired script, the same empty moral performances, the same refusal of complexity by people who have confused moral righteousness with moral integrity.

I wish I could say I fall somewhere in the middle, but I actually fall far away from both camps (which means I get the chance to make everyone upset with this article). Kanye is a great artist, and I do not mean that in the defensive, fangirl kind of way people mean it when they are trying to excuse someone they are too emotionally attached to. I mean that he is genuinely one of the most influential artists of the past few decades, not just in hip hop, but in music. He has changed the sound of popular music, changed the aesthetics around it, changed what an album can be, what releasing music can look (and feel) like, what a public artistic persona can be. You can dislike his music, but I don’t think there is much to gain for anyone from pretending he is not an excellent artist.

And here lies the core of the tension: Kanye is also deeply mentally ill. He has said things that are hateful, dangerous, violent, and very painful. For that reason, I resent the fans who play the dishonest game of arguing that every horrifying thing he has said was taken out of context or unfairly portrayed, because some things are in fact exactly as bad as they sound.

But the most important part of the puzzle for me is also maybe the truest and most inconvenient thing of all: severe mental illness can look like that sometimes. (Especially when mixed with power, isolation, and a culture ready to exploit it. I’ll get back to that.)

That, I think, is the part a lot of people cannot tolerate, because we live in a culture that loves to talk about mental health right up until it stops being cute. We support mental illness when it is photogenic, when it comes with a podcast and quotable admissions about burnout, anxiety, or seasonal sadness. But the second it becomes frightening, grandiose, paranoid, delusional, antisocial, verbally violent, physically violent, family-destroying, or impossible to package into a carousel post, everyone suddenly becomes a bully. We say we care about people who are suffering, but what we really mean is that we care about suffering when it remains aesthetically acceptable and socially convenient.

The truth is that some forms of mental illness are really ugly, sometimes terrifying and very violent. Some forms make the people around you miserable, some others make you say hateful things, destroy your own life, alienate everyone who loves you, and become dangerous to yourself and others. Mental illness can make people do and say absolutely unforgivable things, irreparable things. And that doesn’t excuse the harm, but it does mean that anyone serious about reality has to be willing to look at both things at once, namely the devastation caused and the devastation underneath it.

And let me be very clear here: the harm caused is not abstract, symbolic, or confined to one unstable man saying vile things into a microphone. When someone with Kanye’s reach spirals publicly into antisemitism, misogyny, fascist imagery, and paranoid grandiosity, he helps circulate very toxic ideas. He gives scale and cultural permission to ideas that are already alive in the bloodstream of the internet and the political right. For Jewish people, Black people and women, it’s not just an interesting ethical think piece; it lands inside already-existing histories of violence, humiliation, and threat.

And I also want to be clear about the fact that I’m not collapsing every single controversial thing Kanye has said or done under the umbrella of mental health. Some of his behaviours are the result of him being a christian man with a big ego and a bigger bank account. But I would argue that the way he has gone about expressing these feelings is very much influenced and tainted by his unstable mental health.

(On the topic of both Kanye’s mental illness and his controversial personality, I recommend listening to The Psychology of Kanye West by Psychology in Seattle. They have no emotional attachment to him, and are much more well versed than I am when it comes to mental health and personality issues.)

Either way, the damage done is real, and I’m not interested in absolving anyone of anything; which is why I would like to offer a deeper analysis than either fan denial or ritualised condemnation.

Separating the art from the artist: what can it ever mean?

Some people who do really bad things also make good art. Where do we go from there?

I find the public conversation around Kanye exhausting and frustrating because the question people always ask is whether we should still listen to him, and I’m sorry but I think that’s an unserious question for unserious people. It is a consumer question masquerading as an ethical one: should we still listen to Michael Jackson, should we still watch Weinstein films, should we still stream Diddy, should we still read this one, boycott that one, delete this one from the playlist.

The fantasy underneath all of it is the fantasy of moral purification through consumption, that if we buy or do not buy the right things we can render ourselves clean while leaving every underlying structure beautifully intact. We have done the right thing, we’re good people on the right side of history, now let’s move on.

But that’s not how harm reduction works, that is not how repair works, that’s not how justice works, and it is definitely not how community works.

How do we stay in community once harm has happened? How do we repair without disappearing one another? How do we protect people while also refusing the idea that there’s no such thing as two neat and impermeable categories of “victims” and “oppressors”? Those are much, much harder questions than “should I stream this album,” which is why we shy away from them. Unfortunately, they’re also the ones actually worth asking if we want to build a safer society.

(As a side note, the podcast Psychology in Seattle also has great episodes on Michael Jackson, on what it means for someone who has been abused to go on to abuse others; and on how to have more compassionate and constructive conversations about it.)

So instead of asking whether we should still listen to Michael Jackson, maybe we should ask what kind of systems we have built for people with dangerous impulses, or rather what kind of systems we have failed to build. And what kind of systems we can come up with to both protect potential victims, but also treat potential abusers with the compassion and care that they need? Instead of asking whether we should still watch Weinstein movies, maybe we should ask why male sexual violence is so banal, so structurally protected, so depressingly ordinary that women learn to protect against it before they enter middle school. How do we start an actual conversation about the omnipresence of sexual violence? Instead of asking whether we should cancel Kanye, maybe ask what it means that a Black man publicly unravelling inside a culture built on humiliation, extraction, and spectacle would be susceptible to the seductions of fascism, grandiosity, and ideological self-annihilation.

I’m not excusing anything. I think explanation is not excuse, context is not absolution, and mental illness is not moral innocence. But context is relevant, and one of the things that most interests me about Kanye is not just Kanye himself but the way the discourse around him reveals us to ourselves, the way it exposes what we actually believe about mental illness, harm, punishment, accountability, celebrity, and how quickly we are willing to revoke care and compassion once someone has become difficult to love.

The spectacle of collapse

Looking from the outside, it looks like we have two options in the Kanye scenario: we can either be a fan who treats every hateful outburst like a misunderstood act of performance art, or a morally erect spectator who has turned condemnation into an act of moral purity, and can now enjoy the spectacle of collapse from the safest seat in the house. But both of these positions are forms of cowardice: one is worship, the other is bloodlust. Neither requires integrity or intellectual involvement, and both are ways of avoiding the unbearable difficulty of holding multiple truths in the same hand.

Avoiding, too, the fact that together we have created a world that breeds mental illness and that publicly shames, monetises, and discards mentally ill people once their suffering stops flattering our politics.

Celebrity culture makes this worse, because celebrity is a profoundly diseased social arrangement, a machine for turning human beings into symbols, fantasies, projections, and sacrificial offerings. We do not let famous people remain people: we turn them into gods or monsters, objects of aspiration, objects of disgust, anything really except fellow humans living inside a body and a nervous system. We have built an entire economy around watching people become unreal, and then we act outraged when they begin to disintegrate.

A public breakdown makes for such good content, and we fucking love sitting back and watching the show (we all remember enjoying Britney Spears’ very famous head-shaving public meltdown, or Amy Winehouse’s many drug and alcohol induced unravelings). Everyone gets to feed from the carcass: the platforms profit, the media profits, politicians profit, the audience profits (psychically if not financially). The thrill of moral superiority is one hell of a drug.

There is a whole class of people for whom Kanye’s collapse functions as a kind of secular morality play, a chance to reassure themselves that they are sane, decent, politically pure, and safely unlike him.

Moral perfection might not exist, but for a lot of us, moral high ground is the next best thing.

We don’t want accountability, we want a good old public stoning. We can lie about it all we want, but we love the spectacle of people being publicly unwell, publicly manipulated, publicly humiliated. And the person at the centre of it all gets further and further removed from any conditions in which healing might even be imaginable.

The media-political machine around all this deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Kanye has, over the years, repeatedly talked about being manipulated when he was at the height of manic episodes, by media figures, by political figures, by people who could clearly see he was unstable and still found him useful.

One of the things that seems clearest to me in Kanye’s case is that these public cycles have a pattern. We all witness the ramping up, the climax, and then the collapse, hospitalisation, and finally the aftermath: some form of apology, remorse, and amends making. Again and again we see the same arc: escalation, wreckage, fallout, reckoning. I’m not saying it erases the harm in any way, but I think it’s worth looking at.

Because if someone repeatedly returns from the other side of these episodes horrified by what they said and did, then at the very least we are looking at a pattern that should force more seriousness from us than the usual public performance of disgust. There is recurrent proof that he does not stably stand by the hateful things he says while spiralling. When he is in those manic states, it’s painfully visible, the cadence, the speed, the tone, the grandiosity, the certainty, the dissociation from reality.

