This piece is not written to impress but to express some deep held beliefs. Not with the aim to showcase mastery of political philosophy or psychoanalysis, but to open a door to healing—mine, and maybe yours too. This essay is not a thesis; it’s a weave. A quiet unraveling of how generational wounds live in the body, not just the mind. How sovereignty isn’t a posture of control, but a reclamation of breath, attention, and the self. It explores how our nervous systems, conditioned by threat and performance, need rewiring, not through force, but through presence. Drawing on thinkers like Kierkegaard, Rollo May, Carl Jung, and Jean Baudrillard, the piece examines the architecture of anxiety in a hyper-visible, emotionally extractive world. From the subtle teachings of fifth graders to the slow discipline of patience, from emotional refusal to spiritual re-rooting, this is an invitation to resist the culture of appearances, not through disappearance, but through discernment.
To breathe less. To feel more.
To remember what you’ve always known:
The future does not belong to performance.
It belongs to presence.
The Weight of Writing Anyway
I’ve avoided writing this for a while. Maybe because it felt like too much. Too abstract. Too easy to come off like I was trying to sound wiser than I am, like someone who has it all figured out. But the longer I sat with myself, the more I started to notice that a lot of what I once thought of as “mine”—my ideas, my instincts, even my sense of right and wrong weren’t always original. They were often borrowed. Inherited. Picked up through repetition and reward, woven into my nervous system by a culture that rewards performance and punishes pause. René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire sheds light on why this is so powerful. In Violence and the Sacred,1 he suggests that what we often perceive as our own genuine desires are actually imitations—responses shaped by the desires and signals of those around us. Our wants aren’t formed in a vacuum; we are drawn to what others appear to want.2
What we believe often starts as what we think we need to believe to belong. And still—here I am, writing anyway. Not from a place of knowing, but from the only place that feels real: that stretch between the quiet voice inside and the self that chooses to act. That’s where healing happens.
Over the last three years, I’ve come to know that stretch more intimately through my work as a fifth-grade teacher. It’s a role that softened me, stretched me, and surprised me. Teaching didn’t just teach me patience; it taught me courage. It gave me a spiritual push: to speak up even when unsure, to lead with care instead of control. It helped me find my voice—a deep, authentic knowing that guides from the heart. I wanted to explore what it means to truly be in a "flow state"—that feeling of complete absorption and joy—and how we can reach it without the constant, anxious worry that we are somehow separate from the vast universe. I believe we can find connection and peace, even when facing life's toughest challenges, by simply using our words and acting with pure intentions.
There’s something humbling about showing up for children every day, holding their questions, their moods, their wonder. In learning to hold theirs, I learned to hold mine too. To speak, to feel, to show up: not perfectly, but fully. Because maybe enlightenment isn’t about becoming something new. Maybe it’s just a slow remembering of what we’ve always known.
The Culture of Appearances: Simulacra, Narcissism, and the Fear of Depth
There’s a truth we rarely say aloud: your worth might still be tired from giving in ways that only deplete you. You may think this exhaustion is your personal failure: that you're not “enough,” not strong, disciplined, or spiritual enough. But beneath this fatigue lies the historical weight of a collective wound. Generational. Cultural. Psychological. So I ask: How much longer will we keep blaming the collective unconscious for individual suffering, without ever pausing to understand the gravitational pull it exerts on every thought we try to liberate?
Why do we follow ideas only to the point where they bruise our ego, then retreat? Perhaps we need to rethink the very nature of modern thought: especially how our thoughts are demanded, turned into money, and "performed" for others. This is because we've become so deeply accustomed to seeking approval and agreement that we often forget: the more we fit in, the more certain systems benefit financially.
Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,3 names this system for what it is. Every provoked reaction—every defensive comment, every angry repost, every thirst-trap caption, every quote-tweet laced with rage—generates behavioral surplus. This is the data you leave behind when you access digital spaces; what seem like expressions of freedom are actually harvested as resources to feed predictive algorithms. These algorithms then feed advertisers, and the advertisers pay.
Surveillance capitalism was born when companies realized that even your emotional residue—the subtle feelings and reactions you leave online, what once seemed like digital "exhaust"—could be collected, sold, and used to predict your behavior. What you thought was disposable became profitable. And what you thought was private became a product, creating a kind of simulacra where the copy (your online performance or digital trace) begins to overshadow, or even replace, your true self, as thinkers like Baudrillard explored.
