At the heart of this book lies a simple but unsettling hypothesis, articulated through four closely intertwined propositions.

 

First, we are lost—not merely confused or disoriented, but deprived of orientation itself. Something essential has been lost: limits, direction, and shared horizons through which life, desire, and meaning could once be situated.

 

Second, we are lost in ourselves. Contemporary Western subjects are increasingly self-centered, not as a matter of narcissistic excess, but as the result of a structural constraint. The self has become the primary site of responsibility, explanation, performance, and failure. Everything is referred back to the individual: success and happiness, resilience and suffering, balance and collapse. The promise was autonomy; the result is saturation. The self is overexposed, overburdened, and trapped in permanent self-monitoring.

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Third, we are lost in consumption. Our societies are organized around consumption as a mode of regulation—of desire, of time, of attention, of identity. Consumption is no longer oriented toward use or need, but toward maintaining circulation within the system itself: keeping economies running, subjects stimulated, and dissatisfaction productive. In such societies, there is no stable notion of “enough,” no socially legitimate endpoint of satisfaction.

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Finally—and most critically—we are lost in self-consumption. Consumption has turned inward. We no longer consume only objects, images, or commodities; we consume our own bodies, our mental energy, our emotional resources, our attention, our imagination. The self becomes both the fuel and the site of exhaustion. What should circulate outward—toward others, toward meaning, toward the world—folds back inward, accumulating until it turns toxic.

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These four dimensions do not describe separate problems. They form a single dynamic. The disappearance of the outside—of alterity, of symbolic distance, of transcendence—forces individuals and societies into closed loops. The loss of orientation leads to self-centering; self-centering is amplified by consumer systems; consumption becomes centripetal; and the self, deprived of exits, begins to consume itself.

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This book does not begin with theory, but with a disturbance.

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The initial impulse came during one of my stays in Nairobi, Kenya, where I am involved in several projects. Moving back and forth between Geneva—where I practice as a psychotherapist—and Nairobi, I found myself almost shocked by the contrast between worlds. On the one hand, the concerns of my patients, my friends, and Western society more broadly; on the other, the concerns of the people I met in Nairobi—their mood, their energy, their spontaneous desire to dance, to laugh, to gather—as if they were suspended in a different universe altogether.

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This was not a romanticized opposition between “poverty” and “wealth,” nor a naïve celebration of suffering. It was a contrast between two psychic economies. One appeared saturated, overloaded, internally congested; the other, materially deprived yet strangely open, porous, animated by forces that exceeded the individual self.

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In the West, people often seem to be suffocating under stress, bills, retirement plans, and anxieties about holidays or future security. In Nairobi, despite material hardship, I encountered ways of being less centered on the self, less obsessed with individual accumulation or optimization. There, the self does not occupy the same central position—perhaps because daily life is animated by other energies, other beliefs, other symbolic horizons, an openness toward something larger, sometimes spiritual, sometimes communal, sometimes simply alive.

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This observation gradually led me to question one of the most deeply rooted assumptions of contemporary Western societies: that psychological well-being is primarily a matter of the individual self—its regulation, optimization, performance, and satisfaction. As a psychotherapist, I increasingly encountered patients who were not suffering from a lack of self-esteem, agency, or autonomy, but from too much self: too much self-monitoring, self-responsibility, self-explanation, self-pressure. Their suffering did not stem from absence, but from saturation.

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What if many of our current mental health crises—burnout, depression, anxiety, addictions, eating disorders, a pervasive sense of emptiness or “lostness”—were not failures of individuals, but symptoms of closed systems? Systems in which everything circulates internally, where there is no real outside, no symbolic distance, no horizon that exceeds the self. Systems that endlessly feed the self with demands, stimuli, and expectations, while depriving it of genuine nourishment.

 

Lost in (Self) Consumption proposes a systemic diagnosis: we are not ill because we consume too much in the material sense, but because we have learned to consume ourselves—our bodies, our time, our attention, our emotional energy—within environments designed to eliminate exits. Consumption has become centripetal. Instead of circulating toward others, toward meaning, toward the world, energy folds back onto the self, accumulating there until it turns toxic.

 

The book unfolds along four complementary perspectives.

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It first examines how consumer societies operate as technologies of gavage, force-feeding desire through engineered environments that abolish satiety and normalize excess. This is not a moral critique of greed, but an analysis of systems that condition overconsumption as a structural necessity.

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It then explores the overdevelopment of the modern self—how Western philosophy, economics, and psychology progressively constructed the self as an autonomous, self-owning, self-managing unit, severed from relational, symbolic, and transcendent anchors. The self becomes both project and prison.

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The book then approaches contemporary psychopathologies as pathologies of closure. Rather than isolated disorders, they appear as collective responses to societies with no outside: no rest, no transcendence, no legitimate space for non-productivity, vulnerability, or dependency. Deprived of external regulation and meaning, the psyche turns inward.

 

Finally, it confronts the loss of the infinite—not as religious nostalgia, but as the disappearance of any horizon capable of relativizing the self. Finite individuals are now compelled to behave as infinite projects, endlessly optimizing themselves in a world that no longer offers a beyond. Exhaustion becomes inevitable.

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Throughout this book, I do not argue for a return to tradition, religion, or any predefined belief system. Nor do I propose ready-made solutions. The aim is both more modest and more radical: to restore the question of the outside. To ask where exits have disappeared, where circulation has been replaced by accumulation, where protection has turned into self-aggression, where autonomy has become isolation.

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This book is written at the crossroads of clinical practice, social observation, and critical thought. It is addressed to those who feel overwhelmed without knowing why; to those who sense that something in our way of living is structurally wrong; and to those who suspect that the answer will not be found by further intensifying work on the self.

 

If the self has become a closed system, the task is not to destroy it—but to reopen it. To let something else enter. To let something leave. To allow life to circulate again.

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That is where this inquiry begins.

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[work in progress]

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Read L. Poenaru, The West: An Autoimmune Disease?

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