Over the years, he has talked extensively about his mental illness and about struggling to find treatment that actually works for him (for example in a 2019 episode of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman; you can find it on Netflix). He has spoken publicly about how hard it was to find and accept help, how mania feels, how difficult it is to find the right medication, how quickly illness can become identity, and how humiliating it is to be watched while coming apart.

You can decide it is all a lie, all theatre, all self-serving myth making. But if you do, then I want to ask a very basic question: what exactly does he gain from telling and living that story? What is the payoff in purposefully hurting so many people, alienating yourself, and then making amends, over and over again?

I would add that in my opinion, being constantly publicly scrutinised and being this rich are not exactly conditions conducive to sanity, and probably add gasoline to the mental health fire. One of the worst things that can happen to the human psyche is isolation, and extreme wealth is a particularly total form of it, because at a certain point you no longer belong to ordinary human life, and with that goes your sense of mutuality, proportion, and reality. I hate billionaires as much as the next person, but it doesn’t stop me from acknowledging that it is a psychologically agonising form of existence for the person themselves too. (On that topic, I recommend listening to the Bobo’s Void episode called The Absolute Horrors of Being Rich)

And maybe the cruelest part is the return. The part where the episode ends, the hospitalisation happens, the dust settles, and the person has to wake up inside the ruins. The part where you are once again lucid enough to see what you have done, who you have frightened, what you have destroyed, and the fact that none of your illness, however real, has magically removed the consequences. That, too, is part of the tragedy.

And I think part of what makes this whole thing so painful to watch is that beneath all the noise, beneath the rage and the memes and the righteous posturing and the fan delusion, what I mostly feel is grief. Grief for a person who seems profoundly isolated and increasingly unreachable, grief for the people he has harmed, grief for the fact that we seem incapable of responding to any of this without immediately turning into executioners.

Grief, too, because I find it hard to imagine a scenario in which someone like Kanye ever gets his village back, ever gets surrounded by grounded people who care more about community, nourishment, truth, mutual aid, and actual love than they do about proximity to fame, money, chaos, and power. Fame seems perfectly designed to make healing impossible.

Is revenge justice?

When people ask me what I think about Kanye, what they usually want is for me to perform the correct ritual denunciation, to say he is over, finished, cancelled, dead to me. But I don’t believe cancellation is a serious ethical framework. I think it’s mostly a theatre of purification for people who want the pleasure of judgment without the burden of transformation.

We have a tendency to make systemic issues unique, because it’s easy. Kanye is a very convenient person in our lives, because as long as he exists, we don’t have to change anything. Sure, we might have done or said bad things, but at least we didn’t wear a swastika necklace or say slavery was a choice while half the planet was watching.

He becomes a kind of moral outsourcing mechanism, a grotesque public figure onto whom we can project all our certainty, all our revulsion, all our urges to dodge responsibility; and in the process we avoid asking harder questions about the systems that shaped him, the systems that continue to structure and enable so much violence against marginalised and oppressed people.

Cancel culture is moral prison for celebrities, and I’m a prison abolitionist. That means that on a very deep level I do not believe isolation, alienation, punishment and revenge can ever lead to justice. I do not think exile heals people, I do not think disappearance heals communities. I do not think silencing, shaming, banishing, and publicly enjoying someone’s destruction is evidence of moral superiority. In fact, I think the exact opposite. I think it is what people do when they have no real theory of harm, no real theory of healing, no real theory of accountability, and no tolerance for discomfort. (On that topic, I recommend reading Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis, and We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice by Adrienne Maree Brown)

This does not mean I think everything should be tolerated, or that all forms of behaviour deserve platforms, audiences, or cultural power. In fact one of the things that seems most clear to me in Kanye’s case is that when he is visibly in the middle of an episode, giving him a microphone is profoundly irresponsible. People who platform a mentally unwell man while he is spiralling into hate speech because they know it will generate clicks, outrage, money, and engagement are guilty as fuck.

Exploitation is the opposite of accountability, and so is condemnation. Pointing fingers and saying someone is monstrous does not tell me what world you are trying to build. Refusing to stream an album does not tell me whether you have any coherent politics of repair.

We should explore what ethical seriousness would actually require from us in such situations. Not permissiveness, not denial, not pretending harm did not occur. It would require us working on a real theory of repair. It would require asking what accountability looks like when the person who caused harm is also: talented, famous, loved, and also not reducible to the worst thing they have done. It would require structures that can hold contradiction without immediately converting it into spectacle or exile.

This question is not just about celebrities, it’s about all of us. How do we live with the fact that the people in our lives will fail, wound, frighten, disappoint, betray, and still remain part of our moral universe? How do we respond when someone causes harm and is also in pain? How do we stay in community without becoming enablers, and how do we hold boundaries without turning into executioners? How do we repair harm when punishment is the only language we have been taught?

What I really wish for is a deeper conversation about what justice actually is once we stop confusing it with vengeance. bell hooks said, “For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”.

If we’re intellectually honest enough, and if we’re emotionally brave enough, the Kanye question is a human question.

Mental health is a group project

I grew up around mental illness that was not cute, not poetic, not easily transformed into an Instagram post about resilience. My father was bipolar and unmedicated, and there were substance abuse issues in the mix too, which meant that from very early on I had to learn to hold two things at once, namely the pain of being affected by someone’s mental and emotional instability, and the fact that I loved him anyway. (This is probably where you start wondering if my relationship to Kanye is simply a “daddy issues” type of thing - I guess we’ll never know).

There was no moral purity available to me in that situation, there was no clean side to stand on. All I had was proximity, confusion, anger, grief, love, fear, and the constant obligation to keep reality large enough to contain all of it.

His brother, my uncle, was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a child, and has said and done many terrible things. My family’s response, broadly speaking, was to want him to disappear. As far as I know, no proper conversations were had with him, about him, or among the people who loved him. His own mother pretended he stopped existing, and to this day, I’m met with silence and embarrassment when I try to talk about him. There was no village, no collective reckoning, no attempt to metabolise what was happening in a way that preserved his dignity. We avoided him, we felt shame, and he’s been institutionalised for many years now. We disappeared him. It devastated me as a child and it devastates me now, not only because of what happened to him, but because of what it revealed about the rest of us. We failed him, and by failing him we also failed ourselves.

One of the most important things I have ever heard on this topic came from Bobo’s Void, who said “there is no such thing as individual mental health.” I think about it all the time. We go to our individual therapy sessions to fix what we see as individual problems, but I believe we would benefit greatly from understanding that most of our issues are systemic more than personal.

We live in a world that mass-produces alienation, monetises narcissism and instability, isolates the suffering, glorifies domination, money and power, and then acts scandalised when someone breaks in public in a way that mirrors all of those logics back to us.

And guess what happens when you alienate someone: they go find belonging somewhere else, because belonging is a fundamental human need, and if healthy forms of community are absent, hateful ones are more than ready to step in. Research on radicalisation has found that extremist groups often draw people in by offering social bonds, love, acceptance, purpose, and a self reinforcing sense of community, while stigmatisation, punitive responses, and indignant public discourse can push at risk people further down the extremist path rather than interrupt it. (You can read this RAND report about it if you’re interested). Kanye is far from the only person in recent years to become an easy target for anti women or neo nazi rhetoric.

(Just to use another example to illustrate this point: I find the idea of mocking and publicly humiliating incels to be both unnecessarily sadistic and counterproductive, if we want to build a society that is safer for everyone.)

But still, despite my general exasperation with the way we talk to and about people who are both suffering and causing suffering, I don’t want to give up on the idea that we have the intellectual, emotional and practical resources to build something better than this; maybe not for Kanye, maybe not in time for Kanye, but for ourselves, for each other, for the people in our actual lives.

We need to talk about what accountability and repair look like outside the framework of cancel culture and prison. We need to talk about how we remain in community once harm happens. We need to see healthy community as a shared responsibility.

Maybe we should also talk about how moral perfection doesn’t exist for anyone, how we have all been, throughout our lives both abusers and victims (even if in small ways), because we are human. How we were lucky that the spotlight wasn’t on us when that happened.

We have to be able and willing to tell the truth, to hear the truth, and to stay with the truth.

Kanye is not interesting because he forces us to choose between art and artist. He is interesting because he exposes how little moral, political, and communal language we have for responding to a person who is at once gifted, harmful, unwell, powerful, exploited, and as much as we hate to face it, part of our human community.

