The Commodified Self and the Designed Collapse of Generation Z

Since Covid, the “mental health crisis” has gone from background music to a deafening noise. It is said to touch every part of society, but none more than Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2013. The French figures give the scale: compared with the previous decade, psychiatric hospitalizations in 2021–2022 rose 106 percent among 20-to-24-year-olds, 163 percent among 15-to-19-year-olds, and a staggering 246 percent among children aged 10 to 14. Researchers spent a decade arguing over datasets. 

Parents look for a single culprit they can blame or a device they can confiscate. Having exhausted the managerial and therapeutic answers of more awareness, more services, more medication, and more self-expression they offer for every modern sorrow, institutions are now itching for the stick of social networks age verification, or for AI fear porn. Two excellent books written by two Generation Z authors and published this year refuse the usual explanations and their lazy remedies. They do not deny the disastrous effects of smartphones, lockdowns, or ubiquitous pornography. They insist that these were oil poured on a well-established fire.

Freya India’s GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything is the report from inside girlhood. Pierre Valentin’s The Malaise of Generation Z, alas not yet available in English, broadens the perspective to the entire Zoomer generation, taking Christopher Lasch as a guide. Read together, they describe one event: the transfer of the inner life from families, churches, trades, and ordinary adult authority to a tutelary, market-therapeutic complex specialized in the production of a fundamentally dependent and weak self. In other words, the “mental health crisis” is not happening by default, but by design.

India and Valentin’s books are not interchangeable. Born in 1999, India is a British woman who was given a smartphone at eleven and later logged off to think…and to live. Her popular Substack is essential reading on what it feels like for girls to grow up as content. 

GIRLS® is personal without being a memoir and researched without being bland journalism. Born in 1998, Valentin is a French political essayist. His subject goes well beyond what screens do to boys or girls. It is a whole age group, from early adolescence to the edge of thirty, whose shared experience is no longer a war, an economic crisis, musical tastes, or a common work, but a psychiatric curve. Specialists agree that this generation is more depressed, more anxious, more fragile, and more unhappy than those that preceded it. But they completely miss the mark on what that fact means.

The Brand Called Girlhood

India’s title is the argument. Girls have been remade into GIRLS®. They are ornaments under filters, objects on dating apps, brands under management, lives packaged for an audience and priced by public rating. Her book is not another self-righteous and exasperating sermon taken from the register of luxury stoicism about “too much Instagram,” like Jonathan Haidt’s lazy conclusion in The Anxious Generation.

In that book, Haidt, who is atheist, pleads for mass transnational prohibitions, particularly age verification, and, as Pierre Valentin ironically points out, ends with a utilitarian eulogy of religion! It is a minutely detailed account of how a web of industries exploited the oldest vulnerabilities of girlhood by turning them into a commodity and marketing them as empowerment. Beauty, psychiatry, pornography, dating, and tech all pull attention inward, toward appearance, feeling, and appetite. In an almost burlesque version of Mandeville’s bee fable, it is vanity turned into liberation.

GIRLS® moves through six stations. Filtered focuses on girls’ anxieties over their faces and bodies, revised by apps that began with very few filters and became a permanent and unforgiving tribunal. Diagnosed is the conversion of ordinary unhappiness into a portable identity, complete with language, community, and a product line to transform mental health into a market worth billions of dollars with influencers, therapy apps such as Better Help, and medication companies all profiting from girls’ pain.

Documented is the description of a life lived under the dual yoke of social status and popularity and how young girls of Freya India’s generation became “the most documented generation in history.” Disconnected and Detached are the social and erotic aftermath: simulated friendship, simulated sex, a generation loud about self-love and body positivity that is also driving demand for eating-disorder clinics and cosmetic procedures. “Empowered,” in quotation marks, is the slogan that closes the trap. A girl who is told that the future is female, that she can be anything, that her feelings are sacred, discovers that she is anxious, risk-averse, and afraid of the future. The industries that congratulated her will happily treat her fears.

