In press, Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Preface—The obese self
Suffocated by my own comfort, and by an alienation that was weighing on me more and more heavily—an alienation that manifested itself through increasingly invasive anxiety, and through the absence of oxygen, not the artificial oxygen supplied by economic codes, but a more plural, multidimensional breath—I decided, in 2024, to join an NGO in Nairobi and work as a psychologist in the slums, in several schools, and more particularly in a day centre for adolescent girls. Some of them came with their children. They gathered there to support one another, to do their homework, to braid each other’s hair, to cook, and to be together.
The year before, in 2023, my book Inconscient Économique (Economic Unconscious) was published by L’Harmattan in Paris. That work radically altered my perception of the West and forced me to think more deeply about the unconscious and sanitary effects of economic codes disseminated throughout our societies, our education, our professions, our desires, and our most intimate ways of inhabiting ourselves. This transformation played a decisive role in my decision to leave for Nairobi. Yet I had not fully understood, at that point, that I was also trying to escape the sterile enclosure of my own world.
Without realizing it, I had decided to expose myself to real life in the same way an immune system exposes itself to a plurality of bacteria in order to enrich the microbiome, survive, and defend itself better. This is not a hygienist fantasy of purity; it is the opposite. Life does not strengthen itself by remaining sealed, disinfected, and protected from every contact. I understood only later that when the psychic microbiome becomes impoverished inside sterile bubbles—well protected, well secured, carefully designed by the ideology of risk—we may begin to turn our defenses against ourselves, like an autoimmune disease. We suffocate from within, as if life itself had become a closed system.
One day, I was “doing psychology,” surrounded by about thirty girls. We were speaking about violence at home, about sexuality, about their lives. The conversation flowed, but something was missing—not theoretically, not clinically, but materially. I wanted to understand more, so I asked: “But don’t you eat? What do you cook?” Someone answered: “We have nothing to eat.”
For the first time in decades of professional practice, I felt utterly and ridiculously lost in my role as a psychologist.
We left the earthen shelter, and I bought food for several weeks. Later, we cooked together outside. There was a pot over a charcoal fire. I was stirring the rice.
And then…
My soul rose.
This cannot really be explained. My soul rose for the first time in my life. And since then, it has remained in levitation.
The decision to write this book came to me later, in Karura Forest, in Nairobi, as an imperative—almost as an emergency. I had hesitated for two years, during which I made several long stays in Kenya, each time struck to the bone by the differences between Western egos, Western Selves, and the forms of personhood I encountered there. Yet I could not always find words for those astronomical, almost unbearable differences.
As a psychotherapist working in Geneva with a population that is, for the most part, materially comfortable, I felt uneasy about exposing the inflated and sacralized nature of the Western relation to the self, as if doing so would amount to moralizing or giving lessons. At times, I was even afraid of losing patients if I dared to write openly on this subject. I believed it could only be addressed in backstage conversations, almost clandestinely, as if telling this truth were somehow forbidden.
But that day, in Karura Forest, I understood something else: that as a researcher, I had an ethical duty to go to the end of what I had seen; that I had a responsibility to speak this truth; and that perhaps, by pursuing this inquiry, I might finally help my patients differently.
What came into view was a subtle yet crushing burden—one whose effects are real, while its forms often remain diffuse, unformulated, and largely unnamable. From that point on, a central part of my work became to explore this burden, to render it more intelligible, and to help free my patients from it, so they could stop suffocating inside themselves instead of endlessly circling around a zone that has largely remained in the blind spot of Western knowledge.
After my last stay in Kenya, I continued writing this book in Tanzania. In Zanzibar, I met Dr Said, a traditional healer who treats hundreds of people voluntarily. He was trying to build a small hospital and a school so that he could continue healing and transmit his oral knowledge—knowledge rooted in plants, prayers, gestures, and inherited forms of care. I felt immediately drawn to him: to his detachment from material life, to his depth without solemnity, and to the disarming clarity of one sentence he repeated to me: “Our future ends tomorrow, and so does our stock of food.”
During my travels, without guarantees, without insurance, and without the psychological scaffolding that organizes so much of life in Geneva, many of the people I met seemed less crushed by the weight that bears down on so many Western lives. When the future is no longer endlessly calculated, and when the self itself is no longer treated as a targeted object of calculation, something shifts. Do those whom we still call “underdeveloped” not have, perhaps, the deepest lessons to offer the so-called developed world?
