“Trauma” is a buzzword these days. Wherever you turn, someone is being traumatized by something. But just what is trauma and why is it such a hot topic right now? Some would argue that recent generations have had it too easy, that they haven’t been through enough to toughen them up, and so they’re traumatized by even the most insignificant of stressors. But is this really the case? Or is something else going on?

As a philosophical counselor, I contend that the demands of living in this era are categorically different from those in previous eras. These new demands almost invariably create oxidative stress, which causes trauma—the Greek word for wound or damage. So, the real issue is not figuring out how we can adapt to conditions that are so stressful that they are literally causing physical and psychological breakdown, but how we can change these conditions so that fewer people experience such breakdowns. Such questions are fundamentally societal and not personal. They entail commitments about who we think we are and what we believe we owe to one another. These questions are also about how we should live.

Years ago, a philosophical counseling client—we’ll call her Janet—said to me that “It’s not just burnout. It’s burnout from burnout. It’s the stress, the backlash from the levels of cortisol I’ve kept in my body for years.” A college graduate with over twenty years of work experience, Janet was juggling multiple jobs and trying to make ends meet. It was clear that her situation was physically and psychologically unsustainable. Day after day, the stress was taking its toll. Still, she was unable even to think her way out, let alone get out. She was slowly breaking down, on a stress-induced free fall.

The conversation I had with Janet that day was in no way anomalous. It is a conversation I have over and over with people all around the globe. It is a story of stress, anxiety, and powerlessness, and the inevitable physical and mental breakdowns that follow. My contention is that it is a story of systemically induced trauma.

First, let’s talk about stress. Pioneering stress researcher Hans Selye tells us that the body’s adaptability, or adaptive energy, is finite. “One would think that once adaptation has occurred and ample caloric intake is available, resistance should go on indefinitely. Not so,” he writes.[i] “Stress is not simply nervous tension. Stress reactions do occur in lower animals, and even in plants, that have no nervous systems … Indeed, stress can be produced under deep anesthesia in patients who are unconscious, and even in cell cultures grown outside the body.”[ii] Research has indicated that uncertainty, the lack of information, and the loss of control are three universal factors that lead to stress.[iii]

To say that we are overstressed almost goes without saying. Stress inputs are exceeding our ability to process and adapt. Breakdown is becoming inevitable. It is just a question of when, how, and in what manner. A quintessential sense of powerlessness is now the affective norm. External conditions are driving us—as individuals and en masse—toward a cliff. And yet we must capitulate to these conditions in order to live for another day. The irrationality of such a situation can be felt in the body. Under conditions of imminent breakdown, individual agency rings hollow.

The concept of oxidative stress was first introduced in 1985 to explain an array of symptoms.  Oxidative stress is, in short, toxic stress. It is produced when free radicals overwhelm the body’s antioxidant defenses, causing tissue damage. Oxidative stress can lead to a life of chronic pain, disability, and premature death, and is implicated in nearly all identified diseases, syndromes, and disorders. I argue elsewhere that oxidative stress has become a central aspect of living in our accelerated, monetized, techno-precarious society.

Predictably, traumatic breakdown is becoming increasingly normalized, as we collectively fumble towards the cliff. Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi describes trauma in the following way: “Trauma is a process of dissolution that moves toward total dissolution, that is to say death. The body, the cruder part of the personality, withstands destructive processes longer, but unconsciousness and the fragmentation of the mind already are signs of the death of the more refined parts of the personality. … [Trauma] is a chronic death-agony.”[iv] Janet expressed such thoughts but felt powerless to stop the reality behind them.

Trauma is a buzz word these days because of the nature of contemporary existence. Whatever stability may have existed in previous eras has been effectively jettisoned, replaced by philosophical and systemic precarity. As Guy Standing argues in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, the gig economy has upended not only our work lives, but our collective associations and our very sense of what it means to be human.

The precaritization of all facets of society results in the progressive dissolution of the self. We are beyond Sartre’s notion of authenticity, for bad faith is only possible against the ontological backdrop of good faith. Inauthenticity has been replaced by a palpable, weighty absence, an absence that is felt in the body.

The traumatic dissolution of the self is a catastrophe for which we are wholly unprepared, a calamity for which there are no words. In this vacuum of space and meaning, we see the daily eruption of millions upon millions of words into electronic cyberspace. With all narratives under erasure, we strain to produce a feeble simulation of meaning. It is literally a cry to the implacable heavens. Such precarity produces what Baudrillard describes as a liquidation of meaning, beyond which sense-making is no longer possible. Thus, both material conditions and conditions of consciousness are essentially traumatic. Today, we are all Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Reflective consciousness moves in an endless loop—what I call the endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance. Such consciousness telegraphs movement without progression.

