It's Not Just You: The Mental Health Cost of Late-Stage Capitalism

You're exhausted. You're anxious. You can't remember the last time you did something that wasn't productive. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice keeps asking: what's wrong with me?

Here's what I want you to hear: probably nothing.

A couple of years ago, I came across an essay by journalist Kirsten Powers titled The Way We Live in the United States Is Not Normal — and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. In it, she describes the dawning realization, formed over years of traveling to Italy and Europe, that so much of what Americans accept as inevitable doesn't have to be.

She writes about watching people treat it as completely normal that we have GoFundMe campaigns to fund life-saving medical care, that college costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, that "self-care" has become a billion-dollar industry designed to patch us up just enough to keep functioning inside a system that's grinding us down.

As a therapist, I read that and thought: yes. This is what I see every day in my office.

The system is the problem. Not you.

So much of what brings people to therapy — the chronic anxiety, the burnout, the sense that no matter how hard you work you're still falling behind — isn't a personal failing. It's a rational response to an irrational system.

When you're working two jobs to afford basic healthcare, your nervous system is going to be dysregulated. When you haven't taken a real vacation in three years because you're afraid of falling behind, your body is going to start breaking down. When your entire sense of worth has been tied to productivity since childhood, untangling that is going to take real work.

This isn't weakness. This is what happens to humans under sustained pressure with insufficient support.

So what do we do with that?

Most of my clients can't move to Puglia. (Though if you can, that sounds amazing, please eat some pasta for me.) But naming the source of the pressure matters — enormously. There's something quietly radical about a person sitting across from me and saying, oh, maybe I'm not broken. Maybe the system is broken and I've been trying to survive it.

That shift doesn't fix your 60-hour work week or your student loans. But it does change how you relate to yourself. It loosens the grip of shame. It creates just enough space to start asking different questions — not "how do I optimize myself to keep up?" but "what would it actually look like to live well inside this?"

That's where therapy comes in. Not as another self-improvement project, not as a productivity hack for your mental health — but as a place to slow down, get honest, and figure out what you actually need. To work with your nervous system rather than against it. To start building a life that feels like yours.

You're not failing at life. You're feeling the weight of a culture that asks too much and gives back too little.

And you deserve support in navigating that.

If this resonates, I'd love to connect. I'm a licensed therapist in Pasadena, CA, specializing in anxiety, burnout, and life transitions. You can learn more or reach out at www.shanatherapy.com