Backwards Blog
Core Capitalist Values - Their Impact So Far
Manufacturing Loneliness — Why and How Connection is Meant to Fail.
Today, I want to really drill down into what MIGHT be the solution to loneliness—connection—and make clear how the values we hold as a society make that connection so damn difficult. My hope is that, in understanding that, the real solutions—the ones we’re not shown in therapy or self-help books—might become clearer.
Two things sparked this episode. One was a well-meaning but completely-missing-the-point comment that made me realise: we need to pull together everything we’ve explored so far to understand that loneliness isn't just personal—it's structural. In many ways, it’s become a precondition for existing in this society.
The second was a very real experience—this is a bit of a raw check-in.
As I said in the very first episode, I am not doing this because I am healed. Loneliness is so hard to escape in our culture that I am still plagued by it. So, it was one of those evenings where the loneliness was so intense it felt like a physical ache. I needed to be around people. Not because being around people always leads to connection—it often doesn’t. We can feel profoundly alone with others when there’s no real openness. But as a middle-aged single person living with a dog, being around people still seemed like a better bet than sitting at home.
And somehow, that night, I met someone who let themselves be seen—and let me be seen in return. Someone who didn’t flinch. Who wasn’t performing. Someone who was really there. Really open. Also lonely, but warm, human, and real.
We talked for hours. Laughed. Drifted into those rare, unguarded places where nothing needs to be explained and nothing feels like too much. It was the kind of connection that lands in your body like a memory from the future—something you didn’t even know you were missing until it arrives.
It felt like home. No, not “home” as in familiar—because for those of us who grew up in families that felt like unsupervised psychiatric wards, familiar can be dangerous. No. This was something else entirely. It was safety. Softness. Mutuality. It was rare.
But then, the time was up.
Experiences like that are so uncommon in a world like this, and in a country like this, that it hit me hard. It reminded me how often intimacy is blocked—not just by logistics, as in our case. Not just because of timing or fear or the personal stuff we often cite, but also by the values we’re taught to hold too dear. In so many cases, we’re taught to close off, to override what we long for, before we even open up. And sometimes, we become so starved of real, authentic closeness that we hang on to broken connections just to avoid being alone. That latter one I’ve done myself. But that is just some of how our culture actively interferes with connection before it has a chance to root.
The experience also reminded me that you don’t have to be queer, middle-aged, and living alone with a dog to feel the full force of loneliness. You can feel it in your family of origin. You can feel it in a crowd. With friends who never open up. In a relationship where your partner no longer sees you.
My own loneliness feels so deep and chronic sometimes that I don’t know what to do with it. And I know I’m not alone in that. It’s a story many of us live, just in different settings.
And of course, a lot of people would respond to this too with, “Get therapy!” And whilst therapy can help us make sense of our feelings or even congratulate us on doing something “productive” with our pain, it can’t conjure connection. It can’t undo the values that have conditioned us to live in competition, to mistrust intimacy, to prize control over vulnerability.
That’s why, today, I want to explore the tension between psychology’s focus on the individual, and sociology and philosophy’s attention to the broader systems shaping our lives. Because it’s never just one or the other. Yet we’re so conditioned to focus on the individual—we blame ourselves for feeling lonely while staying blind to the wider isolation we’re swimming in. The wider isolation that’s drowning us all.
I want to pause here, because what we are swimming in—the system and the structures and institutions that uphold it—is what this podcast is really about. You can search for almost any podcast or article on how to “deal with” loneliness, and nearly every one will focus on you. What you might have done wrong. What you “should” do. As if loneliness is just a personal failing—a lack of effort, insight, or self-worth. As if all around you, everyone else is part of a rich web of community.
Trust me. I’ve done the therapy. I’ve done so much therapy there’s likely no modality you could name that I haven’t sat through—or studied. I’ve read the books. Done the work. Dug through the trauma. Bought the commodifying T-shirt.
And yet—I feel painfully alone most days.
There comes a point when you’ve done everything they say to do and still feel isolated. And that’s when it hits you—even though our culture makes it almost forbidden to say it:
The problem isn’t you. It’s society.
I may be struck by lightning, assassins, or self-righteous haters just for saying that. It’s anathema to the self-help industrial complex. To the wellness world. To certain kinds of therapy, too. Because they depend on you believing that you are the one who’s flawed. That your pain means you haven’t taken enough responsibility. That you haven’t worked hard enough. That you still, somehow, just need more therapy.
But I’m here to say: No.
Society is sick. And trying to adjust to a sick society may well make you sicker. If you’ve “failed” to adjust—if you can’t contort yourself into the shape this world demands—consider it a good sign.
It might just mean you’re still alive.
With that—on with todays post.
Western Cultural Values and Disconnection, or, How to Mass Produce Loneliness
As mentioned, the aim here is to bring together everything we’ve discussed about capitalist values so far—specifically how they prevent real connection and, in doing so, make loneliness not just likely but compulsory. We will delving into a lot of opposites, because opposites always gain their meaning from each other. We will look at how the assertion of something being “good” (such as individualism) gives birth to it’s opposite (such as “co-dependence) being labelled as bad. We also look at how the opposite of loneliness—connection—is actively blocked by what we have decided is good or bad, in terms of the values we hold dear.
This means we are going to talk directly too about what is deemed “sick,” because central to this episode is how our culture pathologizes the opposite of its ideals. To value individualism so highly, for example, means we end up labelling our natural human need for one another as “co-dependence.”
