ADHD, OCD, Imposter Syndrome, Main-character Syndrome, Hypochondria, Cyberchondria…
After a careful cruise on the internet and an endless stream of TikTok videos on diagnostic guidelines and mental coaching, I was convinced that these mental health conditions all pertained to me at some point in my life. I drew some comfort knowing that I wasn’t the only one and drew some fascination in the explanatory power of such and such “syndromes” and “conditions.”
Today is the age of self-diagnosis. And perhaps over self-diagnosis. From 2019 to 2023, University of Huddersfield and Aston University researchers found an 18% annual increase in ADHD prescriptions in England. Similarly, between 1998 and 2018, the diagnosis of autism rose by 787 percent, according to data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink. Globally too, mental health has become a central societal issue, spurring the growth of a giant self-improvement market. The global personal development market, including mental health, self-help books, and personal life coaches, was estimated at USD 43.77 billion in 2022 according to Grand View Research, which estimates that the market is growing at 5.5% each year.
These staggering stats make one wonder: have we become sicker? Or has scientific literacy among the general population (TikTok ADHD videos, for instance) made diagnosis more accurate? Or, could it be, as Irish neurologist and author Suzanne O’Sullivan mentioned in her most recent book The Age of Of Diagnosis, due to “overdetection.” We are ever more aware of our own mental and physical states and therefore quicker and better at detecting “diseases,” even pathologizing ordinary life experiences like anxiety or sadness.
Overdiagnosis, then, may only be one symptom of the much larger societal issue of rising individualism where people are conditioned to focus on themselves– “my achievements, my mistakes, and my mental states” – which leads to other deep-entrenched societal issues.
Two pertinent case studies are the U.S. and China, both facing a surge in self-diagnosis and introspective fixation, coupled with a retreat from emotional intimacy and close relationships. In both countries, especially among the youth, there is a growing preference for low-investment, temporary social interactions—like America’s viral “Chill Guy” or China’s “DaZi” companions—over deeper emotional bonds. This shared cultural shift, fueled by digital hyperconnectivity and individualistic ideals, has led to what some describe as a “loneliness epidemic,” where people are increasingly alone and seeking meaning through introspection rather than intimate relationships.
Americans, indeed, are lonelier than ever. In the past two decades, the proportion of people in the U.S. claiming to have close friends in the double digits decreased by a fifth, from 33% to 13%. There has been, as many call it, a “friendship recession.” More are choosing to eat alone, go to the movies alone, and live alone. With economic giants like UberEats, Amazon, and Netflix digitizing all aspects of real-life activities, it is more convenient than ever to live as “an island, Entire of itself,” as John Donne romantically posited, and refuted, four centuries ago. In China, there has been a similar, if not worse, trend. Young people, on average, have 2.5 close friends, according to a survey data by Soul, a Chinese virtual socializing app built for “a lonely generation.”
Perhaps not so surprisingly then, we see both Americans and Chinese retreating from intimate relationships. Take a look at online memes and trends. The Chill Guy, for instance, which went viral in 2024, is an anthropomorphized dog animation who wears a grey shirt and stands laid-back with hands in his pockets. The viral character, as explained by its creator Philip Banks back in 2023, was just “a chill guy who doesn’t give a f**k.” It quickly turned into a frenzy, with people sharing posts tagging #chillguy on all social media platforms. On TikTok, some of these read: “When she yells at you for forgetting what she told you earlier today, but you are just a chill guy enjoying your day”; or “When everyone is calling you an alcoholic but you’re just a chill guy who enjoys drinking.” The character celebrates a resistance to turbulent emotional response to the surroundings and represents a general mood of detachment from too much emotional investment.
Similarly in China, there has been the shift toward low-risk, low-investment, and temporary relationships. Chinese young people are increasingly seeking DaZi: temporary, activity-tied companions to share specific hobbies or interests like fitness, travel, dining, or gaming. These are the people who are more than strangers or colleagues, but less than friends, who only occupy a very small portion of one’s life, and where the connection can be cut off at will.
Furthermore, what’s called “companionship economy” (“pei liao jing ji”), where people pay for company, either online or offline, through virtual chats, cosplay commission, or shopping DaZi, are provided to strangers, who are typically tech-savvy young adults, was estimated to be worth up to 50 billion Yuan by 2025 in China.