Precariousness is a universal existential condition. It is a function of the fact that we are subject to disease and death, a condition often described by the existentialists. For example, in Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard describes the faith requisite for a truly human existence as swimming over 70,000 fathoms of water. For Sartre, any being that has the possibility of not being is fragile. Simply put, we live in precariousness because blood is coursing through our veins. Precarity, by contrast, is contingent. It is induced by systemic conditions. It could exist or not exist. Differential exposure to precarity situates it in the realm of social justice.

Technology in our era has not, generally speaking, been utilized to level the playing field, but rather to induce precarity as leverage for ever-new forms of value-extraction. The techno-precarious society is a society in which, as Byung-Chul Han notes in The Burnout Society, everyone must become an entrepreneur of the self. This vestigial self, I argue, is the wounded, fragmented, and disintegrating techno-precarious performance self, as systemic conditions erode and subvert the very possibility of homeostasis.

In what ways is our era qualitatively different from previous eras?[v] In no particular order, we observe: the dissolution of community, panoptic surveillance, and the end of the right to privacy, all factors that work against trust and produce fear and anomie. There is the futilitarian entrapment of a gamed system. There is the systemic effort to eliminate critical thinking. There is the imminent threat of planetary annihilation, producing subliminal terror. There is the increasing insecurity of the global gig economy, an economy in which workers must endlessly compete with one another, and with emerging AI. There is the de-securitization of public and private space, resulting in preventable gun deaths, suicides, and overdoses. And, of course, environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and the momentous existential threat of climate change. Oxidative stress and trauma are predictable consequences of such conditions.

None of the qualitative differences we see in our era are inevitable. Our trauma pandemic-in-the-making is not a foregone conclusion. It is not a function of some ethereal economic or metaphysical determinism. These differences are the result of human choices that must—if we are to survive as a species—be collectively reviewed. As long as economic considerations predominate, progress will be stalled, and the trauma pandemic will continue. Money, after all, is an abstraction, but the pain of trauma is something real.

Our fundamental sense of being in the world is under suspension (Greek: epoché). Self-trust—including trust in the body—is becoming increasingly tenuous. Detachment from self is inextricably linked to detachment from others, resulting in a thanatotic symbiosis, a death spiral. Deaths of despair are just one example of the collateral damage.[vi] The solutions offered for the conundrum are individual: more powerful drugs, procedures, and surgeries.

We can’t solve collective problems with individual solutions. There is no way an individual can protect herself from the next deadly pandemic, from climate change, or from the increasing threat of weapons-induced global annihilation. There is no way a working person can pay for an extended healthcare crisis that may run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. When health (care) itself has been commodified, life as such is devalued. The realization of this fact—whether conscious or not—produces trauma.

Without the collective will to address the philosophical premises of our trauma-based, techno-precarious performance society, there will be no path forward. How is collective action possible in a graveyard of disintegrating selves? Doesn’t an attempt to answer this question set us up for the endless logical loop of cognitive dissonance? How is it possible to even raise it in a world where truth is shouted down by those with the least knowledge and most certitude, erasing all viable narratives and replacing them with conspiracy theories that foment no more than the simulacra of revolution?

The dismantling of techno-precarious performance society is possible. We don’t have to fumble, en masse, over the cliff. The starting point must be to go beyond the buzz word and take our trauma seriously, to learn to acknowledge and respect our wounding as an indispensable source of meaning and value. To do this, reconnection with the body is vital. Such reconnection generates the affective and cognitive awareness necessary to interface empathically with self and others in ways that transform existing relations of power, laying the groundwork for systemic change. The alternative is to live what’s left of our lives with Leszek Kołakowski’s metaphysical horror, a horror that we will have brought to fruition in our soiled garden of Eden.

Notes:

[i] Hans Selye, Stress in Health and Disease (Boston: Butterworth, 1976), 6.

[ii] Hans Selye, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 62.

[iii] Seymour Levine and Holger Ursin, “What Is Stress?” in Psychobiology of Stress, ed. S. Levine, E. Baade, H. Ursin (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 17.

[iv] Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, ed. Judith Dupont, trans. Michael Balint and Nicola Zarday Jackson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 130.

[v] This is an argument I make in the forthcoming Precarity, Trauma, Addiction, Love (Bloomsbury-Lexington Books, 2025.)

 

[vi] P. Sterling and M.L. Platt, “Why Deaths of Despair are Increasing in the US and Not Other Industrial Nations—Insights from Neuroscience and Anthropology,” JAMA Psychiatry 79, no. 4 (2022): 368–374, https://doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2021.4209