Therapy represents what we are meant to grasp for as a solution to these pathologies, and in doing so, it often blinds us to a more critical perspective. As an example, the perspective of Mate, Bowlby and others, that we actually BECOME ill when we are unable to connect and rely on one another. The term “inter-dependence” is an attempt de-stigmatise our inherent need for co-reliance on one another. The fact that we will still go to therapy, however, to “correct” what we see as a flaw exposes how placing the burden on individuals is not only unjust but ultimately self-defeating.
Foucault might put it this way - therapy often functions less as liberation and more as normalization—it teaches us how to conform better to an unjust system rather than to question it. And I don’t know about you, but if I get the impression I am not allowed to question something, it makes me even more inclined to question it.
Loneliness VS Connection
As any philosopher will tell you: one must begin by defining their terms.
We’ve already defined key concepts like individualism, the hero narrative, control, cognitive primacy, and competition. Now it’s time to define loneliness—not in clinical or self-help terms, but in the critical framework this podcast is grounded in.
Loneliness is not simply being alone—it is the absence of reciprocal recognition. It is the experience of not being seen, felt, or mirrored.
This framing draws from thinkers like Carl Jung, who observed that loneliness does not arise from a lack of people, but from feeling unable to communicate things that are deeply important to oneself – whether because those things go unheard or unrecognised, or because you feel like you can't mention them in the first place.
It is worth considering going further with the definition too. Hannah Arendt warns that “loneliness is the common ground of terror”—the condition that allows totalitarianism to flourish by severing relational bonds. Lauren Berlant looks at something called affective infrastructures: meaning how institutions and cultural norms shape what kinds of emotional connections are possible—or impossible.
Both of these theorists draw our attention to the idea that loneliness isn’t just about the disconnection that our definition so far elucidates. It is produced. It is political. And it is deeply tied to the values capitalism teaches us to hold dear.
This is what inclines me to add a second part to this definition, and one that you have heard me say before:
Loneliness is not a personal failure, but a structural and relational wound.
Putting this together, loneliness can be defined as follows:
Loneliness is not simply being alone—it is the absence of reciprocal recognition. It is the experience of not being seen, felt, or mirrored. Loneliness is not a personal failure, but a structural and relational wound.
What Stops Us Being Lonely
Whether or not you are OK with the second part of our definition, we can still see pretty clearly what’s implied in terms of solutions. If loneliness is the absence of being seen or felt, or of reciprocal recognition—then the antidotes become intimacy and connection. At its core, human connection is built on intimacy—yup, we have even commodified and transactionalised THAT word to such an extent that half of you will think it just means sex. It doesn’t. Think about it. Most of us are over 40 here, and have likely learned the hard way that sex can be one of the most meaningless, hollow, soul destroying acts there are, if the person you are with is… a twat, and asshole or a client.
Sex does not always involve intimacy, even though it can. Intimacy is more than physical touch and may not even involve it at all. Intimacy is letting ourselves be known, and being curious and open enough to know another. Intimacy requires mutual openness. It requires vulnerability, and truth-telling. It is about sharing our inner world and having it received—not judged, exploited, or ignored. Close friendships are intimate. Relationships with family can be intimate, if your family are not dysfunctional, at least.
Now, if the very values we hold dear mean that real mutual openness, vulnerability and truth telling are precluded, that is the structural element of connection being doomed. If our culture thinks of showing emotion as weakness, and insists we not show weakness, and vulnerability is essential to intimacy, VOILA: we have a structural barrier to connection. You don’t have to take my word for it either. This is exactly what some thinkers and authors already suggest.
For example: bell hooks, in her book All About Love, writes that love cannot exist without honesty. Hooks also notes that love exists in friendships too, but did you feel that? Most of our connection words - “love” “intimacy” – draw us towards the idea that they apply to only ONE other person – our lover/ partner/ spouse. It is no accident either and we will talk about this later on. But back to Hooks.
Hooks is not just talking about romantic love. She is talking about the conditions for any kind of loving relationship, and the absolute necessity of authenticity – as opposed to performativity. In Chapter 3, which is called Honesty: Be True to Love, she writes that “lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.” In a culture that rewards performance, self-protection, and branding of the self, the kind of truth-telling required for intimacy becomes rare. If we are constantly managing impressions or commodifying ourselves, we are less able to engage in the kinds of relationships that truly see us.
This is one of the most devastating impacts of capitalism on our emotional lives: it trains us to think of connection not in terms of trying to really see the other, or of opening ourselves to being seen, rather, it teaches us to look at all kinds of relationships in transactional terms—what am I offering, what am I getting? In that framework, taking the emotional risks that intimacy demands actually seems foolish. And without taking the emotional risks required for intimacy, connection becomes shallow, scripted, or strategic—things that may reduce social isolation on paper, but not emotional loneliness in practice.
Transactional relationships can be seen everywhere too. The classic pairings between a rich person and a person that makes them look good, and enjoys luxury. Each is getting something, but neither is getting “love” as Hooks would term it.
With transactional relationships, that is typical. It is not about connection, and quite often, it’s about something else, and we will get to that here today too. But first to the importance of connection and what facilitates it, intimacy.
Evidence that Intimacy is a Need, not a Nice-To-Have
Gabor Maté and others have shown that intimacy is not optional for our well-being; it is essential. Maté points to the importance of relational safety—of having relationships where we can express pain, fear, confusion, and still feel loved. This kind of connection is protective against the toxic effects of stress, trauma, and yes, loneliness. But under capitalist values of control, competition, and self-sufficiency, these conditions are hard to come by.