The strength of India’s argument is that she will not flatter her generation and will not sneer at it. She knows what her generation has lost. She knows that the old anxieties of looks, status, friendship, and romantic love did not begin with a feed. What started with Facetune and Snapchat’s Lenses, however, was the intensification of these anxieties to a point that no character can bear, and their capture by firms that profit from the impossibility of ever being whole. Coming of age was always hard, but it was nothing like growing up in an algorithmic marketplace that made interior life the last frontier of what can be harvested and turned into a business model. Some of her descriptions of that form of existence are deeply moving:

“My generation never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never got to experience a first kiss or hold hands with a boy before watching Pornhub. We never knew flirting before it became sending Instagram DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it meant keeping up Snapstreaks and using each other like props to look popular online.

And freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily, to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear they would be posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while, without the pressure of read receipts and active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.”

Three essential things have been lost for her generation: 

(1) a sense of belonging, of rootedness, of community lived as something bigger than ourselves;

(2) a sense of moral guidance. In the past, she writes, “guidance came from families, communities, religious leaders, shared values, and cultural traditions. Much of that has now fallen away. Now it feels as if the world is moving too fast for wisdom, and so adults have largely stepped back[…] And when adults stepped back, companies stepped in.”

And (3) ourselves. Relentless commodification, she writes, leads to “confusion about who we are, what we want, and what would make us happy – a confusion corporations are waiting to exploit […] The things we have lost are the things that make us human.”

The Program Succeeded

Valentin starts from the same wreckage and refuses the medical monopoly on its meaning. He is careful to avoid a triple methodological error: the adult “youngism” that glorifies whatever comes from the young; the wholesale adult critique that is merely the inverse of that piety; and the young’s own youngism, which mistakes youth for a bearer of revealed truth. 

His generation, he writes, suffers from “a crisis of meaning […], which originates in the fact that we have renounced defining ourselves as a collectivity with a common project to view ourselves as an aggregate of individuals that nothing binds together, except maybe interest.”

In other words, he continues, “the mental health crisis is not an accident within a process; it is the consequence of the full application of our anthropological choices. The program succeeded, and the youth is failing.” 

If the crisis were only psychiatric, the explosion of therapists, awareness campaigns, diagnostic categories and prescriptions would by now have bent the curve. Far from it. One of the sharp breaks in the data falls in the first half of the 2010s, the same years in which young Americans began agreeing in large numbers that life often seems meaningless. For reference, Snapchat launched in 2011, TikTok in 2016, and Discord in 2015. 

For sure, phones mattered in this drama. Covid too. But Valentin argues that these shocks aggravated dynamics already at work: an individualism degraded to a solipsism that dissolves the bonds that once held a person together, a future that no longer invites projection, an ideological militancy that isolates its own believers, and a therapeutic culture that treats ordinary moral life as a clinical problem. All this, he insists, feeds a culture of survivalism, where “everyday life patterns itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity,” as Christopher Lasch wrote.

That last point is where Lasch precisely enters, and where India and Valentin’s arguments merge into one.

Three Parties of the Psyche

Valentin’s ingenious move is to build his argument on Lasch’s attempt to redefine the political landscape through the psychoanalytical categories of the superego, the rational self, and the ego ideal. In The Minimal Self, Lasch argued that the old left-right map no longer accurately described the country’s deep sources of disagreement. Instead, he distinguished three parties that were organizing themselves around the three psychoanalytical concepts describing the human psyche. 

The party of the superego sees the modern disorder as the result of a collapse of inhibitions and internalized authority. Its remedy is the recovery of limits, of taboos, of a conscience able to refuse impulse. Though it can overlap with the contemporary right, this party should not be confused with it. Many conservatives, whom I would call paleo-liberals, have a very poor understanding of the superego; they want the freedom of the consumer and, when that freedom produces chaos, they have no qualms about reaching for the coercion of the state. 

The party of the ego, the rational self, sees the problem as insufficient adjustment. Its remedy is a stronger coping apparatus: therapy as training in competence, the well-managed individual who treats feeling as a risk to be optimized. This matches quite clearly the technocratic ethos and the promethean technological impulse.

The party of the ego ideal, which Lasch called the party of Narcissus, sees the problem as repression. Its remedy is liberation from the forbidding parent and identification with idealized images of boundless self-realization. Historically, this was the gospel of the cultural left and the Neo-Freudian revolt against guilt. In practice it did not produce freedom. It produced a punitive gap between the grandiose image of what the self should be and the depleted self that actually must reside in this world.