We need to become people who can survive complexity, because if we cannot do that, then the only tools we are left with is punishment and self-congratulation; which is to say the exact same tools that keep producing and enabling the exact same harm.

And if that is the best we can do, then I really don’t think we get to wish for a healthy society.

I don’t love animals I don’t know, just like I don’t love humans I don’t know. The idea that veganism is about loving animals is not only inaccurate, it’s politically weak, philosophically incoherent, and profoundly speciesist.

What I want, for humans, for cows, for pigs, for chickens, for fish, for insects, for the trillions of individuals inside and outside of my species, is lives free from domination, and exploitation.

That’s not a feeling, it’s a political stance.

The invention of “animals”

Something we don’t often talk about is what makes an “animal”; and just as importantly, why we’re so comfortable with the category.

Most of the time, what we mean by “animal” is simply “not human”. Animals only exist as a concept in opposition to us. But this is not a neutral distinction; and it’s not a biological category, it’s a political one.

Biologically, humans are animals, socially and philosophically we go to great lengths to pretend we are not. We carve ourselves out of the category, then collapse every other being into a single abstract mass called animals; trillions of radically different individuals, flattened into one word.

Even when we say “human animals” and “non-human animals” (which I do), the line remains arbitrary and largely unexplained. Is it because it’s our species versus all the others? Is it because we think we’re the only ones with consciousness, language, culture, or a sense of irony? Is it because we’re the only species that can create viral TikTok content?

Whatever the justification, the result is the same: an arbitrary hierarchy with humans at the top.

Love as redemption

Once that hierarchy is in place, we work hard at redeeming it with a feeling: love.

But redemption doesn’t work like that. We don’t say feminism is about loving women, we don’t say abolition is about loving incarcerated people, we don’t say opposing capitalism entails loving every exploited worker.

We understand these movements as struggles against systems of harm, against domination, dispossession, and structural violence. We take the systems, the movements, and the victims, seriously.

So it is worth questioning why anti-speciesism is framed as a sentimental project, and why other animals are reduced to a moral test of our emotional capacity instead of being recognised as individuals trapped in systems designed to exploit them.

The problem is not that humans fail to love enough, it’s that love was never the ethical requirement to begin with. Opposing exploitation does not require emotional identification, intimacy, or affection. It requires recognising moral worth, and refusing to treat others as resources. I don’t need to relate to someone, like them, or feel close to them to know that their life is not mine to use.

But what do we mean when we say “love”?

In my opinion, part of the problem is that, just like we never define “animals”, we never define “love”. And that is very convenient, because an undefined word can mean whatever we need it to mean in the moment.

bell hooks reminds us that love is not a feeling, love is an ethic, a practice, a commitment to care, responsibility, and accountability. Love cannot coexist with domination, which makes most “I love animals” claims a little awkward.

Here, one could think of Cornel West’s famous “justice is what love looks like in public”. It’s a powerful statement that I use in my human rights activism; but I would argue that in a deeply speciesist world, the love we claim to have for animals is the opposite of a justice-shaped love. It’s one-sided, self-serving, and built on control, domination and extraction.

We say we love animals while deciding where they get to live (true for most animals), when they reproduce, how their bodies are used, and when they die (true for most domesticated animals).

Often, under the empty language of “loving animals”, we perpetuate some of the most intimate forms of human domination: for example domestication, where control is presented as care, and ownership is reframed as affection. (To clarify my take here: I think adopting individuals who need a home is wonderful, but if we truly oppose speciesism, we should actively work towards putting an end to domestication.)

Who exactly do we love?

When people say “I love animals”, it’s worth asking: which ones, exactly?

Usually this means a small, carefully selected group: dogs, cats, maybe horses, sometimes a few wild animals we find impressive or photogenic, wolves, elephants, whales (the ones that make good documentaries and tattoos.)

It almost never means fish, or rats, or insects. The trillions of beings whose lives are short, invisible, and mechanically destroyed are not included in this love.

So when we say “I love animals”, what we often mean is “I love some animals, on my terms, as long as they don’t inconvenience me, and provide me with something (affection, assistance, a fuzzy feeling)”.

The politics of empty feelings

“I love animals”works socially precisely because it’s empty.

It asks nothing, risks nothing, and changes nothing. You can say it while eating their bodies, you can say it while funding their oppression, you can say it while defending systems that depend on their suffering.

When love is undefined and weaponised, it becomes a shield against responsibility; and it recentres us, our feelings, our sense of being good people. The story becomes about how we feel, so we don’t have to think about how we impact others.

Neither friends nor food

When we reduce veganism to “loving animals”, we discredit it. We turn a structural critique into a matter of personal sensitivity, a justice movement into an emotional performance.

I don’t want a world where humans go around feeling good about ourselves by claiming to love a vague, convenient concept of “animals”, instead of investing time and energy into dismantling languages and systems of oppression.

I want a world where vegans do better than repeating empty slogans like “friends not food”. I want a world where we don’t need to love someone, or see them as a friend, to want them to live a life free from exploitation and violence.

I want a world where we fight for liberation for all, for the sole reason that their lives are not ours to use.

Instagram bios are tombstones for the living: there isn’t much room, so you carve it down to the bare essentials. For me, antinatalist fit the bill. It’s at the core of who I am (along with “political vegan,” “mountain runner,” and “prison abolitionist,” if I remember correctly.)

These days, I leave antinatalist out of my bio not because I changed my mind, but because that word deserves more context and conversation that 150 characters could possibly allow.

No one asks for this

I just spent a week with my parents; the best week we’ve probably had in 25 years (I’m 35). But the feelings that have underlined my relationship with them, and with parenthood in general, never budge. When I was a kid, I didn’t have the vocabulary, but I had the thought: this is a lot to carry. Also: I didn’t ask for any of this. (Having talked to many therapists between now and then, I realise that it’s not a common thing for a kid to think.)

As I grew older, I learned to articulate it: we are all brought into existence without our consent. Then, at some point, the moral and practical responsibility for that life shifts onto us. Ready or not, willing or not. To me, that feels like a twisted kind of game. To be held accountable for something you never asked - or agreed! - to participate in.

Because I find it so perplexing that some people seem to view life as a gift, I did what any serious philosophers would and made an Instagram poll:

Existence as a gift

I’ve lived with depression, anxiety, and eating disorders for most of my life; an experience that makes me painfully unexceptional in modern society. The root of my depression, to overly simplify it to the max, is being a highly sensitive person forced to exist in a world that more often than not is unbearably violent (towards me a little bit; towards most beings, human and nonhuman, a lot more).

To me, it feels like a logical conclusion to feel resentment towards the people who brought me into existence. And the times I was deep in the kind of depression where suicide starts to look like the only possible relief, I faced another dilemma: I couldn’t put my parents through that kind of pain. (I’m an only child. My parents, especially my dad, struggle with their own mental health issues; not that it would be easy for any parent in any context to lose a child to suicide, but I found my situation even more pressuring because of that).

So for me, it’s felt like a full-circle emotional blackmail: I was brought into existence against my will by two people’s self-serving choice, and now I’m expected to stay alive for their sake.

(This is something I’ve actually talked about with my parents. It was hard, obviously, but I consider it their responsibility to sit with the consequences of their actions. I told them how I felt: that I never consented to being here, that their decision was selfish. To their credit, they listened. And I think it’s freeing for all of us that this is now out in the open; and that they could admit it was purely selfish from them, and to say they’re sorry.)

But as much as I think that the sentence “life is a gift” is Stockholm syndrome, if you’re reading this and genuinely believe that life is a gift, I would love for you to leave a comment and explain what it means for you. (One of my friends who is religious said she sees life as a gift from God, and not her parents; which I think is a very interesting thought)

What do we mean when we say we “love” our parents?

I love my parents; I genuinely believe I like them as people. I see their flaws and their trauma, and I don’t think they should’ve had a kid; but I love them for who they are regardless. And I love other parents too, I have friends who are parents (I’m aware this sounds like the antinatalist equivalent to “I have a Black friend”).

But how can I be sure I don’t think I love them because it’s my biological makeup? Unless we’re bell hooks, we don’t spend much time pondering about love or trying to define it; we don’t take it too seriously. So can we know we love someone, let alone the people we’re biologically wired to feel attached to?

If we were to describe the relationship we have with our parents, I would bet that for a lot of us, it would sound like a toxic relationship. They love a version of you they wish existed but doesn’t? You love a version of them you wish existed but doesn’t? Seeing them feels like a chore? You get triggered by what they do, what they say, how they say it? You have to refrain from saying what you really want to say because you fear the consequences?