We need space to be known. That means:
• Time and energy for conversation that isn’t optimized or efficient;
• Environments where emotions are not seen as weakness;
• Relationships where we are not treated as projects to be fixed, tools to be used or a means to an end;
• And a culture that makes room for mutual care rather than constant self-management.
In short, the very things that might stop us from being lonely, are the very things capitalism discourages us from doing at all: showing vulnerability, being interdependent, and honest. Our culture, in short, trains us to NOT do the things that would lead to connection and intimacy. In fact, we are trained to be ashamed of the things that would.
Foucault – a societies values will structure pathology.
And that is where the well-meaning, overly indoctrinated people start yelling at us “you’re THIS bummed out by being lonely? What? Go to therapy!”—buying into exactly the idea that issues like loneliness are automatically and purely personal, and that the solution is purely clinical. They are buying right into the idea that it is we, as individuals, who are malfunctioning in a perfectly normal environment; it is we who are “not healthy”.
Cue Michel Foucault, by now friend of the podcast, because this demonstrates how deep this issue goes. As I mention at the beginning of each episode, these capitalist values we have discussed so far, along with others, shape what we think of as healthy or unhealthy, sane or insane, good or bad.
Foucault argued that what a society defines as “mad,” “deviant,” or “ill” is not fixed. It actually changes – and that change is dependent on what that society values at the time. Back in the days where religious institutions were those that essentially ruled and held power, for example, someone who thought they saw and communicated with angels was likely to have been called blessed. This is because it fit perfectly with what those in power needed their subjects to believe at the time. People seeing angels were believers, they had internalised the values of the controlling institution of the time – the church. At THAT time, anyone saying “wait a second mate, this isn't happening because of god, it is because of physics”, was often punished or even put to death.
In post-Enlightenment Europe, the whole thing reverses. Rationality became the new highly prized value and did not fit at all well with seeing angels. The physics fan is seen as the sane one here, and the angel-seeing person is likely to be institutionalized.
You and I might sit here now and think, “But come on—that person is nuts.” That reaction isn’t objective or neutral though. It’s shaped by the values we’ve been steeped in: values that tell us what counts as sane, successful, or worthwhile. Foucault’s point is not that one system is more correct than another—it’s that each system constructs its own norms, and those norms shape what kinds of human experiences get pathologized.
You don’t need to be institutionalized to feel the effects of this either. If you’ve ever lived abroad, you’ve probably felt how differently your personality is interpreted in different cultural contexts. I know I have. In Germany, I’m seen as eccentric at best, irritating or “crazy” at worst. I don’t follow the expected scripts; I don’t get excited about comparing the price of crap I do not need to buy; I live in a way that doesn’t align with deeply internalized norms like predictability and fitting into boxes. When your way of being disrupts those norms, it often gets labelled as a problem.
Artists, for instance, are all too often described as “crazy.” I have not actually heard the word artist used WITHOUT the prefix “crazy” here in Germany. This is not because they are, but because their values clash so deeply with a society that prizes order, efficiency, and conformity, that they LOOK deranged in comparison – and those who have adopted all those values simply cannot understand why someone else would not. Hence, they are nuts… and need therapy. And if you come from a culture shaped by different religious or non-capitalist traditions, the gap becomes even more extreme. People who have internalized Western capitalist norms are more likely to label unfamiliar ways of being as “irrational,” “weird,” or even, as we are looking at here, “pathological.”
This isn’t just a cultural mismatch—it’s often racism, classism, and xenophobia. And psychology, when wielded uncritically, becomes a weapon used to enforce dominant norms.
Health vs. Unhealth in Western Capitalism.
So, to Western capitalist societies and the values they support. Productivity, self-management, competition and rationality reign supreme, among other things. And if we say things like “I just can’t keep up any more” or “I don’t feel in control of my life,” that vulnerability isn’t met with care or solidarity. Instead, it’s seen as personal failure—a lack of strength, resilience, or agency. You’re not coping, which implies that everyone else is—and that “coping” is the baseline for health.
In this context, feelings of exhaustion, disconnection, or emotional overload are pathologized. Rather than seeing these responses as rational reactions to a relentless system, we are told the problem is within us. The self-help industry, along with countless therapists, rushes in to restore individual functionality—to get us back to “normal.” But this “normal” is built on unsustainable values: competition, hyper-productivity, and self-optimization. Burnout clinics offer the same promise—patch you up so you can re-enter the cycle—even when the system causing the collapse remains unchanged.
As Byung-Chul Han argues in The Burnout Society, we are no longer oppressed by external forces but by internalized pressure to perform. We exploit ourselves in the name of freedom, and collapse becomes the logical endpoint. In a world where everyone is expected to be a self-managing project, those who falter are deemed “unhealthy,” not because they are, but because they expose the system’s violence.
So when someone admits they’re lonely, it’s not treated as a symptom of structural disconnection—it’s framed as a flaw in them. Western capitalist values don’t just cause loneliness; they encourage us to shame people for feeling it, defining “health” as the ability to push on, alone, without complaint.
Let’s Get Specific - How Our Values Keep us Lonely
By now, it really should be clear that feeling lonely doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. But if you are still floundering, that’s understandable, cos it is a mindfuck: WC values actively produce loneliness, then turn around and make it seem like your own fault for feeling it.
