ON THE STRUCTURAL INFLATION, MORALIZATION, AND SATURATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY SELF

SELF-WATCHDOG

The contemporary subject is increasingly constituted as a self-contained unit of responsibility, coherence, and performance. Psychological stability, success, emotional regulation, and social legitimacy are framed as outcomes that must be produced internally by the individual self. This configuration is not a neutral psychological evolution; it is historically and politically produced through neoliberal rationalities that relocate social, economic, and institutional burdens onto subjectivity itself. Under this regime, the self becomes the primary site where systemic contradictions are absorbed, individualized, and moralized.

The inflation of the self is routinely misrepresented as empowerment. Yet population-level mental health data suggest the opposite tendency. Across high-income, highly individualistic societies, internalizing disorders — particularly anxiety, depression, and stress-related symptoms — have increased over recent decades, especially among adolescents and young adults. Importantly, these increases occur in parallel with intensified educational pressure, performance metrics, and moralized autonomy, rather than with improvements in material security or collective support (World Health Organization, 2017; Twenge et al., 2019). The subject is thus rendered responsible for conditions that are structurally generated and unevenly distributed.

Digital environments intensify this configuration. Social media platforms, quantified-self technologies, and algorithmic feedback systems operate as permanent evaluative infrastructures. They translate social norms — visibility, productivity, desirability, emotional expressiveness — into continuous metrics. Distress emerging from these environments is rarely framed as an effect of design, political economy, or attention extraction. Instead, it is psychologized as a deficit of self-control, resilience, or “digital hygiene.” This narrative inversion exemplifies neoliberal responsibilization: environments engineered to dysregulate are treated as neutral, while subjects are blamed for failing to regulate themselves within them (Bucher, 2018; Elhai et al., 2017).

Psychophysiological and neuroscientific research undermines any attempt to reduce this distress to subjective fragility. Chronic exposure to social evaluative threat, attentional overload, and performance pressure is associated with dysregulation of stress systems, including altered hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis functioning and inflammatory processes. These effects accumulate over time and are increasingly studied within allostatic and epigenetic frameworks, showing how social and economic pressures become biologically embedded rather than merely “experienced” (Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010; Slavich & Irwin, 2014). The injunction to constant self-optimization thus produces cumulative wear rather than resilience.

A critical threshold is crossed when health, productivity, and emotional stability are moralized and sacralized. Well-being ceases to be understood as fragile, relational, and socially supported; it becomes a moral obligation and a personal achievement. Vulnerability, fatigue, or psychological collapse are reframed as individual failures instead of signals of systemic overload. This moral economy masks social gradients of exposure and protection while sustaining the fiction of equal opportunity at the level of the psyche (Metzl & Hansen, 2014).

Clinically, this configuration produces subjects who do not lack identity or agency, but who are overwhelmed by a structurally distorted self. The self no longer functions as a containing or orienting structure; it expands without limit, monitors itself incessantly, absorbs contradictory demands, and internalizes pressures that cannot be symbolized or externalized. Distress emerges not from inner emptiness, but from saturation: nothing remains sufficiently external to be negotiated, shared, or metabolized.

A SELF-WATCHDOG position therefore refuses narratives that naturalize suffering as personal insufficiency or reduce mental health to individual adaptation strategies. It insists on holding together psychopathology, technological architectures, and economic rationalities within the same analytical frame. Without such vigilance, psychological discourse risks becoming an auxiliary language of governance — therapeutic in tone, normative in function, and structurally complicit.

Liviu Poenaru

REFERENCES

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Twenge, J. M., Cooper, A. B., Joiner, T. E., Duffy, M. E., & Binau, S. G. (2019). Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005–2017. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128(3), 185–199.https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000410

World Health Organization. (2017). Depression and other common mental disorders: Global health estimates. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/depression-global-health-estimates