There was a piece I saw doing the rounds on social media recently, called “Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?” The premise was essentially that an explosion of terminology about “self care” and “boundaries” and so on has made people behave selfishly but without having to really reckon with the fact they are doing so. This, the piece argued, has caused an epidemic of people ending friendships with snide messages couched in the passive aggressive gloss of HR terminology. There were a host of people interviewed for the piece who had received texts saying “I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to be friends with you anymore” and similar.
I don’t mean to go in on this particular piece too much. Pieces with an argument along these lines seem to pop up fairly regularly these days, so I’m talking more in general terms. But I don’t buy the idea that therapy language really has become all that pervasive. I don’t think I have ever heard someone use the phrase “emotional bandwidth”, for example. Similarly I haven’t noticed people using the word “boundaries” really other than in a work context, perhaps saying they won’t answer emails on a weekend or similar. I do have conversations, often, about friendships which have grown frustrating or cumbersome. But I don’t think this is the language with which these problems are generally discussed.
Obviously my observations here are anecdotal. But I’m a millennial graduate who works in media. I seem like the exact demographic for whom this trend would be inescapable, yet I haven’t really come across it at all.
I don’t doubt that a friendship-ending text couched in therapy language does happen occasionally. I imagine the people interviewed for the piece were more or less honest about their experiences. Well, as far as they understood them, anyway. Since you only got the impression of the HR text recipient (which is not a failure of this particular piece, just a feature of how this reporting works) there were elements of each interaction you had to guess at. Like was the person who sent the “emotional bandwidth” text at the end of their tether trying to re-orientate their relationship with 6 clingy, over-dependent people at once? Had they hinted at their frustration with no success and so took to this as a last resort? Would the HR text have seemed so out of the blue to someone more emotionally perceptive?
Perhaps the answers here would be no, but I found myself wondering more about the context of these interactions. And ultimately I didn’t find the neat, declarative “therapy speak has made us selfish” thesis particularly convincing. I tend to find what I think of as “Grand Unified Theory of the Universe” pieces, which make these huge claims about what every woman or millennial or “other vaguely demographically bonded group” is doing, and why it can be explained with a fairly niche trend, dubious. My view is that this stuff never stacks up so neatly or feels true to life when you actually sit and think about the people you know and how they act.
But one thing I did find interesting about the HR texts was how generic they were. For example one read: “I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework.”
Assuming this is real, I wonder if it was written for this specific interaction. I don’t think it reads as if it was. To me it reads like something you might find on a Reddit thread, for generic advice about how to extract yourself from a relationship you don’t want to be in, or similar. Or perhaps something you would write yourself and store in a document to use in a variety of situations, like a generic “we had 3 nice dates but there’s no spark :)” message. Either way, the thing I found striking about it was that quality of un-specificity.
The thing these messages actually reminded me of was a friend of mine who was sort of cancelled a while ago in their industry (not media, and they have since been uncancelled, as it happens). They showed me a range of messages they had been sent by friends at the time of the cancelling. The messages basically said these former friends didn’t want to associate with this person anymore because they had been cancelled. The people who sent them didn’t all know each other but the messages were uncannily similar, to the point that I thought they must have been developed from some kind of template. I couldn’t figure out how they would all bear such a strong likeness otherwise.
I looked online and tried to find one but couldn’t, although it was hard to know exactly what to look for. I never really got to the bottom of it and then I kind of forgot about it. (If there is a template somewhere you have seen please feel free to send it to me, I’m fascinated by the idea of this). But the idea of a template came to my head once more with the HR messages.
To me this quality of generic-ness or non specificity is far more interesting than the idea that therapy speech has run rampant. It reminds me of the cliched language people use to chat and fill out their profiles on dating app platforms too, usually telegraphing more that they are a certain “type of guy” than an actual, specific, real and existing “guy”. Even when a friend sends me an unusual dating app profile the noteworthy thing tends to be, not that the person hasn’t spoken in clichés, but that they have run them together in an unexpected way, or used so many of them the overall effect is bamboozling. One example: “If your after a pen pal or to waste my time swipe left cause I’m not here for it. I will judge you on your music choice!! No vegans/vegetarians I eat what I eat and won’t be judged for it! … [and so it continued]”
But anyway, when reading the recent therapy language piece, the question which seemed interesting to me was not whether boundaries are selfish, but instead why a person would send a generic message to end a friendship, rather than a personalised one.
Is it because they send so many messages like this that it simply doesn’t make sense to craft a new one each time? Was it an idea that someone other than the intended recipient might read it? Is it because, from their perspective, the friendship had long ended and investing any more time in it at all seemed pointless? Is it because they feared a more personalised message may instigate a dialogue they didn’t want to engage with?
I don’t know what the answer is in any specific case. But I do think it is relevant that all of this is happening on phones. I wonder, with the explosion of text based communication over various social media platforms, if there are simply more and more and more kinds of possible interactions now which we don’t have a clear script for, and so are badly equipped to deal with. And if generic, stock responses have started to feel like a bit of a crutch.
When I read that piece I was thinking: what kind of messages did people used to send to end their friendships? I suppose the answer may be that, not that long ago, they didn’t really. That it was more natural to drift apart, without someone feeling “ghosted” by a string of unanswered texts or slighted by social media evidence that they were being deliberately excluded. That if you moved apartment you could just not pass on your new number to someone you felt you had outgrown.
It made me think of the Arthur Russell song “I couldn’t say it to your face”. The chorus lyrics go “I couldn't say it to your face, But I won't be around any more”. He was a genius, and I love what he managed to capture in that song; that even the simple phrase “I won’t be around any more” can be so hard to say.
It may give the HR “I’m at emotional capacity” messages too much credit to say they’re just a clunkier version of “I won’t be around anymore”. But I think it’s fair to say they feel like an imperfect (ok, very imperfect) solution to the problem of ubiquitous communication, rather than the whole problem by themselves.
Till next time! xxxxxxx
Here are some pre-order links for Lazy City if you are minded to order, for the UK (it will be out in August) and the US (it will be out in October). Pre-orders tell shops that people are interested in and excited about the book which helps the book a lot.
Also I will be reading an extract of Lazy City at Paul Johnathan’s night (details on this great poster) on Thursday 27th April. Come if you are in London, I think it will be really fun.
Some Things I Liked Recently
I loved this piece on influencers giving up influencing for corporate jobs. I’m so interested in the influencer as a figure, they speak to so many facets of both human nature and modern culture. The essence of the choice they make here is to give up some money to get a job which does not depend so much on their “self” (or performing a certain version of this) and having to keep a nebulous, faceless audience happy.
We All Go Into the Dark by Francisco Garcia. This is a book about a serial killer named Bible John who set Glasgow alight in the 60s. He was never caught, so this is centred around the victims and the case, rather than the killer. It’s full of people driven to distraction by the sense of a white whale.
I agree! I read that Insider article and thought the “pervasiveness of therapy speak” was the result of hyper-specific focus on a specific milieu. I’m in Auckland right now hanging out in the most liberal and left-wing circles imaginable—one part PwC consultants, one part musicians—and no one I know talks like this. The Arthur Russell “I won’t be around any more” connection was perfect: that’s much more the animus of the silence that indicates the end of friendships than these bizarre text messages no one I know actually receives