That is called gaslighting. It is like punching someone in the eye and then saying “it’s your fault, you must have made me hit you.”
And this is a classic tactic—not just of narcissistic people, but of narcissistic societies.
(As I keep promising, we WILL be diving deeper into that in upcoming episodes.)
The only way to deal with gaslighting is to find clarity. And that’s exactly what I want to offer here: a clearer view of how each of these WC values shapes our ideas of what’s “good” or “bad” when it comes to connection.
We are now going to drill down into each, one by one.
Independence means Depending on Others Is Not Allowed
At the beginning of this episode, we looked at how words like love and intimacy are often taken as referring to a specific kind of relationship: a romantic one, with that One Special Person. We are taught to kinda assume that when love and intimacy are being talked about, it is in reference to that person, rather than our other close relationships.
This reflects another aspect of WC. That One Special Bond is SO loaded with importance, that such pairings come with massive expectations. When wider kinship structures and community supports shrink — as they have in many Western countries — we’re left with the romantic diad as our primary, and often only, source of emotional and practical support. Sociologist Eva Illouz has written extensively about this, noting how the erosion of extended social ties places enormous emotional weight on romantic relationships, which are now expected to provide everything: meaning, belonging, identity, support, sex, security.
Even as we load all our expectations of love and intimacy onto that One Special Other, the romantic diad, our cultural worship of individualism walks hand-in-hand with other moral ideals. Ideas like “independence” and “self-sufficiency.”
Hmmm. Does that sound potentially problematic? Ah.. but those things are positive, right? Strong even. Noble?
Obviously, WC places those values in the “good” column. Dependence and self sufficiency are good. Words that imply their opposites — stuff about depending on or needing others — get marked as “bad”. That badness is can even become institutionally upheld as pathology. As we saw with Foucault, psychology has often acted as an institution that polices such categorisations, ensuring that when we falter on the values we are meant to hold, we receive coaching or therapy to bring those values back into our lives.
So now we have this overloaded romantic diad, which is the only acceptable place to get our needs for intimacy and love met, and yet we are also meant to exhibit independence and self-sufficiency. It’s like, when we come together in the romantic diad, a beautiful spring is formed that both parties are allowed to drink from - but then we are told that it’s more admirable to, I dunno, drink our own piss instead of drinking from that fountain we made together, cos that is, in fact, more self-sufficient.
Let’s look more closely at what we consider opposites to independence and self-sufficiency too. For example, “co-dependence.” This term became a buzzword in pop psychology and self help circles. These discourses urged us to see close reliance in relationships as inherently unhealthy. People who made each other their world were encouraged to diagnose themselves with this very pathologised “co-dependency” trait. The assumption? That people who cannot look after their own needs are “dysfunctional.”
But wait. Rewind. Remember we have reduced the survival unit, the family unit, down to a maximum of two adults. Remember human beings DO need each other. What do you think might occur when one person becomes your entire support system? What do you expect will happen when we associate the words “love” and “intimacy” primarily with the romantic diad? What choice do you have but to rely on that one special person for your relational needs, not to mention stuff like like helping with and financing the kids, for building and maintaining a home, sex, intellectual stimulation and walking the dog? This isn’t dysfunction — it’s the inevitability of a flawed setup. You have to lean hard on each other, because the set up is such that there’s nowhere else to go.
The very structure of our family unit encourages over-reliance, then shames it. This is a hideous double-bind, for which the proposed solution is SELF-reliance: meeting your own needs, or having none at all. Which makes you wonder if the end game is that we all conclude it’s better to just masturbate into a jar and hire a nanny.
And whilst a worldwide wank fest may or may not be telos of our species, as things stand, the connection of couple-hood is still pretty doomed, especially where kids are involved, placing more needs in the mix. The failure of this units' ability to hold up under the pressure is reflected in divorce stats.
Western capitalism gives us this message loud and clear: dependence is the PROBLEM. Reliance on others is bad. This means the real issue goes unseen– a lack of connection or mutual presence is the real issue. Blaming our need for one another as the problem simply reinforces the false ideal of the emotionally autonomous individual who “needs no one.” If you feel lonely in your relationship, you are told that the solution is to be a lone wolf. To need no one. REDUCE your needs, in terms of what the other might be asked to bring to the table.
The not so sub-text is this: YOUR needs are TOO MUCH. Getting your partner to meet them is CO-DEPENDENT.
This is literally a setup. You cant win. It’s also a double whammy for anyone in a loveless marriage. If you are feeling awful, cos you’re enduring being unseen and unloved, you are THEN meant to conclude you are a WEAKLING too. Yup, your basic human need is not OK. You are meant to transcend it. It is easy to conclude that it is weakness that you want to feel loved at all.
And, if you are lucky enough not to be in a loveless marriage, the odds are heavily stacked against it staying that way. Not because you will stop being loveable. Not because your partner will either. But because society demands you rely so heavily on one another just to get by that becoming distracted by childcare, work, or whatever else you have to organise together is just too hard to do the stuff that brings us close together.
Bell Hooks also critiques this carving away of wider connections in favour of the two-adult maximum. In Chapter 8: "Community: Loving Communion"Hooks highlights our deep hunger for community, but shows that this longing for a wider, deeper network has been flattened by individualism. She also challenges the idea that romantic love is the only kind that matters and calls for a revaluation of community, friendship, and chosen families. In other words, love and intimacy can come from elsewhere - and no, this does not require cheating. It means forming deep bonds with people outside the societally sanctioned diad.
