The sad trend of becoming a weepy widget in the feelings factories of Big Therapy, Inc.

Lately, YouTube has become stricter with accounts that use Adblock, preventing some videos from being played, or even slowing down performance. This happens sometimes even after you’ve disabled Adblock for a video and refreshed the screen, as for some reason Adblock will still default back to its ON setting.

It’s maddening, frustrating, and makes watching YouTube a painful process, as you’re forced to constantly reload videos. It’s a human rights violation as far as I’m concerned. Now I may end up having to subscribe to YouTube Premium, which is likely the ulterior intent of all this technical trip wiring.

In the meanwhile, I’m getting smacked around by tons of ads, including one for a therapy company called BetterHelp that really stuck out to me. It shows a young woman doing an amateur vlog-style video where she starts off saying, “I’ve been in therapy since I was six.”

I found this shocking and ridiculous. Why the hell would someone need to be in therapy at that young an age? I can barely remember when I was six. The only things I needed in life then were cartoons, frozen push-pops, my stuffed animals, hanging out with my friends and girlfriend (yes, I actually had one at that tender age and our first date was watching Pinocchio together at her house), and going to the video rental store to pick out a new movie every week. I don’t remember ever feeling the need to discuss my feelings with some v-sweatered stranger in a room with potted plants, and looking back on myself at that age as a mature adult, I’m glad I didn’t.

However, the young woman (whom I’ll call Therapy Lady) in the ad seems quite overjoyed to say she’s been in therapy for decades, and gives off a programmed happy vibe. She looks to be in her mid-twenties, probably college-educated, very conversant, almost certainly Westernized. White or possibly mixed, not that it matters. Likely from the middle-class. No visible handicaps or disabilities.

Therapy Lady doesn’t mention legit trauma, or some justifiable and/or understandable reason for why she’s been in counseling sessions since before smartphones existed. It’s not like she survived the Rwandan genocide as a little kid. She goes on to say how she’s always wanted to be “emotionally intelligent,” or something, because I guess that’s totally something a six-year-old would think. I was always telling my mom, whilst sipping my chocolate milk and reading the business section in the morning paper about how I wanted to be emotionally intelligent. I didn’t want to be like those other six-year-olds in the neighborhood, who were all uncivilized emotional ignoramuses. How embarrassing.

What does “emotionally intelligent” even mean? It sounds like one of those stupid sciency buzz words that’s meant to come acrss as more sophisticated than it actually is. I take it to mean, “The ability to blather on about my feelings all the time,” given the enthusiasm with which Therapy Lady was mugging for the camera in her vlog.

(Sidenote: The “TikTok Face” and “TikTok Voice” trends need to die also. TikTok Face is when someone, usually an obnoxious female, but plenty of guys do this, too, bobs and weaves her face all over into the camera in a contrived and melodramatic way to make her points about whatever. TikTok Voice is when they use a spoiled brat tone so every statement sounds like a big deal. It makes me feel like I’m being talked to by a crazy person on the street as opposed to being calmly informed.)

When did therapy go mainstream? When did it become something people seem thrilled to admit they need? When did openly sharing one’s perceived mental health issues in public as though they were discussing the weather become the norm?

Years ago when I was in college we were doing introductions in class, and some young woman just started blabbing about her struggles with depression. Excuse me lady, but nobody cares. This isn’t a Thursday night group therapy session, it’s fucking Literary Analysis. Save your navel-gazing for the dorm room, please.

Looking back, Depression Chick was fat and always sipping on giant Starbucks milkshakes in class. She was loaded up on sugar and caffeine, out of shape, sedentary, and almost certainly glued to her smartphone all day. Gee, no wonder she was “depressed.” She didn’t need therapy. She needed to hit the gym and improve her diet.

To make matters worse, Tom Brady partnered with BetterHelp for a promotion of one month of free therapy sessions for new customers. Brady says he’s been in therapy for 25 years, which would precede his time in the NFL.

Putting aside the fact that if a celebrity is touting something it’s almost always bullshit (I call this rule the Paltrow Constant), I just have to ask why in hell would someone like Tom Brady need to continue therapy for that long? I can see maybe using counseling at the early stages of his career, when he was just a fledgling athlete hoping for a shot at the draft and under all that pressure to perform. But why now still?

“Oh, God, I’ve won seven Super Bowls, made hundreds of millions, can date any supermodel I want, am in perfect health, am admired by millions, and am also extremely good looking, please someone help me!”

— Tom Brady (probably)

We’ll ignore the fact that Brady was probably paid north of $10 million for this promotional scheme, and ask this question: What exactly would someone like Brady need therapy for exactly? The guy is as close to being Superman as anyone could possibly get.

But let’s NOT ignore the elephant in the room. If you’ve been in therapy since you were a little kid like Therapy Lady, then clearly therapy is not working for you. That doesn’t even sound like therapy. It sounds like dependency. It sounds like you’re stuck in the subscription model of a business. Like Netflix. Only instead of shitty movies generated by an algorithm, you subscribe to a rent-a-friend who lets you verbally masturbate about your problems for a monthly fee. That’s not something to be proud of. That’s not something to make a TikTok video about praising yourself for doing. That’s like proudly announcing you have an STI. Not everything needs to be broadcast. Some things should be kept private.

On the surface therapy sounds like a positive trend. But I think it’s indicative of a decline in society. People may be more accessible due to social media and smartphones, but they are not truly connected. More and more people tend to have fewer and fewer friends and tend to live alone. Marriage rates have declined. Many families are atomized or broken due to divorce. People are having fewer children, who have them at all. More and more people are having to work more and more to make less and less. All the while the cost of living explodes higher everwhere. Less people are religious or live their life according to any meaningful doctrine outside of the “eat, sleep, consume media” cycle. Socialization is being substituted with screen time. On and on.

And while this observation is purely anecdotal, I couldn’t help but notice while browsing Better Help’s website of testimonials, that it seems to mainly be women who are all about this therapy thing. So it’s no suprise that Better Help recruited someone like Brady to be its spokesman. To give the impression that therapy is for guys, too, and that it’s not, you know, just for ladies to whine about their lives.

Therapy is clearly filling a void for some people. Therapy simulates what close friendships, religion, and the genuine connections of family used to freely provide. It’s become like a secular confessional.

But therapy has also become a social contagion, convincing otherwise normal people that they “need” it, with little reasoning other than nebulous terms like “emotional intelligence.” Or “trauma.” That’s another one. Everything and everyone has trauma these days.

Therapy may help some people. But it will always have an ick factor for me. If people have to remain in it for decades, how productive and useful can it really be? At a certain point a person has to accept that it’s up to them to deal with the world and fix themselves. You can’t outsource personal development. That can only come from within after overcoming struggle. What many people think they need therapy for is really just the natural process of maturity and aging. It’s just being an adult. It’s not supposed to be an easy or fun process. But that’s life.