The sick game of consciousness

I am not depressed anymore. I’m very content with my life for the most part. But I still think existence feels like a sick game. We’re the only species cursed with a brain big enough to reflect on our own death, and on the death of everyone we love. If that isn’t a twisted form of psychological torture, I don’t know what is.

In addition to that, being alive comes with an endless list of obligations (obligations that in a lot of ways get worse as we age). Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I resent being forced to do: keeping my body healthy, keeping my mind stable, working most of my waking hours to afford a life I didn’t ask for, building and maintaining relationships so I don’t collapse into loneliness, finding a place to live, managing said place to live, paying bills to companies I hate, making decisions that could ruin or save the rest of my life, and constantly keeping at bay the knowledge that everyone I love will die.

If we all agree that suffering is inevitable, and even the most optimistic among us admit that (worth noting that this isn’t a new thought: buddhists have believed life is suffering for millennia), then why keep subjecting new people to it? Isn’t the ultimate form of freedom, compassion - and maybe, controversially, of intelligence - deciding to opt out?

Gabor Maté said it better

Even if you’re the most loving, intentional, self-aware parent in the world (which, just to be clear, I think is impossible) you still can’t protect your child from harm. You can’t control what happens at school, how their peers treat them, or what random cruelty the world decides to throw their way. You can’t stop heartbreak, humiliation, illness, or loss. You can’t shield them from the weight of existence itself.

Gabor Maté talks about how childhood trauma isn’t limited to the obvious horrors of abuse, neglect, and violence. It’s also the everyday moments of disconnection and overwhelm that a child’s nervous system can’t make sense of. And we all carry some version of that. Even children raised in love spend their adult lives trying to heal from the pain of simply being alive, from unmet needs, from tiny ruptures that add up, from the impossible task of being human.

How can you possibly protect someone from the suffering inherent to existence under capitalism? Under a patriarchal, white supremacist, classist system? How do you protect someone from unavoidable emotional and sexual abuse? How can you see the world we live in a decide it’s an acceptable place to bring a vulnerable being into?

Everyone you know suffers from some form of mental illness but you think that, magically, your kids will be fine? That’s not optimism babes, that’s delusion.

I like using my own example because I’m not someone who had a particularly difficult or traumatic life and still, the suffering far outweighs the pleasure and the joy. I had a pretty unremarkable life: I had an okay childhood with loving parents who did their best. Like most kids, I was bullied, mocked and ridiculed for not fitting in, in different ways at different ages. I was a girl and am now a woman so naturally I was sexually abused in countless ways. Because of the toxic system we live under, I developed self-destructive coping mechanisms from an early age. I navigated a very complicated and violent world the best way I could. As I grew older and matured, I realised I had to make the conscious choice of staying alive, and that I alone had to carry the responsibility of my own existence. As a matter of fact, I’ve become so invested in trying to stay alive, that I have recently created this list as a compass for myself and others.

So when I think about antinatalism, I don’t see it as pessimism. I see it as the acknowledgment that even under the best circumstances, life guarantees some degree of trauma. To bring someone into the world is to sentence them to a lifetime of patching themselves back together, a process most of us will die not having completed.

“I have so much love to give”

Here’s one of the usual counterarguments: reproduction is natural, we’re biologically wired for it. But guess what? So are rape, murder, and infanticide. Humans have historically defined morality against natural urges. So as a species who has made it our number one source of pride to differentiate ourselves from other animals, I find it bizarre how attached we are to such a basic instinct, going as far as calling it “meaning”, “calling” or “purpose”.

Have you ever asked someone why they had kids or why they want kids? They can never give you one reason that isn’t deeply self-centred. “I want to see what they’d look like” or “I really want to be a parent”. My personal favourite is “I have so much love to give”, where we go as far as weaponising “love” to justify selfishness. If we really took consent seriously, we’d have to admit that we’re willing to ignore it as long as it serves our own vanity.

If you’re a parent reading this, first, thank you. I know it must be hard. Second, I think you should, truly, deeply understand that you carry an immense responsibility towards your children, and spend the rest of your life acting accordingly. (But if you’re lucky, your kids aren’t ungrateful little brats like me!)

True environmentalism means stop breeding

I’ll be transparent here, the environment is not one of the reasons I refuse to procreate; but I would like to briefly talk about most people’s presumed concern for the environment.

I see so many people being up in arms about the destruction of the planet, and it leaves me wondering what they don’t understand. Do they not understand the planet is going to shit 100% because of humans? Isn’t the logical conclusion to that problem to stop making new humans?

I am very cynical about the environmental movement for this very reason: you don’t actually care about the planet, you care about the future of your species on the planet. And these are two different concerns (they’re actually opposite concerns!).

The case against being born

Someone commented on my recent instagram post (where I teased this article like the good millennial I am), and talked about David Benatar’s work. I haven’t read his book (I didn’t even know he existed), but I found a couple articles online. He articulates what I’d always felt: that there’s an asymmetry between pleasure and pain. The absence of pain is good even if no one experiences it; the absence of pleasure isn’t bad unless someone exists to miss it. In other words: if someone is never born, they’re spared all suffering without being deprived of anything.

I studied a little bit of philosophy, so I know that philosophers have long talked about consciousness as a tragic flaw, or a torturous device. And when you live with depression even a little bit, it’s easy to understand what they mean. Even when life feels “good,” it’s built on constant maintenance. Pleasure is fleeting. Pain, in one form or another, never really leaves.

So when people hit me with the usual “But what about love, joy, sex, purpose?” I don’t deny those exist. They’re real, I feel them; sometimes I feel the sun on my face in the mountains, or I nestle my head in my lover’s neck, and think “it’s good to be alive”. But for me, these feelings don’t cancel out the inherent and intangible injustice of being thrust into existence without choice. Love and pleasure can make life bearable; they don’t make life justified.

One last midnight

Antinatalism isn’t about hating life or wishing for death. It’s about recognising that creating life is an ethical decision with enormous consequences. I don’t think existing people should die (unless they want to). I think we should stop forcing new people to carry the burden of existence.

I’ve decided to live (mostly cause I don’t feel like I have a choice), so I justify my existence by trying to do good, by fighting for justice. That’s one of my coping mechanisms: finding existence so unfair and difficult makes me want to do my part to bring about as much justice and soothing as I possibly can to others.

I know most people strongly disagree with me; I’m fine with that. I would just like for more of us to consider antinatalism maybe being the ultimate form of radical compassion, and selfless love.

***

I have one last midnight tattooed on my right collarbone. It comes from the series True Detective, in which Rust says: “I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight.”

After a talk last night, a woman came up to me to tell me she had to hold back tears. She has three kids, all breastfed, and she said she couldn’t imagine a deeper pain than them being taken away from her so someone else could have her milk.

The truth is, we share far more with other species than we are aware of, or willing to admit. We all build families and form social bonds. We all want safety, love, and connection. And we all deserve a life free from oppression and exploitation.

It’s striking how, once you strip a being of their individuality, it becomes disturbingly easy to turn a blind eye to their suffering, both in a nonhuman and human context. (It’s impossible not to think of Palestinians as I write this, though this applies tragically to many groups throughout history.)

This paves the way for oppression, exploitation, and genocide to feel justifiable. The word “dehumanisation” says it all: once someone’s humanity is no longer acknowledged, anything becomes permissible. This is why all forms of oppression are interconnected: they overlap and reinforce one another, ensuring that systemic injustice goes unchallenged.

In that sense, anti-speciesism is essential; not just for non-human animals, but for humanity as well. When we see every being as deserving of freedom, respect, and dignity, we’re fighting for justice in its truest, most universal form.

“We should be looking at veganism as a liberation struggle for other animals and, as such, it is the same as any other liberation struggle. If we leave out other animals and we don’t see that as connected, we’re essentially taking the tools and the playbook of our oppressors and we’re using them to subjugate others; which principally just exposes that we’re not really seeking equality and we’re not really trying to dismantle the status quo or unjust hierarchies, we just want a better placement within them.” – Yvette, @collectiveabolition

As long as we justify the domination and objectification of other sentient beings, we reinforce the very logic that permits injustice everywhere. Justice isn’t possible while hierarchy and domination remain the foundation of our ethics.

It begins when we recognise that all lives, regardless of species, matter not because of their use to us, but because they are their own.

My last article was a list of reasons I think so many of us are miserable. It only feels fair that this one focuses on things that might help us keep going. I like lists, they’re neat, reliable, reassuring, so I compiled 30 things I (and others) have identified as making life a bit more tolerable. I hope it can help you, even a little bit.