Here’s the sobering truth: If you were more regulated, if you truly paused to feel your "second self" before speaking, there would simply be less for these systems to extract. If you waited before reacting, you might write one clear, thoughtful post instead of fifty angry replies. If you questioned the headline before retweeting it, you might break the chain of contagion before it spreads. If you stepped away before reacting, you might find—miraculously—that you had nothing left to say at all.
And in that silence, you would become less valuable to the machine.
Not to yourself. Not to your community.
But to the system designed to profit off your fracture.
Emotional Sovereignty Is Not Gentle
There’s a hard truth about sovereignty—especially emotional sovereignty—that rarely gets spoken:
It is not gentle. It is not neutral. It is not even fair.
It is the decision to deny your volatility to others, and instead reserve your agency for yourself. In a world that thrives on extraction—of labor, of time, of intimacy—this is not just a choice. It is an act of resistance.
Self-regulation is not about being calm. It’s about being anchored. Anchored to the truth of what you are, and what you refuse to become. And sometimes, the refusal itself is the anchor.
Think of Bartleby, Melville’s quiet scrivener, whose simple yet disquieting phrase—“I would prefer not to”—echoes like a soft rebellion against the machinery of productivity and expectation. Bartleby doesn’t shout, doesn’t explain, doesn’t comply. He simply resists, by withholding himself.
In a world that profits from your reactions, your explanations, your every click and emotional leak, to prefer not to is a form of psychic preservation. A withdrawal not out of weakness, but from a deeper alignment with one’s inner truth.
Sovereignty, then, might look less like dominance and more like discernment. Less like action, more like restraint. Less like performance, more like presence.
We often confuse self-regulation with serenity. But it’s not about appearing composed—it’s about reclaiming your breath from the jaws of constant demand. As James Nestor reminds us, the secret to optimal breathing is not more, but less. Fewer inhales. Smaller volume. A quieter rhythm.
In a world that conditions us to overreact, overshare, and overextend, even the breath becomes commodified—short, shallow, rushed. To slow it down is to step out of that circuitry. To breathe less is not deprivation; it is deprogramming. A return to rhythm not dictated by urgency, but by inner truth.
And that’s where emotional sovereignty begins, not in grand declarations, but in the quiet rebellion of not leaking your nervous system to every stimulus. Not performing stability, but practicing it by choosing what gets access to your breath, your blood, your becoming.
Freedom and the Burden of Anxiety: Kierkegaard, May, and the Modern Self
Rollo May called it decades ago: we are living in an age of anxiety.
But it was Kierkegaard who gave us a deeper frame. He believed anxiety arises when we confront freedom—not the consumer freedom to choose between options, but the spiritual freedom to become. To choose a self. To take responsibility for becoming that which only you can be.
“Self-strength,” May wrote, “develops out of the individual’s successful confronting of anxiety-creating experiences.” To face anxiety, then, is not to avoid pain but to become worthy of one's own becoming.
Yet this confrontation—so vital to human growth—has become increasingly difficult in a hyperconnected, hypervisible world where our inner experiences are constantly externalized, tracked, and commodified.
Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear has an object. Anxiety is diffuse, ambient, existential. It is a signal that the self is under threat—not physically, but symbolically. When your culture is invalidated, when your identity is dismissed, when your values are gaslighted, anxiety arises.
Here, May’s insights collide with Kierkegaard’s in a sobering truth about our time: the kind of anxiety we most often feel today is not simply existential. It is neurotic—amplified by the sense that we are being used, watched, and mined. Our digital presence has become a form of currency in a surveillance economy. Our emotions are no longer private—they are harvested.
So while Kierkegaard’s anxiety was metaphysical and May’s was psychological, today’s anxiety is also political. Structural. Engineered.
And that anxiety is not felt equally across all bodies.
The Psychological Afterlife of Culture
There is a wound that culture carries, and it doesn’t vanish with education or assimilation. Anxiety manifests differently across geographies, histories, and social hierarchies. Asians report higher anxiety than Europeans or White Americans. Black Americans, despite generations of resilience and creativity, often experience heightened performance-based anxiety in educational systems that devalue their lived experience. What is normalized for some is invalidated for others.
Some of this is neurological. Much of it is cultural displacement.
