emember when every family problem in a desi household could be solved with “bas sabr karo”?

Now, in contrast, the worst insult you can throw at someone is: “You’re a doormat.” Or toxic. Or avoidantly attached. Or an emotionally unavailable gaslighter with unresolved childhood trauma.

Sorry to break it to you, but we might have overcorrected.

Every awkward conversation is a boundary issue. Every ex is a narcissist. Every personality quirk is trauma. Every difficult emotion demands another podcast, another therapist’s reel, another four-slide Instagram carousel explaining why we are the way we are.

Somewhere between “just pray about it” and “let’s unpack that,” healing quietly became a fad for the ‘woke’ people.

Millennials did not become the therapy generation by accident. We inherited a world that felt unstable in ways our parents often did not. We came of age through recessions, wars streamed live into our bedrooms, climate anxiety, impossible housing markets, unstable jobs, social media and a loneliness epidemic. Many of us also grew up in families where mental health was either dismissed or hidden behind phrases like “everyone has problems” and “life means compromise.” So, of course, we turned towards psychology. We were trying to find a language for experiences nobody had taught us to name.

That shift has done enormous good. Conversations around depression, anxiety, trauma and abuse are no longer whispered. Therapy is no longer seen as something reserved for people in crisis, or for the ‘psychos,’ as they call it. People leave unhealthy relationships sooner. Parents are beginning to break cycles instead of repeating them. We have become more compassionate towards invisible struggles.

Those are real victories. We should be absolutely proud of them.

A problem begins when healing stops being a bridge and becomes the destination.

Spend enough time online and almost every ordinary human discomfort starts looking like evidence of unresolved trauma. Feeling jealous? Inner child wound. Having a disagreement? Emotional disregulation. Wanting reassurance? Anxious attachment. Needing space? Avoidant attachment.

Psychology gave us useful maps but the internet became the undeclared, unhinged, uninvited expert at it.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once warned that if you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Replace “abyss” with your own psyche and the warning still holds. Endless self-examination can slowly become another form of self-absorption. Psychologists even have a term that brushes against this idea: negative rumination. Some hardcore professional once called it “analysis paralysis.” The point is, repeatedly thinking about problems without moving towards solutions creates the feeling of working on yourself while quietly trapping you in the same emotional loops.

Healing can become another productivity contest. We optimise our nervous systems the way previous generations optimised their careers. It’s almost like being human means to feel like another project requiring constant upgrades.

Then there is an economic angle that rarely gets discussed. Healing has become a very profitable industry. Therapy apps, coaches, wellness retreats, supplements, courses, trauma-informed everything… Entire businesses now depend on convincing us that we are perpetually unfinished.

To be clear, therapy itself is not the problem. Good therapists often spend years helping clients become less dependent on therapy, not more. The issue is the wider wellness marketplace that quietly benefits from people seeing themselves as endless renovation projects. The god-awful consumer culture has always been good at selling inadequacy. It once told us we needed thinner bodies or bigger houses. Now it tells us we need more healing.

Perhaps the most subtle danger is moral. Healing language can become a shield against responsibility. Cutting people off becomes protecting peace. Never apologising becomes honouring your truth. Discomfort becomes a boundary violation. Sometimes those labels are accurate, but sometimes they simply make ordinary selfishness or, pardon my French, being a jerk, sound therapeutic.

Psychological vocabulary has extraordinary power because it sounds objective. It gives our choices the authority of science even when they are simply preferences.

None of this means we should swing back to emotional suppression or romanticise older generations, who survived by swallowing everything they felt. Silence has never been a reliable cure.

If every conversation becomes about your triggers, if every relationship becomes a diagnostic exercise, if every setback becomes another reason to turn inwards, something has gone wrong. Recovery is supposed to return you to life, not replace it. The ancient Stoics believed we become ourselves through action, not endless introspection. Existentialist philosophers argued that identity is shaped by the choices we make in the world.

Even modern psychology increasingly points towards behavioural activation. Sometimes the path out of emotional suffering is just getting out of bed, calling a friend, volunteering, laughing until your stomach hurts, falling in love, making terrible pottery, dancing badly at weddings. Most of all… forgiving those who hurt you, because humans are imperfect.

Life itself has always been one of the best therapists.

Healing was never meant to be a fashion statement, it was meant to help us rejoin the world we had temporarily stepped away from. There is a strange irony in spending hours every day thinking about recovery. At some point, you have to ask whether constantly examining the wound is preventing it from closing.

Becoming the most emotionally self-aware person in the room and knowing all the terminologies is a decent goal. But the real winner is someone who can finally stop thinking about healing long enough to actually live.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer who focuses on education, philosophy, music and culture