A few notes before I start: this list comes from a place of privilege (I’m an able-bodied, cisgender white woman living in Switzerland). While it’s not intended only for people with similar privilege, I am aware that poverty and marginalisation make some of these ideas difficult to access. I truly hope not to come across as tone-deaf.

And importantly: “trying hard” won’t offset a system that keeps us isolated, anxious, and precarious. I don’t want anyone to walk away thinking, “if only I tried harder, I’d feel better.” Feeling good in the societies we live in is incredibly hard, and that’s not a personal failure.

The inspiration for this article came from an episode of Psychology in Seattle titled “20 Tips for a Good Life.” Some items on this list come directly from there, and from other people who have influenced me. I’ll always give credit where it’s due.

I’ll start with sharing the list as bullet points, then break down each point in more detail.

30 things to try before you try suicide:

1. Accept that life isn’t about being happy

2. Cultivate good relationships

3. Find your community role

4. Question cultural and societal norms

5. Define your own moral guidelines

6. Be honest and live an authentic life

7. Recognise and appreciate what you have

8. Assume the best in others

9. Get acquainted with the holy trinity: Angela Davis, bell hooks and Gabor Maté

10. Be passionate about your passions and not your distractions

11. Seek out experiences and never stop learning

12. Don’t consume mainstream media

13. Get good sleep

14. Cultivate your self awareness

15. But think about yourself less

16. Understand that mental health isn’t individual

17. Pick your addictions wisely

18. Have hobbies

19. Don’t take shortcuts

20. Work through your traumas and anxieties

21. Own as few things as possible

22. Be disciplined

23. Take responsibility for your health

24. Find a God bigger than money

25. Have mentors

26. Do acts of altruism

27. Get better at forgiveness

28. Spend time in nature

29. Don’t be a hater

30. Join the revolution

1. Accept that life isn’t about being happy

The belief that we should be happy all the time is relatively modern, inflated by capitalism, and amplified by “self-help” (ugh) culture. (The U.S. Declaration of Independence even enshrined the “pursuit of happiness” as a fundamental right, if you can believe it)

In order to sustain themselves, capitalism and consumerism require us to believe that (1) happiness is an achievable goal, and (2) that it can be bought. (Think of slogans like “You deserve to be happy” used to sell you shit you don’t need.)

This is the approach I follow, and that works for me (unsarcastically): life is suffering, but we can create little pockets of joy and meaning in the midst of all the suffering, through our passions, our relationships, our purpose, or community.

Because ironically, if our ultimate goal is to be “happy” (a state philosophers have never even been able to define or agree on, by the way), we’re doomed to live in constant frustration. It’s much more sustainable to accept that life is made up of a whole spectrum of emotions, like joy, sadness, anger, love, grief, boredom, awe, envy, contentment, all of which rise and fall, none of which can or should last forever.

2. Cultivate good relationships

One of my mentors when it comes to relationships, Esther Perel, once said: “The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships.” As someone with medium-to-severe social anxiety, it’s been painful to accept at times. But it’s so true I can’t deny it. A few years ago, I decided to really invest in my relationships.

I even made rules for myself (can you tell I love rules?): being proactive about reaching out and staying in touch; making plans; being rested and present enough to listen intently; learning my friends’ needs; keeping secrets; communicating my own needs; having hard conversations when needed; and not cancelling on people (that was a big one for me).

And it works. Fast forward a few years: I have more friends, better relationships with them, and my life is much richer for it. It can feel like a lot of effort at first, but it gets easier, and it’s always worth it.

3. Find your community role

We used to be organised in societies where everyone had a distinct role based on their skills (or inherited from their family). You were a bricklayer, a healer, a blacksmith, a farmer, a storyteller, or a midwife. Obviously, capitalism has destroyed that, and now we’re all left to work meaningless, soul-crushing jobs to make a very rich person richer.

But we can still try to reconnect with what our skills truly are, buried under the thousand layers of capitalist hell, and think about how we can best contribute to society: maybe you’re a really good listener and people come to you for advice; maybe you’re a planner and can organise a weekly book club; maybe you’re great with your hands and can fix things for your community; maybe you love cooking and can host people around your table; maybe you have a gift for teaching and can help others learn; maybe you’re a connector who introduces friends and brings people together; maybe you’re a creative who writes, paints, or makes music that inspires; maybe you’re a rebel who sparks change and builds networks of resistance; or maybe you’re a caregiver who looks after children, elders, or friends in need.

4. Question cultural and societal norms

Most of the things we take for granted as “normal” are just made up rules designed to keep certain systems in place. But we’ve been fed them since we were too young to form our own thoughts, so they stick.

The truth is, a lot of what we accept as “just the way things are” is actually serving someone else’s interests (spoiler: not ours). A few examples of societal norms that are good to question: working 40+ hours a week for someone else’s profit, aspiring to impossible beauty standards (my personal favourite: women shouldn’t age), the idea that money is inevitable, needing therapy to “fix ourselves”, alcohol being the default way to socialise, police and prisons ensuring safety, the “justice” system serving justice, the idea that binary gender is “natural”, romantic love requiring monogamy, animals being inferior to humans, school being the only way to get “educated”, technology meaning progress, and voting every few years being the pinnacle of civic engagement.

Questioning them doesn’t mean rejecting everything about the culture you grew up in. Some traditions genuinely nourish us and act as social glue. But asking who benefits from this? is always a good place to start, in my experience.

5. Define your own moral guidelines

We cannot keep outsourcing morality to institutions that are inherently violent and unjust (I’m thinking governments, but it can also be schools, corporations, the media, or religions). Too often, people’s moral compass is tied to what is legal or illegal in the country they live in. But once we recognise that these institutions are designed to serve capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and mass control, we recognise that legality or conformity cannot be the measure of what is ethical.

Having a strong moral compass is a crucial part of mental health. That is why I invite everyone to reflect on their own principles, to define guidelines for themselves, and to live by them as best they can.

In case that’s not clear, I’ll share a few of my own moral guidelines. I believe no one, regardless of species, race, gender, or sexual orientation, should ever be treated as property or as a resource; I do not believe justice is achieved through revenge; I do not believe police keeps us safe (I believe we keep each other safe, if we want to); I believe in radical compassion and kindness, especially when it is hard; I believe in building bridges and engaging in dialogue with those we disagree with most; I believe in building communities and mutual aid networks; I do not believe it is ever right to take a life unless in self defence (and self defence can be collective, for example in resisting colonisation); I do not trust governments to ever serve the needs of the people, which means I take it upon myself to be the kind of community member I think my community needs; I do not believe in the concept of laziness; I do not believe we are meant to “work hard” (I believe we are meant to contribute a few hours a week to our communities, and beyond that, to simply exist), which is a long way to say I don’t believe anyone’s worth is tied to their productivity.

Of course this moral framework can (and should) evolve overtime.

6. Be honest and live an authentic life

This one is as simple as its title suggests: be as honest as possible with yourself and with others. For much of my life, I relied on white lies to escape uncomfortable situations, and sometimes on bigger lies to make myself look better or to seem more interesting. Over time I’ve come to see that honesty is essential for a healthy life, both in our relationship with ourselves and in our relationships with others. It is also a key part of living authentically, following our own moral compass, and treating people with the respect they deserve. Living inauthentically creates psychological suffering, while honesty opens the path to connection and integrity. It’s not always easy but it’s worth practicing daily!

7. Recognise and appreciate what you have

I am not a gratitude girly. I cringe at the mention of “gratitude journals”, and most of the time I feel like we are all trapped in a capitalist hellscape with no way out. But I also see that because of capitalism, most of us are trained to focus on what we lack, what we haven’t achieved yet, or what others have that we don’t. That mindset breeds frustration, disconnection, and self-loathing. Shifting our attention toward what is already present in our lives (our relationships, our passions, the beauty of nature) is a powerful tool for better mental health.

8. Assume the best in others

This is a big one for me. For a long time, I believed most people were abusive, oppressive, violent bullies. And I still see how that perspective is easy to adopt: we witness so many atrocities, whether in our personal lives or through the media (more on the media in another paragraph). But a few years ago I had a turning point. I can’t remember if it was a conversation with a friend or something I heard on a podcast, but the phrase stuck with me: “Everyone does the best they can. If they could do better, they would.” Whether or not it’s literally true doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that adopting this point of view makes me more compassionate, more patient, more understanding. And from a selfish perspective, it makes my life easier: I’m less on edge, less angry, more open.