The Balance Sheet Of “I Give to Get”
Here I want to take a closer look at the term “co-dependent.” In coining this term, we see the very mechanism by which our culture undermines our connection to this almost singular, sanctioned lifeline. It is there in related words and terms that pathologise our need for one another too. “People pleasing,” is an example. I know, there will be a tonne of people out there who want to chime in with “yes, yes! I am one of those!”. Me too. And I want you to ask yourself, what is really so fucked up about wondering “what does this person I love need need right now?” Is that not part of being connected?
Here is a sports metaphor for you. You know I hate them, but I no longer work for a multinational firm, so it is OK to use them. Imagine you are on a soccer team and all you are thinking about is what YOU need to shoot a goal. You will likely run willy nilly all over the field ignoring everybody else (or even fighting your own team members) in order to obtain the ball, and until you get your chance to shoot. However, if you think, “hmm, Jane is already near the goal, and I am far away but near the ball. Jane needs the ball, cos she can shoot a goal from there” your team will achieve the goal YOU ALL HAVE. That is how community works - the people in it think of each other, meaning others think of you too, to complete the goals YOU ALL HAVE.
However, we live in a me-first culture. Terms like “co-dependent” and “people pleaser” EXIST to tell us to put our own needs first. They come pre-wrapped in the warning and assumption that others NEVER WOULD! They also come pre-packaged in the idea that it is better to meet all your own needs anyway, rather than ask anyone else to.
Now, in an increasingly narcissistic world, you might say two things. One, that this is messaging is itself, exactly what a person with NPD would train you to do – not need anything from them or risk being told you are too much or a burden. The second thing you might say is that is has become fair to assume that everyone IS out for themselves. But think about it. Assuming, before there is evidence, that your own partner is a purely selfish fuck, seems a little on the cynical side. Our other option is to assume that our romantic partner, who professes to love us back, might actually give us a bit of thought. And if they do show a pattern of selfish fuckness? Well, then you can and should leave, and you can and should smear dog shit all over their car. However, working on the assumption that all others, including your special-connection think about no one but themselves should really will likely make you too scared to connect with anyone at all. That might even be the idea.
Speaking of self-centred fucks though, the “stop doing so much for others” idea encourages us to check in on, and measure who is doing how much of what. It encourages us, in their words, to be transactional. This mirrors a narcissistic metric too: “What do I get out of this?” — rather than, “Do I feel connected here?” Or, “Is there love?” Even emotional complaints now require evidence — some measurable imbalance — to be considered valid. Saying “I feel unseen” often isn’t enough unless you can also prove the other person failed to give back in quantifiable terms.
Bell hooks, in All About Love, urges a revaluation of that myth too. She writes that capitalist culture frames relationships as transactions, and that even calls for “equality” can miss the point. What we need is mutuality: a deeper, flexible sense of reciprocity that isn’t about score-keeping, but about recognizing our shared humanity and our natural interdependence.
“With reciprocity all things do not need to be equal in order for acceptance and mutuality to thrive.”
— bell hooks, All About Love
She also invites us to recognize that our need for one another is not a flaw to fix — but a source of strength, and a doorway to healing.
We Are Wired for Connection – But Connection is Pathologized.
In a nutshell, when it comes to individualism: we are now trained to hone in on our dependence on one another as the key problem, when the key problem, in terms of feeling lonely, is more often a lack of real connection. We are encouraged to feel shame about our needing one another at all, because we have been given an ideal of independent, self-sufficient, lone wolves whose only need is to chew on the carcasses of those they have out-competed.
And because a lot of sociologists and other thinkers were aware that we DO need one another, it was a very hard job to bring that back into being not only an accepted, but a NECESSARY part of human relations. Only now is it entering public discourses (and NOT in German speaking countries) that inter-dependence is not just healthy but necessary. And yes, we needed a new word for the idea of relying on one another because the word co-dependent has been irredeemably categorised as pathological.
Our values, in western capitalism, do not ALLOW us to need each other. They have turned what is a basic human need into a character flaw, and even a “sickness”.
Re-framing Need as Intelligence
Yet, the fact we do need each other is backed up by science, psychology and sociology. All show that we don’t need each other because we’re weak, dependent, broken or cannot keep up with the times—rather, because we are human beings and therefore actually suffer terribly without genuine connection.
John Bowlby’s work on attachment, which began with research on children in orphanages, showed just how severe the consequences of connection-deprivation really are. Infants who were physically cared for but emotionally ignored often developed severe cognitive and psychological difficulties. Some literally failed to thrive – yes this is a euphemism for dying. Without emotional connection, even basic developmental processes stall and can even stop. The body knows when it’s unloved.
That early research formed the basis of attachment theory—now widely accepted in psychology—and it still points to one radical truth: connection is not optional. It’s a prerequisite for healthy development, nervous system regulation, emotional capacity, and long-term well-being.
We now know this across disciplines. Dan Siegel’s work on interpersonal neurobiology and Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory both show how our sense of safety is co-regulated. Our bodies read the signals of those around us—facial expressions, tone of voice, presence—and respond accordingly. Our nervous systems are built for relational responsiveness.
But instead of honouring that sensitivity as wisdom, Western capitalist culture has trained us to mistrust it. We’re not JUST told its weakness, oversensitivity, or pathology. There are actual so-called therapeutic approaches that re-train you to completely discount your own radar and intuition, and I will get to exactly that in a minute. For now the point is this - we respond to emotional starvation with distress, yet, the system says the problem is in us.