Generation Z, argues Valentin, was raised after the party of a human and mature superego had already lost the contest, or more accurately abdicated, inside a culture that fused the other two parties into a single machine. The therapeutic rational self and the commodified ego ideal now operate together to cement a weak personality, which Lasch called the minimal self, characterized by an unhealthy obsession with one’s psychic comfort. Obviously, Lasch died in 1994, i.e. three years before the first cohort of Gen Z, so this evolution predated Gen Z, but that is when the process reached a stage near completion.

In this arrangement, writes Valentin, the rational self is not the old liberal ego of delayed gratification and empirical testing. It is the app-mediated self that tracks mood, diagnoses itself from a carousel of labels, performs for an audience, and treats other people as bacteriological risks. Following Lasch, Valentin describes the therapeutic paradigm with aching accuracy.

It sacralizes the patient’s feeling. It treats moral judgment as violence. It discredits authority as such. It frees the person of the burden of responsibility while exercising a very punitive paternalism it will not name. It is especially powerful in the Anglo-Protestant countries where 19^th century Protestant liberal religion made it a more fertile ground, explaining why the therapeutic culture that translates civic life into “mental health” has gone the furthest in the US. But it is catching up fast in zombie Catholic cultures like France and the rise of therapeutic morality is probably one of the deepest trends of the Americanization of European society. 

India shows the commercial face of the same ego. Therapy is no longer a rare and costly conversation. It is a subscription, a chatbot, a same-day prescription, a content genre. Diagnosis is not the beginning of a difficult inquiry into a life. It is a brand affiliation. The girl in her chapter Diagnosed and the patient in the waiting room are the same figure seen from two angles: she is a person invited to experience her soul as a condition requiring management.

Products and the Womb

The ego ideal has undergone parallel degradation. In a healthy formation, it is demanding and humanizing. It is the internalized image of a parent, a teacher, a saint, a king, a mentor: someone the young person can identify with and view as a protector and a model. What India documents is a fluctuating role model which can be purchased by the hour. Filters, routines, “that girl” aesthetics, the sexual script downloaded from pornography, the political persona that must never be impure: these are not models of adulthood. They are a recipe for the worst kind of restlessness, one of a self that can never be content, bombarded with contradictory injunctions by electronic signals.

Valentin’s harsher formula is that the implicit ideal of his generation is the oceanic contentment of life in the womb. Gen Z’s survivalist imagination is fashioned by the metaphor of the cocoon, the den, the delivery app, the climate-controlled interior, with the outside perceived as contamination. These are not merely lifestyle facts. They are a regression of the ego ideal into the womb, from becoming this kind of adult to never having to be born into friction.

The counterpart of the womb experience is a paranoid exterior, a neo-Hobbesian sense that the street, the workplace, the unvetted other, and the unscripted future are threats to be managed rather than a world to be entered. India watches girls becoming products. Valentin watches a generation refusing to be born.

Shame without a Law

Meanwhile, the superego did not disappear. It morphed into something archaic, distant, and blindly punitive. As Lasch wrote, in a quote partly reproduced in Valentin’s book, the modern man who faces the world without fathers “imagines a remote, vindictive father and comes to see the world as starkly divided between power and impotence […] Psychologically, he remains in important ways a child, surrounded by authorities with whom he does not identify and whose authority he does not regard as legitimate. Their only importance to him is that they represent raw superior force which is capable of thwarting his wishes.”

“If he bows to these authorities,” continues Lasch, “it is only because he fears retribution.” Finally, he concludes, “he may harbor dreams of revenge, the most prevalent form of which, perhaps, is the fantasy of a general uprising of the young.” 

In this landscape, shame is no longer the voice that says you have offended a law you can name. It is the voice that says you have failed the brand. That is why a culture of extreme private permission produces extreme public moral terrorism, on a scale that only the State can carry out. Here again, Valentin quotes Lasch: “The only alternative to the superego […] is the super-state.”

The Victorian father is gone. In his place are a much more punitive feed that never sleeps and a strange predilection among Gen Z to call for the mediation of the State every time their psychic comfort is disturbed. This can take several unhealthy forms, such as a widespread recourse to denunciation, and the rise of what Valentin calls “cocomplotisme,” which can be translated as cocoonspirationism, or the tendency to believe in wild conspiracies as a means of survival in a society unintelligible to young men and women.