With more life experience, I’ve also learned that everyone is going through something, and that, as corny as it sounds, “hurt people hurt people.” Apart from a very small percentage of psychopaths, I don’t believe anyone genuinely enjoys inflicting harm, or wakes up wanting to do bad things for the sake of it. Most of us are just trying to survive a messy cocktail of childhood trauma and the weight of an oppressive system (don’t make me say capitalism again).

Assuming that everyone is doing their best (even when their best is shitty, just like ours is sometimes) helps us show up as better community members. And it makes it easier to be kind to strangers, and I believe being kind to strangers is a first step towards overthrowing the system.

9. Get acquainted with the holy trinity: Angela Davis, bell hooks and Gabor Maté

Angela Davis, who is tattooed on my arm, has taught me everything I know about social justice and intersectionality, abolitionism and the revolution. She’s my hero.

bell hooks has written the most transformative books I’ve ever read on love. She helped me reckon with the fact that I love (some) men while hating (most) men. She writes about love in a way that makes you feel like you’re uncovering parts of love you didn’t know existed.

Gabor Maté has made me a much more empathetic person, towards myself and others, by writing about mental health, trauma and addiction in a way that is entirely groundbreaking.

There are a lot more writers, podcasters, and philosophers, that I admire, but this is my top 3. They cover the foundations of what’s most interesting about being a person: activism, love, and self-exploration.

10. Be passionate about your passions and not your distractions

I am taking zero credit for this one: this is something Donavon said on the Bobo’s Void podcast (the greatest podcast of all time, btw). I think it’s pretty self explanatory, and I try hard to think about it as I pick up my phone to mindlessly scroll through instagram when I could be reading or making a nice meal for someone I love.

11. Seek out experiences and never stop learning

I’ve been putting off learning German for years. I’ve downloaded Duolingo at least three times, filled the first three pages of multiple notebooks, even listened to Coffee Break German religiously for a week before quitting. I live in a part of Switzerland where even though German is the official language, people speak Swiss German (which is basically a whole different language). Everyone speaks English or French (two languages I’m fluent in), and I understand enough Swiss German to survive. But I also know that knowing German would make my life easier, and that few things open up new pathways in our brain like learning a new language. It’s just… uncomfortable. And aging makes comfort so attractive.

One of the biggest traps is the belief that we’ve “arrived” somewhere: once we finish school, get a job, or tick certain boxes; the learning is over, we can finally sit back and relax. But the truth is, the most fulfilling lives are lived when we remain curious and open, when we seek out new experiences and learn new things. I love listening to podcasts and reading books about specific topics, but I know learning and growing happen in radical ways outside of the realm of “education”; it happens when you learn a new language, when you try a new trail and get lost, when you cook with an ingredient you can’t pronounce, when you ask questions instead of pretending you already know, when you listen to someone whose worldview challenges your own. It’s about choosing expansion over comfort, curiosity over certainty. A life of seeking out new experiences makes us open-minded, supple, resilient.

12. Don’t consume mainstream media

During my Paris university years, I read Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky, and it solidified what I already suspected: mainstream media is not about informing us, it’s about shaping us. As Chomsky later put it: “The picture of the world that’s presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It’s all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.”

I stopped engaging with mainstream media all these years ago. Because I agree with Noam Chomsky when he said "The illusion of choice is the most effective tool of control", it doesn’t matter to me whether this one media source is left-wing or right-wing, I know they all serve the same purpose (with an insignificant amount of a nuance). I still stay informed, but through independent journalism, books, podcasts, and conversations: sources that don’t reduce complex realities into a 30-second soundbite sandwiched between car ads. And whenever I can, I try to understand issues directly rather than relying on second-hand narratives (like when I traveled to Palestine in 2018 and saw ethnic cleansing with my own eyes, in a way no media outlet could ever convince me isn’t happening). Mainstream media thrives on sensationalism, fear, and division, and its main goal isn’t to inform, but to control and distract. Choosing alternative sources is choosing to open our minds, instead of outsourcing our worldview to billionaires and politicians.

As a more general point, I will also say that I don’t think our brains are wired to take in as much information as we are getting on a daily basis about what’s happening in the world, especially when it’s happening very far from us, especially when we know there’s nothing we can do about it. I think we need to be a little bit more selective about the information we let in, and a little bit more mindful about how we let it affect our mental well-being.

13. Get good sleep

This is one that is directly copied from the Psychology in Seattle’s “20 Tips for a Good life” list. Although I agree that sleep is absolutely crucial to live a tolerable life, I don’t think I would’ve thought about it if I hadn’t listened to that episode recently. The quality of our sleep shapes everything from our mood, focus, and relationships, to our immune system, memory, and even our ability to regulate emotions. Yet it’s the first thing most of us sacrifice when life gets busy. I’m strict as hell about my sleep: I got to bed really early so I have enough time to unwind before I fall asleep, I take supplements like GABA and saffron to help my nervous system relax, I try my best not to schedule anything too early in the morning; and if I don’t sleep well, I try to make a nap happen later in the day.

14. Cultivate your self-awareness

Self-awareness means learning to watch yourself almost from the outside: noticing your patterns, your triggers, the stories you tell yourself, the roles you slip into. It’s not just about knowing your own psychology, but also your political place in the world. For example, a cisgender heterosexual white man will move through life with a radically different set of assumptions and privileges than a disabled Black woman; and self-awareness requires acknowledging that.

Self-awareness doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes it means realising we are the toxic one in a situation. Sometimes it’s catching ourselves repeating the very behaviours we swore we’d never repeat. But the payoff is huge: self-awareness is what allows us to course-correct, to grow, and to stop re-enacting the same harmful cycles on autopilot. It lets us live more deliberately, and show up as a better presence in other people’s lives.

15. But think about yourself less

If you’re not as chronically online as me, you might have missed this, but a few years back someone asked actress Jemima Kirke in an Instagram question box (of all places), “any advice for unconfident young women?” and she replied: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.” And you know what? Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. For example, I know that my eating disorder and body dismorphia had much deeper roots than just thinking about myself too much, but a case can be made that if I hadn’t been so self-obsessed, it wouldn’t have consumed so much of my brain space for so many years. It sounds almost too simple, but I really believe that a big piece of the “lack of self-worth” epidemic comes from how relentlessly we think about ourselves. These days, whenever I catch myself spiraling in front of the mirror, I stop myself and think another, better thought. Like “what friend haven’t I checked in with in lately?” or “what’s the safest way to set a police car on fire?”.

16. Understand that mental health isn’t individual

Capitalism and neoliberalism have fractured our collective into isolated individuals, each made responsible for their own survival. And part of this survival now includes “managing” our mental health as if it were just another personal task on our to-do list. (In a roundabout way, the very loss of collective structures like community, care networks, shared responsibility, is one of the reasons so many of us are struggling mentally in the first place.)

This system has trained us to see our mental health struggles as unique, personal flaws. I’ll take a wild guess and say your diagnosis is probably anxiety, depression, addiction issues, ADHD, BPD, or bipolar. When nearly everyone around you is “mentally ill” in some way, it’s not just an individual problem. It’s systemic.

Gabor Maté has written groundbreaking work on this (his latest book The Myth of Normal is probably the best recommendation I can make here). I’m not denying biology: I’ve had tests done, and my serotonin and dopamine are basically non-existent, while my glutamate is off the charts with no GABA to counterbalance it. The pain is real. But what we often fail to see is the bigger picture: our society is making us sick. The constant pressure, disconnection, precarity, and alienation of modern life are breeding grounds for suffering. Racism, sexism, toxic masculinity, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, all create layers of trauma and suffering that are specific but systemic.

17. Pick your addictions wisely

This one I also borrowed from Psychology in Seattle, and I really like it. Instead of giving ourselves the impossible task of living an addiction-free life, let’s be mindful about which addictions we allow and which ones we don’t. I’ve decided to let myself be addicted to exercise, because even though I know (and feel) the drawbacks, the positive outweighs the negative for me. I don’t let myself drink alcohol, because I’ve seen up close the devastation it can cause, and no upside is worth that cost. I let myself use THC when I need to sleep or when my anxiety outpaces the little supplements in my drawer. I stopped watching porn, but I do allow myself orgasms as a way to self-soothe when I need it. I would like to be less addicted to my phone but I’m still working on this one.

I’m going to quote Gabor Maté again, “Addiction is never really about the substance or the behaviour itself, it’s about the pain it numbs. Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain.” When I look at my own habits through that lens, the question shifts: not “is this good or bad?” but “what is this helping me cope with, and is there a healthier way?” Some addictions I can live with because they soothe without destroying me. Others I’ve had to cut out because the harm far outweighs the comfort. Framed this way, “picking your addictions” isn’t about virtue or discipline, it’s about being honest about your wounds, and choosing the balms that keep you alive without burning you down.