It’s not.
Responding to emotional starvation with distress is not dysfunction—it’s intelligence. It’s a survival mechanism.
However, sensitivity to how others feel towards us, intuition, bodily knowledge, our culture has taught us to be ashamed of such kinds of intelligence. But the being able to feel when something is wrong in a relationship—when we’re not seen, met, or safe—is a capacity worth fighting for. It's not co-dependence. It's a sign your internal systems are working, even in a world built to shut them down.
The sooner we reclaim that knowing—and name the systems that make it dangerous—the closer we get to recovering forms of connection that don’t leave us starving.
“Right” Thinking Means There Is No Such Thing as Sensing Others’ Concerns
This brings me to the next Western capitalist value and how it directly undermines connection.
Remember the episodes on control and cognitive primacy? Where we’re taught to value controlling both our thoughts and emotions—because supposedly, having the right thoughts leads to the emotions we want.
Yeah. It was also a bullshit assertion, as an important reminder. Science shows that emotion often precedes thought, and when it doesn’t precede it, thought and emotion are mutually informing each other simultaneously. But the idea that thoughts always come first stuck anyway, cos like so many lies, it is seriously profitable.
The legacy of this lie is our pathologising “wrong” thinking. Take CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), for example—it’s built on labelling certain kinds of thought as “distorted thinking” and replacing it with more “rational” alternatives. Now, sometimes that’s useful. Sometimes. But CBT also tells us that we shouldn’t assume we know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. We’re trained to dismiss negative intuitions like, “Bob from accounting doesn’t like me,” even if Bob scowls every time we walk into the room.
Because maybe Bob isn’t scowling at us. Or maybe he is, but there’s an office-wide scowling competition we didn’t know about. Or maybe Bob s scowling from a sudden stabbing pain in his rectum because—unbeknownst to anyone—Bob has a fistula.
We’re taught to treat our own emotional radar as untrustworthy. We’re encouraged to believe that our concerns about how others treat us are unfounded.
Sure, sometimes they are. But the assumption that we never know is dangerous. It cuts us off from one of the most valuable human traits we have—especially when it comes to recognising unsafe or manipulative people: intuition.
In fact, we’re told not to call it intuition at all—we’re told it’s “mind reading.” This rewording tactic is also a clever way of making something quite normal (having a gut feeling, for example) into something clearly weird. When we relabel intuition “mind reading” it looks like a distortion. A failure in cognition.
Here’s the surprise: we kind of can read each other. Not literally, look inside someone's mind, of course—we can’t know the exact thoughts in Bob’s head (for example, that he is thinking, “This fistula lark is brilliant. Now I have licence to scowl openly at everyone I hate”). But when we’re emotionally connected to someone, research shows we’re actually pretty good at reading their mood, energy, or inner state.
If you have kids, you know this. Your child knows when you’re mad at them, even if you say nothing. And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of the silent treatment—aka stonewalling—you know it too. According to John and Julie Gottman, stonewalling is a recognised form of emotional abuse. Why? Because you can feel it, and it hurts—and because it’s deniable. A stonewaller gets to say “I didn’t do anything. It’s all in your head” (which is gaslighting at that point) while your nervous system screams otherwise. Your CBT therapist, if they are not up to scratch, may even gaslight you too, with the suggestion that you don’t KNOW that the stonewaller was deliberately ignoring you, as it is also possible that they were on LSD and were experiencing sensory input in an entirely different fashion than you imagine. Or they might have had such a rough day at work that it induced periodic paralysis of the tongue.
But even if you take the humour out of it—even if Bob is just indiscriminately prick-ish to everyone, and your partner WAS on LSD—the bigger point still stands:
We are not wrong to notice when things feel off. We’re just taught to doubt it.
So let’s get technical for a second.
The ability to sense others’ emotions and intentions is well-documented. Neuroscientific research on mirror neurons shows that our brains are wired to internally simulate what we perceive others experiencing. When someone looks hurt or angry, we don’t just observe it—our own nervous systems feel it too. This is part of what makes empathy possible.
Dan Siegel’s work on attunement reinforces this. He writes that relationships become emotionally safe and nourishing when we are seen, soothed, safe, and secure. That requires sensitivity—not just to what’s said, but what’s felt. And Louis Cozolino, in The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, argues that our brains literally develop in relationship with others. Emotional resonance isn’t indulgence—it’s the foundation of connection and development.
Then there’s Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory, which teaches that our nervous systems are constantly scanning for cues of safety or danger in others—often below the level of conscious awareness. That tight feeling in your stomach when someone is off with you? That’s not overthinking. That’s neurobiological attunement. That’s your body doing what it’s meant to do.
Especially in marginalised communities, this isn’t just emotional nuance—it’s survival. And if you grew up in an unsupervised psychiatric ward, or anywhere else where chaos reigned and danger could erupt at any time—emotionally or physically—you’ll know that reading the room accurately can mean the difference between staying safe and getting hurt.
But here’s the thing: in a culture that prizes disconnection, we are told to see this very form of intelligence as irrational. We call it “paranoia,” “catastrophising,” or “being too sensitive.” We label people as “needy” or “difficult” when they express discomfort—even though that discomfort is often a finely tuned signal that something is wrong. It is worth noting that it is often the very people who do not want to be held accountable for their actions that will tell us these things. My mother, a covert narcissist, used all of the above, to ensure I never saw her as the problem, rather, I should blame myself. This is where narcissism on the micro level, is the same as narcissism on the macro, or cultural, level.