In a chapter entitled “Ideological Activism and Malaise,” Valentin analyzes the deep correlation between ideological radicalization, particularly on the far left, and the rise of mental troubles. The reason political ideology rushes into all corners of existence is that thicker languages have receded. Valentin notes the spiritual restlessness of the same young people who fill the clinics. Those who practice a religion are, on average, better protected, not because piety is a wellness hack but because gratitude and obligation pull a person out of the mirror.

However, when the Christian matrix thins, politics and medicine rush in to fill the old offices of sin, grace, and community. And they are no substitute for them. Grand explanations that make the person feel irrelevant or historically superfluous in a drama in which they play no part tend to push the young toward alienating ideologies. Borderline cultish groups that police speech supply belonging at the price of reality. India’s female online world is the intimate version of the same substitution: it mistakes trauma for content, reputation management for morals, politics for a home.

Transmission

Held together, these two books defy polite discussions and become subversive. The crisis is not solved by chemical compounds and better access to the same paradigm that helped produce it. It is not solved by a more inclusive feed or by teaching girls to love the brand. It is not solved by explaining every private failure as the work of a System and every private wound as a trauma that exempts. Those are the remedies of the fused parties of the rational self and the ego ideal. They have had a long run, but the curves are not bending.

What, then, would it mean to take Lasch’s third neglected agency seriously again, without turning the attempt into a dumb incantation for the return of order? That’s what India and Valentin attempt to articulate, humbly and often in a very moving way.

It would mean admitting that love without authority does not make a conscience, nor, for that matter, does authority without love lead anywhere. India’s generation was often parented by adults proud of their suspicion of religion, custom, and the right to forbid. Valentin’s generation inherited a family recoded as a private association of equals for affective flourishing. The family in the form of an “autarkic bunker” for sentiments can be somewhat tender, but as Lasch wrote in his 1977 book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, it is poorly equipped to transmit a world…and very susceptible to being invaded by experts. A child can be endlessly validated and still remain uninitiated. The phone then does what a weak adult world no longer does: it provides the gaze, the rule, the ideal, and the punishment, without an ounce of humanity.

Meeting that challenge seriously would also mean admitting that freedom without form is not a gift to the young. Both Valentin and India lean on the paradox of choice. Beyond a threshold, options cease to emancipate and begin to exhaust. India’s girls can theoretically be anything and therefore cannot bear the risk of being something. The sex recession beside ubiquitous pornography, the terror of motherhood beside a cult of autonomy, the inability to imagine a future except as climate or war or collapse: these are not signs of a generation in need of ever more permission. They are signs of a generation that was denied the dignifying constraint of true adults.

It would mean treating transmission as a political problem in the old sense: the handing on of practices that make the self whole. This would in passing validate the most important issue raised by the New Left: that the personal is, indeed, political. A generation sealed in the womb will not be lectured into the street. It will need work that is not a personal brand, worship that is not a vibe, friendship that involves more than a follow click, and, above all, adults willing to be disliked. India’s closing instinct points this way. 

India does not offer a five-point plan. She points toward community that is not an audience and toward faith in something that cannot be monetized or, taken from one of her recent articles on the commodification of Christianity, that is not “another thing to do on my phone.” That will sound hollow to paleo-liberal boomers who think you can solve anything with tepid policies and legislation such as age verification or TikTok’s restructuring. These issues are deeply personal, and you can’t legislate the interior life or treat it with policy papers. It requires the reconstruction of forms of life that corporations and the clinic have replaced and rendered strange. That task is going to require a lot more than an army of overeducated policy wonks. 

A generation was taught to experience itself as a product, a patient, and a profile. The way out is not a kinder product, a more affirming patienthood, or a more authentic profile. It is the recovery of a soul and a body that are not for sale, and of the unfashionable agencies, including the superego as something other than the mere incantation of a lost order or utilitarian calls for the comeback of Christian faith. Freya India has shown what the market did to girls when it was given the mirror.

Valentin has shown what a culture does to its young when it translates every sorrow into a diagnosis and every duty into a trauma. The rest is transmission: the slow, unprofitable work of teaching the next child that she is not a brand, that he is not a case, and that the world outside the womb, though it will not flatter them, is, alas, the only place where one can lead a human life. And who knows, maybe even a good one.