One sector of the companionship economy is otome video games, in which players navigate romantic relationships with digital avatars as protagonists of an interactive plot. One such hit game, “Love and Deepspace,” generated more than 500 million yuan in the China market within a month of its release in January, 2024. It is not just the big companies that are reaping benefits from Chinese youth in need of companionship. An informal economy of paid companionship has developed on social media platforms, such as Xiaohongshu, where users charge anywhere from 8 yuan to 50 yuan (around $1 to $7) for a thirty-minute companionship chat (“pei liao”). It’s truly low-cost, low burden. But as soon as thirty minutes on the clock wind up, the connections end.
Why is the turn from intimacy to introspection happening now, during the age of the internet, which was supposed to facilitate and empower interpersonal connection? One factor, as chronicled by Fay Bound Alberti, writer and professor at King’s College London, in her 2019 book A Biography of Loneliness: The History of An Emotion, can be traced back to the Enlightenment philosophy. She writes: “After the early neurological work of the French philosopher Rene Descartes (best known for his dictum: ‘I think therefore I am’), it became possible to view the human body as an automation… rather than a spiritual presence.” She writes that in the days of thinkers like Charles Darwin, the “philosophy of the individual predominated; the individual was more important than, and opposed to, society.” Loneliness, which didn’t exist as an emotional state before the seventeenth century, then emerged as a result of mass industrialization and urbanization spurred on by the philosophy of the individual.
More recently, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han noted the inception and danger of individualism, or, as he calls it, narcissism. In his seminal work, The Burnout Society, Han suggests that “the imperative to achieve” and the meritocratic ideal that “you can be anything you want” fixates our attention on the self. This is exacerbated by the self-promotion and affirmation culture of social media. Under such a self-oriented culture, “the function of ‘friends’ is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.” It is then perhaps no wonder why we draw away from intimate relationships. If “friends” are merely mirrors for us to see ourselves, then why not just look at ourselves?
As we stare ever more closely at ourselves and probe our own physical and mental state with more fastidiousness, we zoom in on on every trace of imperfection, turning unwelcomed emotions into labels like “imposter syndrome” or “spotlight effect,” which offer us a sense of control but, at the same time, only drive more introspection, as if we need to come up with a reason or justification for our feelings rather than, well, simply feel. It seems an endless circle, as we gaze and ultimately waste away and drown in the void of the self, as Narcissus did.
In 1924, Elliot Park Frost, an editor for The Atlantic, had already noted such a turn toward individualism. At the outset of industrialized society, where “Lights flash at us, horns shrill at us, speeding things rush us from place to place,” he recognized a widening gap between external stimulation to our neural system and our mental bandwidth. As life becomes more complex, he therefore argues, “we can afford less energy expended self-ward.”
What did he mean? He meant that the kind of worries we had back then were mostly directed at our own circumstances: “[Whether] my bank account [is] intact, my health [is] unimpaired, my friends and family [are] well.” Though written a century ago, these are not so dissimilar to our present worries: “My summer internship, my mental health, my passion, and my future.” We should, in its stead, Frost proposed, cultivate a sense of ego-centric nonchalance, or an “indifference to one’s personal, private, selfish self,” and thus move away from the ceaseless self-directed worries.
Frost’s concerns in 1924 may have materialized. Now, the word “nonchalance” points in the totally opposite direction: rather than “ego-centric nonchalance,” we prize a kind of nonchalance–the kind displayed by Chill Guy, for instance–that directs externally and spurns the concept of “emotional investment.” Such excess attention made a turn either towards the self–evidenced by the culture of self-diagnosis–or to seeking replacements of intimate relationships by low-investment, weak-link, or mediated connections, as we see among young people in both China and the U.S.
There are various versions of the Narcissus story but here is the one I prefer. After Narcissus fell into the lake and drowned, the lake wept. Goddesses assumed that the lake was weeping for Narcissus and the loss of his beauty. To their wonder, the lake replied: “I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.”
Perhaps to truly see ourselves—our beauties and imperfections—we need to turn our gaze to those around us. Perhaps more “self-help” is not the cure. Perhaps it’s time to borrow one piece of advice Elliot Frost offered a century ago: “To come to take one’s personal fortunes nonchalantly, to wear them ‘lak a loose garment,’ to feel the earnestness of life and still smile, this is the finesse of good living.”