Why does this matter? Because intimacy depends on attunement.
If I can’t trust my read on how you’re feeling—or worse, if I’ve been trained to ignore it—how can I safely connect with you? I might end up stuffing down the sort of fear that alerts me to the fact that you are about to use a shovel on my skull. Or I might override the feelings of warmth that tell me you are a genuinely kind person, even though you just accidentally stepped on my dog.
If we treat sensitivity as dysfunction, we break the very thing that allows people to feel seen and met. The price of this disconnection isn’t just loneliness. It’s relational poverty—a world where people are surrounded by others, but feel entirely alone.
Control Creates Hierarchy, Not Connection
To control. Control is not only a value in WC, it is a total aspiration. It is also a total danger, cos when applied to connecting, this is where manipulation can take centre stage. Gaslighting, blame-shifting, silent treatments: when these tactics are used in the context of “connection,” connection is inherently destroyed. Control and connection just do not mix, as relationship research by the Goldmans demonstrates.
Yet the push to control all aspects of our life is there. We are told that “taking control” is what gives you what you want. In this context though, it is fatal. When the desire to control enters a relationship, what is really going on is power over the other person. True connection requires mutuality—being what the Germans call auf Augenhöhe: being on the same level, eye to eye. Control installs a hierarchy though. One person at the top, the other below. Mutuality evaporates, and connection, in the sense that human beings need, is gone.
As bell hooks writes in All About Love and in Chapter 2 of Justice: Childhood Love Lessons, most of us are socialised into the idea that love and control are bound together. We're taught that authority, dominance, and obedience are normal parts of close relationships—especially in childhood. But this confuses control with care, and obedience with love.
That conditioning continues into adulthood. If you've ever been in a relationship with a narcissist or manipulator, people who must, at all times, feel they are in control, you’ll know the ache of feeling totally alone while technically “in a relationship.” As you guys know, I know it personally too. I’ve lived in a narcissistic family system, dated narcissists—and even one actual psychopath. These weren’t just painful connections. They were simulations of connection. I can echo what the research says from personal experience as a result: control kills intimacy. Worse: it stops you from forming real connections elsewhere, because being in controlling relationships eats up your emotional bandwidth and drives you slowly nuts. Relationships of control do a similar thing to what society does when it gaslights you into thinking all this is your own fault. It drives you fucking nuts.
And even outside of overt abuse, power dynamics still fracture connection. You can feel just as lonely in a long-term relationship where love has quietly disappeared—but the structure of the relationship still relies on control: who sacrifices more, who carries more emotional labour, who makes the final decisions. These subtle hierarchies go unquestioned because they’re baked into how we imagine love is supposed to work.
This is especially true in nuclear family setups, where two adults are expected to raise children and maintain a household with little outside support. Emotional exhaustion becomes the norm. One partner often becomes the emotional manager while the other becomes emotionally unavailable. That’s not intimacy—that’s bureaucracy. And it leaves both people feeling profoundly alone.
This isn't about blame either—it’s about systems. We were never meant to do love this way. It is our core, CULTURAL values that deform and cripple connection.
Competition: Capitalist Closeness = Performance
Let’s talk about what “competition” really means when it comes to intimacy under capitalism. Because it’s not always the kind of shiny, winner-takes-all competition we’re used to imagining. Particularly when we are still looking for meaningful connections, it’s more about the things we do to avoid “fucking it up.”
Cos with control, anything that goes awry is our fault. We talked about that in episode 3. So, more and more, we’re trained to monitor ourselves—not just in public, but in our closest relationships. Especially there. We learn to audit our words, tone, reactions, even our silences. To run post-mortems on texts. Particularly when the person we are engaging with is a potential romantic-diad person. We ask ourselves and even other friends - Did I come on too strong? Was I too emotional? Did I over-explain? Was that too much?
This isn’t the confident strut of someone trying to dominate a race – which lets be honest is insufferable behaviour anyway. For a lot of us, it is more like the jittery hypervigilance of someone who has been traumatised by the race, but is still trying desperately not to get disqualified. Not to get abandoned. Not to blow it—again. Because they think it is the only race in town.
Here’s the crap fit: self-help narratives will often call this process self-betterment.
Most of the time, it’s not self-betterment. It’s self-beratement. It’s not a journey of growth—it’s a cycle of self-flagilation, followed by the sort of self-correction that still holds onto the idea of our flawedness, and the need to overcompensate for it. It’s a never-ending effort to sand down our rough edges so we can be more palatable. Less risky. More... acceptable.
Because in a capitalist culture obsessed with control, everything bad that happens to you is your fault.
That relationship that failed? Your fault. You weren’t emotionally intelligent enough. You weren’t healed enough. You got “triggered.” You didn’t communicate “just right.”
That friendship that fizzled? Also your fault. You should’ve had better boundaries. Should’ve regulated your nervous system better. Should’ve used “I” statements instead of sounding—god forbid—hurt.
The underlying message is: under no circumstances be yourself.
You internalise all this until it becomes second nature: if anything goes wrong, it’s because you did. So now, your job isn’t just to live—it’s to pre-empt disaster. To monitor yourself so closely that no part of you can ruin anything ever again. This is where control morphs into internalised competition—not with others, but with yourself. With past-you. With the version of you that “fucked it up before.”