I do not romanticize poverty, precarity, or Africa. Misery is real. But it is intellectually weak to assume that material protection produces psychic health. Europe shows the opposite every day: people surrounded by guarantees and yet deeply anxious, exhausted, and internally impoverished, as if life had been reduced to the management of the Self, the countdown to holidays, and the calculation of retirement.
In Kenya and Tanzania, I kept hearing a recurring phrase: “I can’t complain.” It stayed with me, almost obsessively. Why? First, because I come from a world where complaint fills every minute. Second, because the phrase seemed to point toward another psychic configuration. It did not suggest an easier life, but a different relation to suffering, existence, and the self. It evoked a world in which the self had not yet been transformed into the supreme tribunal, the central battlefield, and the compulsory stage where everything must appear—suffering, certainly, but also the way one imagines, feels, enjoys, and inhabits the world.
In much of the contemporary West, by contrast, the self has become sacred, inflamed, and obese. It must define itself, improve itself, protect itself, narrate itself, display itself, justify itself, and heal itself—while carrying increasingly heavy burdens once distributed across community, ritual, religion, extended kinship, and shared symbolic worlds. In psychic terms, a “developed country” is often a society that has mastered external organization while transferring the burden of meaning inward. It has developed insurance, speed, comfort, data, and control; it has underdeveloped forms of collective holding, existential proportion, and the ability to live without making the self the center of every question.
In my clinical work in Geneva, I increasingly encountered patients who were not suffering from too little identity, too little freedom, or too little self-worth, but from an excess of self: too much self-monitoring, too much self-explanation, too much pressure to optimize, too much obligation to turn life into a successful personal project, and too much psychic formatting by the coupled ideology of the traumatized self and the good life. Often, their distress did not arise from emptiness alone, but from a saturation. They were crowded from within.
I do not propose that we imitate African life, nor that we reinstate tradition, religion, or scarcity. The lesson is subtler and more difficult. The people I met offered no ready-made solution; they offered another psychic configuration. They suggested that happiness may depend less on how much of life we own, control, insure, display, or optimize than on whether we remain open to what exceeds us: to others, to symbolic meaning, to spiritual depth, to dance, prayer, gratitude, improvisation, and the ordinary circulation of life. They suggested that the self becomes unbearable when it is made too central, too sacred, too responsible, too visible. And they suggested, above all, that a human being can remain upright even without guarantees—so long as the burden of existence is not carried by the self alone.
Somewhere between the dust of Nairobi, the sea light of Zanzibar, and the polished fatigue of Geneva, a question refused to leave me: how did we become so protected, and so unable to breathe? This book follows that question through the closed corridors of the modern self. It listens for the place where complaint replaced song, where security replaced meaning, where the mirror became heavier than the world. And it asks whether, beyond the swollen self, something in us still remembers how to levitate.
Introduction
Self-consumption is not selfishness. It is a structural condition in which the self becomes the place where cybercapitalism deposits a surplus of stimulation, visibility, comparison, performance, and self-evaluation for which no previous symbolic distribution existed. Older worlds could place meaning, value, obligation, salvation, and belonging outside the individual self—in community, ritual, religion, ancestry, nature, or cosmos. The new surplus generated by autonomous systems, however, has no such container. It is directed back into the self, which becomes the receiving chamber of pressures it was never built to contain. The self is then made sacred and mined, declared autonomous and conditioned, celebrated as free, while being governed through images, metrics, consumption, fear, and comparison.
This book examines that contradiction. Its central claim is that contemporary suffering cannot be understood only as a private malfunction of individuals, nor exclusively as the consequence of family wounds, diagnostic disorders, or personal fragility. Something more systematic is at work: the environments in which selves are now formed have themselves become pathogenic. They overinvest the self, stimulate it, compare it, expose it, measure it, frighten it, seduce it, and then blame it for the exhaustion produced by this very dynamic. The subject is told to adapt, regulate, perform, heal, optimize, and remain visible, while the conditions producing its distress remain largely opaque and purposefully silenced. This is the quiet obscenity of the age: the system manufactures suffocation, then sells breathing exercises. The object of this inquiry is what I call the economic self. The economic self is not the whole person. It is neither the soul, nor the body, nor temperament, nor memory, nor desire in its living complexity. It is the historically produced form of selfhood through which the person learns to relate to themselves a value: as something to be improved, displayed, defended, ranked, corrected, invested in, and made socially profitable. This self is formed early. It is installed through family expectations, schooling, reward and punishment, advertising, digital platforms, therapeutic language, professional norms, social comparison, and the invisible economic codes that teach the child what counts as valuable, shameful, admirable, risky, successful, or disposable.
