By I’m not a psychologist. Not a therapist, not a researcher, not someone with letters after their name. I work in marketing, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about why people feel what they feel and do what they do. Every once in a while that bleeds into something more personal. Call it an occupational side effect.
Open your phone right now. Give it thirty seconds. Somewhere in that scroll, something will tell you that you’re overwhelmed, that your boundaries aren’t being respected, that what you’re feeling has a name, and that name is a condition. Probably one you didn’t know existed this time last year.
There’s a strange thing that happens when you give discomfort a name and a depth it didn’t ask for. It stops being weather and starts being climate.
Twenty years ago, nobody I knew had their boundaries violated. Not because people treated each other better. Not because relationships were healthier. Just because nobody had sent them a carousel yet.
The vocabulary wasn’t there. And without the vocabulary, the pattern couldn’t complete itself. You had a rough week, not a trauma response. Your ex was difficult, not a narcissist. You were sad, not depressed.
You moved on.
I’m not saying the suffering wasn’t real. I’m saying the label didn’t exist to park it under, so it couldn’t calcify into an identity.
Now we have the labels. A lot of them. And we have an algorithm that figured out, with some precision, that nothing performs better than content that makes you feel seen and slightly unwell. The infographic. The voiceover with the lo-fi music. The study from Norway.
The algorithm found the formula. Psychology has a name for what happens next. It’s called the nocebo effect. The opposite of placebo. Where placebo gives you relief you didn’t earn, nocebo gives you symptoms you didn’t have. Read about insomnia before bed and suddenly you can’t sleep. Watch enough videos about panic attacks and your chest starts to feel tight. The information doesn’t describe the condition. It becomes it.
There’s a related idea called concept creep, the way psychological terms slowly expand until they cover far more ground than they were built for. Trauma used to mean something extreme. Now it can mean a difficult childhood home, a bad breakup, a manager who didn’t give positive feedback. Maybe that’s progress. Maybe it means we’ve stretched the word until it fits everyone, which is another way of saying it fits no one.
Gaslighting is the clearest example. Originally it described something specific and serious, a sustained effort to make someone doubt their own memory, their own eyes, their own mind. A real thing. A damaging thing. Now it means someone remembered the conversation differently than you did. Your boyfriend said he didn’t say that thing you think he said, and the comments section nods along: classic gaslighting.
The word got bigger. The behavior it was pointing to got smaller. Somewhere in that gap lives a lot of content, a lot of engagement, and a lot of people who are now certain they’ve experienced something they probably haven’t.
ADHD went the same way. The hashtag has billions of views. The videos are personal, relatable, oddly comforting. Someone explains how they can’t focus, how they’ve always felt different, how everything finally makes sense. And somewhere between the first video and the fifteenth, a lot of people quietly conclude that yes, this is them.
Self-diagnosis became the natural next step. We see the symptoms, we recognize the pattern, we label it, we go looking for the solution. The problem is that once you have the label, you stop questioning it. You start living around it instead.
None of this is accidental. We’re not getting more damaged. We’re getting better at finding patterns, and we’re surrounded by content whose entire purpose is to help us find them. The algorithm doesn’t push nuance. It doesn’t show you the video that says “actually that’s just a normal human disagreement.” It shows you the one you’ll watch until the end, share with a friend, and screenshot the caption of. The one that confirms the pattern you were already half-looking for.
And once you have the pattern, once you have the word, the identity starts to build around it. Slowly. Without you noticing. Until one day you’re not someone who felt anxious during a hard period, you’re an anxious person. You’re not someone who had a difficult manager, you’re someone who survived a toxic workplace.
The suffering was real. The leap from experience to permanent condition, that part I’m less sure about.
There’s something that gets lost when we name everything. Not toughness exactly, more like permeability. The ability to let an experience move through you before you’ve decided what it means. When you don’t have a word for what you’re feeling, you feel it, and then you feel something else. The feeling moves. It doesn’t get filed.
This isn’t a piece with a takeaway. I’m just sitting with the fact that we are the most psychologically educated generation in history and somehow simultaneously the most fragile.
Maybe that’s a coincidence. Maybe we’re just finally honest about something humans have always felt.
Or maybe the map made the territory. And we’re so deep inside it now we’ve forgotten there was ever a landscape before someone drew the lines.
I’ll leave the solutions to the infographics, made by someone who read two posts from a self-designated expert and put the whole thing together on Canva.
First published on Substack, where the comments are.