As we discussed in episode 5, we enter into that Sartrean/ Foucauldian internalised-audience nightmare where you are always already humiliated for having fucked up totally and been yourself again. There in your internal crowd is the self-help author who kicks you for being down, saying “the only person who can sort this shit out is you”. You are there too, as both the accused and the judge. As both the actor and critic. You feel like someone sees your every failing—because they DO. That someone is you. And you’re terrifying. And terrified.
So connection becomes performance—not because we’re narcissistic, but because we’re shit scared of “getting it wrong” of “being that “version” of ourself that gets it wrong”. We don’t want to be that flawed version. We want to be the perfect version cos that is what gets love. The old version, who did all those fuck ups, would get discarded again. More than anything, we don’t want to fuck it up (like the other person cant do that for us). And because we’ve been taught that our truth is too much, we edit ourselves before anyone else can reject us.
This is the tragedy of so-called “self-improvement.” It doesn't actually teach us to love ourselves. It teaches us to interrogate ourselves constantly, to manage and mitigate our own needs like threats. It’s not liberation. It’s internalised surveillance.
The cruellest part? If we perform connection well enough—if we “do the work” and keep our “shit in check”—we may actually get connection. But we’ll never feel safe in it. Because we’ll never believe we earned it as our real selves. We will be obliged to keep up the performance of someone we are not. We stay stuck in the loop. Polishing a mask. Curating our lives so we look “right” to outsiders. Running interference on our own instincts. Hoping that this time—if we get it perfect enough—we’ll be safe.
This is what Lauren Berlant names cruel optimism: the tragic bind where the very things we’re told will save us are the things that harm us most. The belief that if we just heal harder, perform better, self-manage more perfectly, we’ll finally become loveable. But all we do is deepen our alienation—because love earned through performance is never really felt. And safety bought through self-erasure never truly protects us.
Instead, in internalising the values western culture inculcates in us, we remain attached to fantasies that actively undermine the thing we’re trying to reach. The promise of what to do to find connection becomes the prison that excludes us from it.
On The Antidote: Community
If control kills intimacy, and performance strangles connection, then the antidote isn’t more strategy. It’s not “better boundaries,” “better communication,” or another self-help book on emotional literacy. It’s community. Actual community. Not the buzzword, not the app, not the podcast fandom. I mean people—messy, real, reciprocal relationships. Ones that don’t rely on performance, perfection, or pathology.
Bell hooks, quoting M. Scott Peck in All About Love, describes community as a group of individuals who’ve moved beyond the surface. Who’ve learned to communicate honestly, who’ve dropped the masks of composure, and who have committed—to delight in one another, mourn together, and make each other’s conditions their own. That is: to live inside a shared humanity rather than outside it.
This is not a call for kumbaya group hugs. It’s a call for a radical revaluation of our emotional economies. Hooks calls it a love ethic, and it sits in direct opposition to the capitalist ethic of domination, self-reliance, and profit. A love ethic says: loyalty matters. Slowness matters. Vulnerability matters. People matter.
So, the real work is not in perfecting ourselves to finally “earn” connection. The real work is in building spaces where perfection is no longer the price of entry. Where we can fuck up, be forgiven, repair. Where people can be raw, real, and held—not fixed.
That is community.
Not convenience. Not performance. But a culture where showing up as you are is the only credential you need. Where our truth is not “too much,” and our softness is not a liability, but a strength.
Reclaiming Dependency
So if we are going to resist this system—this loneliness machine masquerading as self-help—we must start by reclaiming what it taught us to despise.
Dependency. Softness. Relational intelligence.
These are not flaws. They are the parts of us that remain human in a world trying to make us robots. They are the reasons we ache in the absence of love. They are the evidence that something in us still knows how to belong.
We’ve been taught to pathologize dependency. To see interdependence as co-dependence. To flinch from our own longing as if it were shameful. But what if our longing is actually the compass? What if our need is not weakness but wisdom?
Bell hooks says: “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.” And she’s right. We do not recover by gritting our teeth and getting more “resilient.” We recover when we are seen. When we are met. When someone holds our trembling, unpolished selves and says, “You don’t have to be perfect to be loved.”
Healing won’t come from fixing ourselves—it will come from refusing to abandon each other. It will come from not just automatically shouting “get therapy,” and caring enough to listen to, and see, each other.
Pulling it all together
This episode set out to name the pattern beneath everything we’ve explored so far:
That Western capitalist values don’t just fail to support connection—they actively undermine it.
The result isn’t accidental. It’s designed.
When independence becomes a moral ideal—so our natural need for others is pathologized.
The romantic diad is framed as the only legitimate source of intimacy—then we’re shamed for depending on it.
Control is seen as strength—even though it kills the mutuality connection requires.
Competition teaches us we’re only loveable when we’re flawless—so connection becomes performance.
As to therapy, while sometimes helpful, often reinforces the idea that the problem is you, not the culture that raised you.
As Foucault reminds us: what a culture calls “sick” or “dysfunctional” is often just whatever threatens its dominant values.
And in this system, real connection is threatening—because it requires truth, vulnerability, and interdependence.
So those things get framed as flaws. As weakness. As co-dependence.
But they’re not. They’re what make us human.
Loneliness isn’t a personal failing.
It’s the outcome of a system that punishes the very things that make connection possible.
And when you feel the ache of that?
That’s not dysfunction. That’s your intelligence.
It’s your nervous system saying:
“This isn’t how it’s meant to be.”
And your nervous system is right.