By economic codes, I do not mean explicit financial rules alone. I mean the unconscious instructions through which a productivist and consumerist society enters psychic life. These codes do not simply say “buy” or “work.” They come embedded in a web of complex, often emotional, ideologies: be useful, be visible, be desirable, be efficient, be resilient, be flexible, be attractive, be emotionally manageable, be constantly available, and above all, do not fall out of social recognition. They enter the subject before they are recognized as codes. They are absorbed as tastes, ambition, shame, fear, preference, motivation, common sense. Their power lies precisely in the fact that the person experiences them as their own.
The economic self is therefore both active and passive. It chooses, but only within a field of choices already prepared for it. It desires, but only after desire has been cultivated. It expresses itself, but only through formats already coded by visibility and market value. It consumes, but also produces itself as consumable. It becomes content, data, profile, signal, target, archive, metric, and brand. Under cybercapitalism, this process is continuous. The subject is no longer shaped only by institutions, family, class, and work, but by automated environments that accompany the self into perception, attention, memory, sexuality, comparison, sleep, anxiety, and imagination.
This is why the book moves from capitalism to cybercapitalism. Capitalism organized production and consumption around lack, status, accumulation, and labor. Cybercapitalism goes further: it turns perception itself into an operating economic system. It captures the eye, the hand, the nervous system, the need for belonging, the fear of exclusion, the craving for recognition, the reflex to compare, and the vulnerability of memory. At the same time, its weapons are rarely spectacular. They are ordinary: the feed, the notification, the like, the ranking, the filter, the recommendation, the resurfaced memory, the personalized ad, the platform metrics. The violence does not always appear as violence because it arrives as entertainment, convenience, communication, self-expression, or care.
The result is self-consumption. Self-consumption names the process through which psychic energy, instead of circulating outward toward relation, symbolic life, creation, shared worlds, nature, prayer, imagination, or infinity, folds back into the self and burns there. The self becomes both fuel and furnace. It monitors itself, repairs itself, judges itself, optimizes itself, protects itself, displays itself, and attacks itself when it can no longer sustain the impossible burden placed upon it. This is not narcissism in the lazy sense. It is a civilizational trap: a mode of subjectivity in which life is forced to return obsessively to the self until the self begins to consume the very energy that should have allowed it to live.
This book also develops the concept of Pathomorphic Social Selection. The claim is not that cybercapitalism biologically selects pathological individuals in a crude genetic sense. That would be vulgar and false. The claim is sharper: contemporary digital-economic environments reward subject-forms that resemble, intensify, normalize, or exploit pathological modes of functioning. They reward visibility over interiority, responsiveness over reflection, excitation over regulation, performance over organism, and extractability over flourishing. The selected subject is not necessarily the healthiest one, but the most operable: reactive, visible, productive, emotionally intense, comparable, available, and data-generating. The system does not ask whether such a subject can remain alive in any deep sense. It asks whether the subject can continue to perform, consume, produce, expose, and return.
Such selection generates an evolutionary trap. Traits once linked to survival—attention to threat, social comparison, desire for belonging, reward-seeking, imitation, vigilance, curiosity—are captured by artificial environments that no longer serve long-term viability. Hunger becomes craving. Rest becomes guilt. Visibility becomes value. Recognition becomes oxygen. Exhaustion becomes resilience. Dysregulation becomes productivity. The organism adapts to what damages it. This is pathomorphic logic: the system rewards forms of adaptation that are biologically, psychologically, and spiritually costly, yet economically profitable.
The book is, therefore, both clinical and not. It is political, but not only. It is philosophical, but not only. Its approach is deliberately multidisciplinary because the pathology itself does not respect disciplinary borders. It traverses the nervous system, the immune system, the family, the school, the market, the platform, the image, the institution, the body, the symptom, the dream, the soul. Psychology that ignores economics, will misread the wound. A political economy that refuses psychic, life will miss the interiorization of power. A neuroscience that disregards meaning, will measure circuits while ignoring the world that trained them. A spirituality that denies material conditions, risks becoming a refined form of escape. The point is not to pile disciplines, but to follow the same disturbance across several fields of research into life.