(I highly recommend In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté on this topic.)

18. Have hobbies

I know it’s hard, as most of us are just trying to stay afloat practically and psychologically, but I think it’s crucial to cultivate hobbies that aren’t tied to productivity, money, or talent. Capitalism has trained us to turn everything we enjoy into something “useful” or “monetisable” (I’m sure you’ve been there: you enjoy baking, so your friend suggests you sell your cakes). That defeats the purpose of a hobby, which is simply to be present and feel a little joy.

19. Don’t take shortcuts

When something matters to you, don’t cut corners, do it the best that you can. That doesn’t mean everything in life has to be done perfectly. Sometimes “good enough” is good enough. But when it comes to the people you love, the values you stand for, or the projects you care about, shortcuts rob the process of meaning. Doing things with care, precision, and integrity is about sending a message to yourself and to the world: some things are worth the time and the energy. I love the kind of quiet dignity that comes with putting in the work properly, even when I’m the only one to notice.

20. Work through your traumas and anxieties

In the Psychology in Seattle list, one of the items is “Go to therapy”. The host of the podcast is a literal therapist so it makes sense, but personally I find it too narrow. I really enjoyed a Trevor Noah interview where he talked about how we lost the village, only for it be sold back to us: we pay for healthcare, for education, for childcare, and we pay someone to care about us and listen to us talk about our pain.

This is a controversial take, but I think talking to people who love you and care about you is more efficient (and more natural) than going to therapy. I’m not saying you should trauma dump on your bestie, but I do believe a lot of the healing work can happen inside our personal circles. I’m not anti-therapy and if it works for you, you should absolutely do it. But personally, I’ve tried therapy many times and almost always left feeling worse than when I walked in. And as I mentioned back in point #16, most therapists reinforce the idea that your problems are individual defects, failing to put it into the context of an oppressive, violent, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic capitalist system.

For me, it feels more powerful to invest in understanding my traumas and anxieties myself, and to work through them with the help of my loved ones, than to pay someone to play a role that should be (and can be) part of the fabric of community. For me, there is something deeply wounding about having to buy care, presence, and belonging.

21. Own as few things as possible

Every object requires space, money, time, maintenance, and mental energy. The less we own, the less mental clutter (and the more room we have for what really matters: experiences, relationships, creativity, rest). We all deserve freedom from consumerism’s lie that happiness lives in the next purchase, that buying and accumulating will make us whole. And beyond the personal, owning less is also a way to resist overconsumption and move towards degrowth, towards a society that values life over stuff.

22. Be disciplined

This is a personal favourite because (1) it has transformed my life and (2) it comes fairly easy to me; the perfect cocktail. I don’t know many acts as transformative as creating habits that work for you, and then being disciplined about them.

If you know me, you know I love discipline. I think it’s underrated and has a bad rap; it’s not about punishment or rigidity, it’s about self-respect. Every small act of discipline (going for a run, cooking instead of ordering, writing in your journal, closing the laptop at eight o’clock) is a way to show up for yourself.

It’s obviously very personal and will vary widely between people. The point isn’t which habits you choose, but that you choose them consciously, and then keep showing up for them.

23. Take responsibility for your health

I know this is a controversial topic, so let me say this first: the advances of modern medicine have immensely benefited humanity, and we would be much worse off without them. Antibiotics, vaccines, surgical techniques; these are lifesaving, and I don’t take them for granted.

That being said, we’ve lost something essential in outsourcing our health entirely to for-profit institutions. The pharmaceutical and medical industries are massive corporations, and like all corporations, their primary interest is profit. Yes, there have been life-changing breakthroughs, but the system as a whole is not designed to keep us healthy, it’s designed to keep us consuming.

Which is why, as a general rule, we should reclaim as much of our relationship with health as possible. That means learning to know our bodies better, to trust our intuition again, and to care for ourselves in ways that don’t always require a prescription. It can mean re-learning medicinal plants, moving our bodies regularly, resting properly, and eating in a way that actually nourishes us (by that, I mean a whole-food, plant-based diet). We can’t control everything, and sometimes we’ll absolutely need medicine, and thank fuck it exists. But the more responsibility we take for our health, the less power we hand over to systems that don’t have our best interests at heart.

24. Find a God bigger than money

Spirituality is not something I’m particularly comfortable with, especially when it comes to talking about it. My stance on it has almost always been: “I wish I believed in God, but I don’t know how to make myself.” Growing up in France, atheism was an integral part of life. Even the English “oh my god” sounds really funny to us.

The more I learn about collective wellbeing and mental health, the more the topic of God and spirituality comes up. And here’s what I believe now, based on many other people’s shared experiences and studies: spirituality is an incredibly important part of the human experience, and when we lose it, we lose a lot of embedded meaning, purpose, social glue, and the ability to soothe some of our deepest anxieties (like death, just to name the biggest one).

An episode of Bobo’s Void talked about how the god we all worship in our society is the US dollar. We all agree it has a certain value at any given time, and we let that value dictate how we live. I’d add to that the gods of technological progress and science (forces we treat as sacred, even though they often fail to answer our most human questions).

I hope it’s clear that when I talk about seeking spirituality, I don’t mean the tired trope of white people neo-colonising the Global South in search of “authentic” wisdom. My favourite philosopher, Bobo, put it perfectly in another episode: “When you go to a place to pursue spirituality, ask yourself why you have to travel far away from home.”

I like the idea of god as it’s presented in AA: a “higher power”, something larger than our egos, something we can surrender to, entrust ourselves to, lean on when the world feels unbearable. That might mean nature, community, love, justice, God as described in the Qur’an, or simply the mystery of existence itself. Whatever it looks like for you, I think we all need to believe in something bigger than money and technology if we want to be mentally healthy.

25. Have mentors

This one was on the Psychology in Seattle list and I like it a lot: whether it’s in our personal circle or in the political, creative, intellectual, or spiritual realm, we need people to look up to, to go to for guidance. They can be friends, acquaintances, writers, activists, poets, artists, podcasters, spiritual leaders. They create a kind of mindmap for us, and they remind us we don’t have to figure everything out alone, that wisdom is cumulative and collective.

26. Do acts of altruism

I know this one is cliché af, but science actually backs this up: studies consistently show that altruistic behaviour lowers stress, boosts mood, and even has measurable effects on physical health. One meta-analysis published in BMC Public Health found that people who volunteered regularly had lower rates of depression and higher life satisfaction.

But beyond the egotistic mental health benefits, altruism is simply the right thing to do, for our communities, for the planet, for the fragile web of life we’re all part of. Capitalism tells us to compete, to hoard, to think only of ourselves; altruism cuts right across that story. Even small acts (checking in on a friend, cooking a meal for someone, volunteering, giving time or resources when we can) are ways of remembering that we are interdependent. Helping others helps us too, not because of some karmic cosmic math, but because our wellbeing is tied up in each other’s.

27. Get better at forgiveness

I mean this both personally and politically.

On the personal level, I don’t think I need to go into detail, but I’ll just say this: forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing harm, forgetting what happened, or pretending it was okay. It means refusing to let someone else’s actions keep you suffering, angry and bitter. It means believing that people can change, and giving yourself permission to change too. Getting better at forgiveness also means we need to get better at saying sorry ourselves when we’ve caused harmed, sincerely.

Politically, I think we are still very far from forgiveness. Our systems of “justice” are not designed around healing, repair, or change; they’re built on punishment, revenge, and permanent exile. Police and prisons don’t make us safer; they institutionalise vengeance and perpetuate cycles of harm. Abolitionists like my lord and saviour Angela Davis remind us that real safety doesn’t come from cages but from communities that meet people’s needs so violence doesn’t fester in the first place. As she wrote: “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.”

Forgiveness on a political scale looks like transformative justice and harm reduction. How do we address harm without creating more harm? How do we create conditions where people can be accountable, make amends, and actually change? And how do we create conditions in which the people harmed can find justice in forgiveness?

Forgiveness doesn’t mean ignoring harm, it means facing it head-on. It means refusing to build our societies around punishment and revenge. It means choosing justice, compassion, transformation, care, it means choosing humanity over fear.

28. Spend time in nature

I love the online sentiment of “go touch some grass,” which, even though it’s meant as an insult, is kinda spot on. There are few things more efficient for emotional regulation than spending time in nature. Our nervous systems evolved to sync with trees, rivers, mountains, animals, the cycles of light and dark. They are not wired to cope with the constant overstimulation and precarity of the capitalist hellscape we live under; so we find ourselves anxious, depressed and disconnected.