When the culture you inherited is at odds with the one you live in, anxiety becomes your baseline. And when your internal cultural compass clashes with dominant societal expectations, your nervous system becomes a site of conflict.
The greater the gap, the deeper the anxiety.
It shows up in breakdowns of intercultural communication. In scapegoating. In silence. It shows up in the body—in ulcers, heart disease, eating disorders. In the quiet wars we wage against ourselves, just to survive the gaze.
Reeves’ analysis of Rollo May’s theory, written in 1977, touches on this in the context of the American civil rights movement. When an individual’s sense of selfhood is disrupted by radical societal shifts, the resulting anxiety often transforms into hostility—misdirected toward those who represent the change. This played out violently in America’s Deep South, where resistance to the civil rights movement culminated in horrific acts of racial violence. The federal government had to deploy military troops to manage the escalation.
Today, we witness similar dynamics in new forms: xenophobia, polarization, terrorism. In a globalized world where cultural collisions are inevitable and digital platforms magnify every difference, we are still playing out the unresolved anxieties of historical change.
And all of this—every cultural conflict, every internal dissonance, every chronic sense of “not enough”—gets folded into the psychic economy of the digital age.
You don’t just feel the anxiety.
You perform it. You tweet it. You get rewarded for it. You get addicted to it. And you keep producing data.
This is the psychic afterlife of capitalism: a condition where the soul becomes the site of extraction.
So, what can we do?
We learn to pause.
We learn to regulate.
We learn to recognize that healing isn’t just personal—it’s political. And that to reclaim your nervous system, to say no to immediate reactivity, is not just wellness. It is resistance.
Capitalism, Competition, and the Violence of Self-Denial
Rollo May once wrote that the dominant goal in America is competitive individual success. And in pursuit of that goal, we have often bypassed our own humanity.
From the repression of sexuality to the pathology of thinness, from Type A hostility to the relentless need to prove our worth, capitalism doesn’t merely shape economies—it shapes identities. It has taught us to see ourselves as machines: productive, polished, replaceable. But we are not machines. We are stories. We are ruptures. We are contradictions. And the soul cannot thrive under the tyranny of optimization.
One of the most radical acts of inner evolution, then, is to stop placing ourselves at the center of the universe. This isn’t about denying our worth—it’s about decentering the illusion of exceptionality. We are not the sun. We are not the axis. We are part of a constellation. To believe otherwise is to be trapped in the idea that our suffering, our insights, our awakenings must all be extraordinary. But they’re not. They are profoundly human.
Even the Sanskrit phrase Aham Brahmasmi, so often misread as “I am the universe” in a self-glorifying way, offers a far more humbling truth: I am part of that which is whole. This is not a declaration of personal divinity, but a dissolving of ego into a larger belonging. A cosmic participation. A return.
And it is this return that allows us to truly empathize—not as a spontaneous virtue, but as a practiced discipline. The ability to see from another’s perspective. To relinquish our need to be the protagonist in every room. To notice how others carry pain that is not our own. This matters deeply in the work of healing—because when we stop assuming that everyone shares our view, we begin the work of true understanding.
To write this is to reclaim the parts of myself I abandoned in my quest to be acceptable, impressive, or safe. This is not just about healing. It is about remembering.
Remembering that thought, word, and deed are sacred.
That appearances are not a substitute for truth.
That to feel deeply is not a flaw, but a form of freedom.
To search for the soul today is to resist.
To heal is not to retreat from the world, but to make a new contract with it.
And perhaps most importantly:
The future does not belong to the performance.
It belongs to the presence.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation—and that is an act of political warfare.” - Audre Lorde
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Kaur, Harnidh. Sunday Longread: Your Worst Self Makes Them Rich. Your Better Self Makes You Free: A Case of Conscious Self-Regulation. HK’s Newsletter, 13 July 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-168095502.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
In the age of digital capitalism, lots of our anxiety is due to the sense that society is losing its grip on humanity. Your article brings attention to many important aspects of preserving our humanity. Thank you.
The larvae to butterfly diagram is sublime illustration for the underlying theme of individual soul experiences within modern society eventually evolving into cultural context woven in this essay. Samridhi is almost lyrical as she summarizes her experience teaching children living life as related to her personal experience while gently posing questions to the reader and integrating clearly stated perspectives from reflections of a deeply lived life. As we butterflies emerge from one phase to the next all these interwoven cycles continue.