This also means that the book is not anti-therapy, anti-modernity, anti-technology, or anti-self. That would be too crude and we must acknowledge that the modern self brought real emancipatory gains: dignity, autonomy, rights, protection against inherited authority, and the possibility of self-determination. Therapy has saved lives. Technology can connect, inform, and assist. The problem begins when these gains are absorbed into systems that turn autonomy into isolation, care into self-management, expression into exposure, and healing into adaptation to the very world that wounds. The task is not to destroy the self, but to displace it from the throne.
For this reason, the distinction between self and soul becomes decisive. The self is a necessary interface: it organizes identity, memory, adaptation, psychological continuity, and social legibility. Without some form of self, there is no responsibility, no promise, no ethical agency. But the self is not the whole. The soul, in the vocabulary of this book, names the dimension of human experience that resists reduction to function, visibility, utility, trauma, performance, and measurable value. It names the place of meaning, imagination, belief, transcendence, and relation to infinity. It may be understood religiously, spiritually, phenomenologically, symbolically, or clinically. What matters is not the doctrinal certainty. What matters is that without this dimension, the self must carry everything alone. And when the self carries everything alone, it inflates, collapses, or both.
Infinity, here, is not a vague metaphysical label. It names the opening through which the finite self can regain proportion. In older symbolic worlds, infinity—whether approached as God, cosmos, ancestors, spirits, mystery, deep time, the dead, the unborn, or the sacred—helped decenter the ego. The human being did not have to become limitless, because life was already situated within something that exceeded it: the unfathomable. However, cybercapitalism has not abolished infinity; it has degraded it. It has replaced depth with loop: infinite scrolling, endless updating, continuous optimizing, permanent comparing, and limitless information simulating boundlessness, while enclosing the person more tightly inside reactivity. The self, then, is no longer placed before what exceeds it. It is trapped inside what exhausts it.
The book, therefore, moves towards a counter-principle: circulation. The opposite of self-consumption is not austerity. It is not moral purity, minimalism, or heroic self-control. It is circulation: the restoring of movement between self and world, body and meaning, individual and others, suffering and symbol, finitude and infinity. Blood is not a possession; it is passage. A lung does not live by inhaling forever. A mind does not remain sane by speaking only to itself. Life persists through exchange. The self must breathe, receive, give, lose, transform, and be interrupted by what is not itself.
The chapters that follow trace the formation, inflation, exhaustion, and possible release of and for the economic self. The path begins with suffocation and finishes with circulation. It begins by asking what happens when systems close, and it ends by discussing how the self might become a passage again.
Presentation of Chapters
Chapter 1—The suffocated self
The central argument of this chapter is that living systems cannot survive by enclosing themselves in pure self-reference, fantasies of total safety, or sealed autonomy. When a system closes itself too completely, it loses discrimination. Defense becomes enclosure, enclosure becomes rigidity, and rigidity becomes self-directed violence. The suffocated self is therefore not a private weakness, but one of the first traits of the manufactured economic self—an entity which is sealed, overprotected, overstimulated, deprived of vital exchange, and trained to turn psychic energy inwards and against itself. Thus, the first chapter introduces “the suffocated self” as the psychic form of a closed system. It begins from the image of solitary confinement, where the mind, deprived of alterity, begins to feed on itself. From there, the chapter follows analogous observations across biology, psychology, and society: the immune system that turns against its own tissues, the body consumed by chronic fear, the mind trapped in rumination, and political communities that confuse protection with purification.
Chapter 2—Force-fed desire: gavage and the conditioning of the consumer self
The second chapter examines consumer capitalism as a regime of gavage. In such configuration, desire is not treated as naturally sovereign, but as something manufactured, intensified, and force-fed beyond the organism’s tolerable thresholds of need, pleasure, and satiety. The chapter moves from advertising and manufactured wants through hyper-palatable foods, algorithmic feeds, gamified platforms, and reward loops, toward the moralization of productivity itself; it argues that the contemporary consumer self is not simply weak or undisciplined; it is passivated. It appears active on the surface—choosing, buying, clicking, eating, watching, and displaying itself—while desire has already been conditioned at a deeper level. The body is one of the most visible sites of this contradiction and it becomes overfed and disciplined, seduced and shamed, saturated and corrected. Gavage, therefore, concerns not only nutrition: it is psychic, digital, social, and political.