I know this is one of the most inequitable points on this list. Depending on where you live, your income, your schedule, and your mobility, access to nature might not be possible. But even then, stepping into a park and sitting under a tree can have tremendous benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing. Go touch some grass.

29. Don’t be a hater

Pretty self-explanatory: don’t be jealous, don’t be envious, don’t be a hater. When you see someone who has more than you, who is “more successful” (and pause to question what success even means), who has something you wish you had, who is loved and appreciated in a way you wish you were, or who does something better than you, be happy for them. If your first thought is, “easier said than done,” you’re right. But that’s not an excuse not to try your best.

Competition and jealousy are poison. They don’t just make us miserable individually, they rot our communities. The system thrives on convincing us that if someone else is winning, we must be losing. But life isn’t a zero-sum game. Their joy doesn’t diminish yours, their achievement doesn’t erase your worth. The more we can genuinely celebrate each other, the more liveable, generous, and abundant society becomes.

And you’ll see, it’ll make your life so much more enjoyable too.

30. Join the revolution

You didn’t think I’d get to the end of this list without saying “revolution”, did you? Every day, I think about what Angela Davis said: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

The revolution isn’t one big moment where everything changes overnight. It’s a movement for the liberation of humans and nonhumans, for a world where we bring communities back, where we keep each other safe through care and connection, not cages and cops. Assata Shakur wrote this in 1973 while incarcerated as a political prisoner: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Everyone can, and should, play a role. Not all of us will be on the frontlines, and that’s okay. Maybe you’re a planner, a caregiver, a writer, a cook, a connector, an artist, an organiser. Maybe you join a local mutual aid group, read and share radical books, create art that inspires, offer free childcare, cook for your neighbours, teach people about medicinal plants, donate money, or build networks of resistance. The point is: we all have something to give, depending on our skills and our preferences.

And we have to think outside the box we’ve been trapped in. “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” Audre Lorde wrote, and that means we have to find new radical ways to show up for each other. We have to dream better dreams, to come up with solutions and systems that never existed before, Love is what justice looks like in public, so we have to learn again how to love, how to forgive, how to resist, both on a personal level and on a political one. We are all we have.

Thank you.

I have about five separate Notes open on my phone at all times, each containing hundreds of words and ideas. I have physical notes plastered on my wall. And the most important piece of the puzzle: a crippling amount of self-doubt and agonising imposter syndrome. I know everything I want to say, and very regularly will start passionately ranting about it to whoever is willing to listen—that usually means Sam, the love of my life for many reasons, but a big one is that he actually listens to me when I rant, and then says something along the lines of, “This is so interesting, you should write an article about it.” (non-sarcastically, I think)

Anyway, the article is nowhere near being ready, but Kanye and I have one thing in common, and that’s bipolar disorder. For me, that means that despite a treatment that works most of the time, sometimes my brain chemicals decide to do their own thing. A few days ago, one small inconvenience triggered a full spiral that culminated with me crying to Sam about how I never consented to exist, and how now I’m stuck being responsible for my own existence, while also being hyper-aware of the constant suffering happening everywhere, all the time.

This is a very long introduction just to say: today feels like a fitting time to share my list of why we all feel like shit all the time (or most of the time, which is enough time to write an article about it).

This is a copy and paste of what I shared on Instagram, with a couple alterations:

- Hyper individualism and lack of community (and by that, I mean real community: having your “village”, a network of people with different emotional, social and practical skills that offer true support)
- Information overload about horrific things happening all around the world and knowing there’s nothing we can do about it
- Lack of financial stability, despite
- How much time and energy we spend working, and
- The fact that most of us work jobs that don’t have any direct impact on ourselves or our community, doing meaningless tasks with the sole purpose of making rich people richer
- Lack of purpose (directly linked to hyper individualism, ironically)
- Lack of physical touch
- Lack of access to nature
- Awareness of death (we’re the only animal that can reflect on their own death and the death of others, a fact that I believe makes existing a form of torture)
- Colonial and capitalist time structure (time is a resource that needs to be harnessed in the pursuit of “productivity”)
- Having direct access to the thoughts and lives of hundreds of million of people through the internet
- Lack of creative expression (because capitalism tells us it’s a waste of time unless it makes money; the opposite of what art is supposed to be about)
- And for the ones of us that aren’t a cis heterosexual white man, there’s also the extra layer of living under a white supremacist, patriarchal, transphobic, homophobic and ableist regime. (I would argue this is a hellish system even for the most privileged ones amongst us).

Obviously, most of these points have massive overlap and can only exist in how they relate to one another, with capitalism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy as a thread between all of them. And the reason I don’t have a “Everyone suffers from a mental illness” item is because I believe most mental illnesses are a direct result of the items listed.

Also, and I don’t know if this is too specific, but maybe there’s something to say about the fact that “dating” (I’m French, so the concept of “dating” will never not sound cringe to me) has become a dehumanising and soul-crushing experience. An endless swipe of faces, bios, and men proudly holding dead fish. Everyone is ranked, compared, discarded. When what we really crave is intimacy, care, and to be seen fully. So we end up feeling more disposable and more isolated than ever (see: Lack of community, and Lack of physical touch).

I got a few interesting DMs and comments. A couple of people emphasised lack of community, especially when living in big cities (I replied: “I really think being surrounded by a lot of people—IRL in cities or digitally via the internet—makes our common feeling of loneliness and isolation even harder to cope with”). One of them wrote, “The individualism and lack of community and the size of our society makes people less empathetic,” and shared the following quote: “I know home is not a place but I miss the time when it was.”

Someone sent me a DM about the never-ending search for perfection, and the pressure that comes with it—both societal and self-inflicted (actually the same thing). It’s worth noting that this person is a woman, as I believe the pressure to be perfect was designed for women to learn at an early age that they will never be enough, no matter what path they choose (or don’t choose).

Someone else said, “Repression & segregation thru religions,” while someone DMed me to say they felt like shit all the time until they found God.

One person mentioned violence against “women and minorities,” while someone mentioned the exploitation of other species. Two points that I believe I covered in my list (Information overload about horrific things happening and Living under a white supremacist, patriarchal, transphobic, homophobic and ableist regime).

A friend wrote, “Environmental collapse, but that might go under your second point,” and I guess it does—but maybe it’s worth being more specific about it.

Someone else said, “Getting trapped in a loop of work, consumption, and sleep, without spending enough time offline to actually remember what life feels like”—which I think is a mix of a few of the points on the list. That’s the beauty of the list: you can combine as many items as you want in order to create your own customised form of suffering.

I would love to know, from your perspective and life experience—what did I forget? What is your own favourite cocktail of existential dread?

But I have officially and proudly outgrown the “late-stage capitalism has robbed me of my ability to concentrate” stage.

Not because it isn’t true (it’s 100% true), but because staying stuck there allows me to continuously dodge responsibility.

(Fun fact: being stripped of the ability to take responsibility for our mental and physical wellbeing is also a feature of capitalism — but that’s a rant for another day. This is just an intro post, let’s stay focused.)

It’s hard to push back (there’s a trillion-dollar industry on the other side, and I only find the time to go to the gym twice a week). But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try my hardest.

I’ve always loved reading, writing, and generally feeling intellectually stimulated. Podcasts are solely responsible for me not having completely lost the intellectual plot. They have become my favourite way to stay connected to other people’s ideas, lived experiences, cultural and political takes, emotional wounds, and philosophical concepts. (And I can clean my apartment while I listen, because god forbid I only just do one thing at once.)

So, starting a blog, in addition to being the respectable thing to do for a white woman in her mid-thirties, is a way to hold myself accountable. Because these days, the only “activism” I seem to manage is typing a few sentences on Instagram. It might not seem like it cause you can’t read my body language (get it together, Substack), but it is an incredibly shameful thing to admit, and I truly can’t believe this is who I’ve become.

So this endeavour is about me, first and foremost (I’m a child of neoliberal individualism, don’t you forget): to rebuild my focus, to make space for thinking, and then make the effort to articulate these thoughts.

But also for you, because holding each other accountable is an act of love (and love is justice, but we all know that). Please try to re-train your mind to read a whole article (or even crazier, a book), watch a whole documentary (serial killers don’t count), finish that YouTube video, listen to a full podcast episode about some historical event (told by a white guy doesn’t count).

I really want us all to push back against a system designed to keep us distracted, self-loathing, and worst of all, politically passive.