Chapter 3—The unconscious economy of the self
The third chapter asks how the economic self is installed before the child can recognize economic codes as codes. It extends the concept of the economic unconscious by examining how productivity, conformity, visibility, efficiency, and adaptability become internalized as signs of value, while slowness, divergence, vulnerability, resistance, and imagination, are devalued. The chapter looks at the mechanisms through which this psychic economy is formed: sensory and attentional conditioning, reward and punishment, emotional contagion, normative influence, hypnotic entertainment, visual colonization, and algorithmic pressure. These mechanisms are, in turn, themselves vehicles for powerful forces that produce and maintain unconscious scripts of conditional value, self-shame, and self-surveillance. The economic self does not begin when the child earns money or enters the market. It begins when the child learns to experience existence as something that must be justified, measured, corrected, and made useful.
Chapter 4—The invention of the modern [economic] self
The fourth chapter offers a genealogy of the modern self. It rejects the idea that the autonomous individual is a timeless human fact. Rather, the chapter traces the movement from embedded pre-modern personhood, organized by kinship, religion, hierarchy, and shared symbolic worlds, to the modern thinking subject of Descartes, the proprietary self of Locke, and finally the contemporary entrepreneurial identity: the self as project, asset, and investment. The aim is not to deny the emancipatory achievements of autonomy, rights, and self-determination, but to show how these achievements were captured by economic rationality. The self becomes something to own, manage, improve, and defend. It is unbound from older authorities, but then left exposed to another command: prove your value. The chapter therefore names the historical passage through which the self becomes economically legible.
Chapter 5—The recursive model of global violence in the age of self-esteem
The fifth chapter examines the cult of self-esteem as the central mechanism in the production of fragile, defensive, and extractable subjectivity. It traces the self-esteem movement from late twentieth-century educational and therapeutic cultures to neoliberal forms of self-governance and contemporary digital visibility. The chapter argues that self-esteem becomes dangerous when separated from moral formation, humility, responsibility, solidarity, and truth. The subject is taught to feel valuable, display value, protect value, and repair value, while inhabiting systems organized by competition, insecurity, ranking, and conditional recognition. This produces what I call the Global recursive violence model of threatened selfhood: systems inflate the self, destabilize it, wound it, and then sell it compensatory solutions drawn from the very injuries they helped create. Self-esteem becomes a productive wound, converting insecurity, comparison, resentment, and validation-seeking into performance, data, consumption, and profit.
Chapter 6—The inflated self: a sacred burden
The sixth chapter considers the modern Western self as inflated, sacralized. The self is treated as the default unit of human existence, as if each person were naturally self-contained, autonomous, and self-owning. Yet, this figure is not universal. It is a cultural construction that has become too heavy for individuals and societies to bear. The chapter contrasts this isolated self with more relational forms of personhood and shows how modern life turns the self into a sacred burden: endlessly protected, repaired, optimized, and made responsible for meaning, dignity, security, and success. The economic self is described as analogous to a sinking boat: built to leak, condemned to repair itself, and made profitable because it never ultimately stays afloat. The chapter shifts the question from “Why are individuals failing?” to “What kind of civilization produced a model of personhood that cannot sustain the weight placed upon it?”
Chapter 7—Lostness: a diagnostic hypothesis
The seventh chapter formulates lostness—the condition of being lost—as a diagnostic hypothesis. To be lost is not merely to be confused, sad, or anxious. It is to lack fundamental stable coordinates for identity, meaning, belonging, and orientation. The chapter argues that contemporary lostness is a structured cultural disorder produced by the erosion and weakening of shared worlds, symbolic mediation, durable relations, meaningful limits, and contact with what exceeds the self. It develops this lostness across five axes: lost in society, lost in non-self objects, lost in consumption, lost in the self, and finally lost in self-consumption. The result is an emergence of a near-hallucinatory social field in which subjects no longer clearly know whether they are encountering others, machines, projections, market signals, or their own anxiety reflected back to them. And while the lost self is active, connected, informed, it is yet disoriented.
Chapter 8—Pathologies of the ecosystem, pathologies of the self
The eighth chapter turns from the self to the ecosystem that produces it. It argues that contemporary disorders cannot be understood only as failures of resilience or self-regulation. They are hybrid formations, partly rooted in individual suffering and partly produced by systemic forces. The chapter first maps pathologies of the digital-capitalist environment: informational overload, infodemic confusion, exploitation of negativity, brain rot, rage bait, algorithmic manipulation, social comparison, addictive reward loops, fragmentation, and networked ideational pathology. It then examines pathologies of the self in this inflamed ecosystem: depression, anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, burnout, cognitive overload, cyberchondria, quantified self-worth, and emerging AI-mediated disturbances. The ecosystem attacks the psyche; the psyche, unable to decipher or discharge the invisible forces colonizing it, is driven to turn against itself.
Chapter 9—Pathomorphic Social Selection and the self as evolutionary exception
The ninth chapter develops the book’s central evolutionary concept: Pathomorphic Social Selection. Cybercapitalism does not abolish selection; it corrupts the environment in which selection operates. It creates a global digital-economic niche where the selected subject is not the healthiest or most integrated form of life, but the most operable one: visible, reactive, productive, comparable, emotionally intense, data-generating, and exploitable under overload. The chapter is careful not to claim genetic selection of clinical disorders. Its claim is that cybercapitalism selects postures, affects, rhythms, instincts, and self-relations through which vulnerability becomes functional. The Blackout Challenge becomes the brutal emblem of this logic: visibility above breathing. What is selected is not life in its fullness, but life reduced to the few forms that can still be used under suffocation.
Chapter 10—From horizon to loop: the degradation of Infinity
The tenth chapter examines the loss and degradation of infinity. We can now observe how modernity did not simply dismantle metaphysical certainties; it reorganized the architecture of limits. What once functioned as horizon—God, cosmos, ancestors, mystery, deep time, the sacred, the unknowable—helped decenter the self and place it within a scale not of its own making. Cybercapitalism replaces this horizon with operational endlessness of noise: infinite scroll, infinite updates, infinite optimization, infinite information. The difference is decisive. Horizon creates distance and proportion; the loop produces saturation. The self no longer stands before what exceeds it, but is submerged inside streams that extract attention, fear, desire, and susceptibility. Infinity is degraded from regeneration into degeneration: no longer a way to breathe beyond the self, but an engineered mechanism of its own exhaustion.
Chapter 11—Self vs Soul and modern collapse of soul into self
The eleventh chapter clarifies the distinction between self and soul. The self is a constructed interface: the organization of identity, memory, adaptation, social recognition, performance, and psychological continuity through which the subject becomes legible. It is necessary, but it is not the whole. The soul, by contrast, opens onto a deeper dimension of psychic and spiritual life, where meaning, imagination, belief, transcendence, and relation to the infinite cannot be reduced to function. The chapter argues that modernity, especially in its capitalist form, has collapsed the soul into the self. Suffering is then reduced to dysfunction, low self-esteem, depression, or maladaptation, while its deeper source may be a broken relation to meaning and infinity. Clinically, this distinction matters. The task is neither to deny the self nor worship it, neither to deny trauma nor enthrone it, but to restore the dialogue between self and soul.
Chapter 12—Beyond the self: sharing your self, not your selfies
The final chapter offers possible resolution in the practical reversal announced by the chapter title: “Sharing your Self, not your Selfies.” It begins from the critique of scopic capitalism, where the self is pushed to exist as image: cropped, displayed, updated, compared, evaluated, monetized, and defended until it becomes both idol and captive object. The chapter then asks how the self can be released from the mirror. The solution is not self-destruction, but re-situation: placing the self back within collective, ecological, symbolic, and spiritual relations. Charity, generosity, detachment, creativity, prayer, ritual, intuition, dialogue with the invisible, imaginative journeys, awe, and attention to the ordinary miracle of life, all function as practices of such displacement. They loosen the self’s monopoly on meaning and transform it from a closed vault into a passage. The self is not abolished; it is returned to circulation.
Epilogue—From self-consumption to circulation
The epilogue circles back to the opening’s image to invert it. The book began with the obese self: overfed, overprotected, saturated with comfort, and yet unable to breathe. It ends with the possibility of circulation. Therefore, the epilogue widens the argument politically, asking how fragmented selves participate in a fragmented civilization: the rise of AI as synthetic authority, populism as counterfeit collective body, the weakening of post-war institutions, the erosion of mediation, and the emergence of non-kinetic autonomous weapons that target attention, fear, memory, desire, and self-image. But the final movement remains clear: the answer to self-consumption is not in more self. It is in circulation. A meal given, a grievance released, a screen closed, a prayer whispered, a child protected from capture, a body allowed to rest, a wound placed inside a larger story. The book ends where life resurfaces again: when something stops being hoarded and starts moving.
