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The Two Faces of an Age Without Boundaries
When I visited my grandfather’s house as a child, the village was like this. Neighbors knew one another down to how many spoons were in the next house. When something bad happened to one family, the whole village wept together; when something good happened, they rejoiced as if it were their own. A cauldron was set up in the yard and a full pot of noodles boiled, and the only wall to speak of was a low stone one that came up to your waist. Then at some point that low wall became a high brick wall. People lock their doors and rarely come out. It has become an age in which eating alone, drinking alone, “I live alone” are worn like badges of honor. What is your neighborhood like?
Is it really a badge of honor? I could not manage it. One summer day when my wife and child were in Canada, I ate soft tofu stew alone at a snack shop I had gone to in my school days, and afterward, craving shaved ice with red beans, I stepped into a nearby shop. The server asked how many spoons I would like.
Two, I answered. Even though I was clearly going to eat it alone. I think, in that moment, I felt ashamed to be eating shaved ice by myself.— 2015, Facebook
A man approaching fifty, ordering a spoon for someone who would never come, in front of a single bowl of shaved ice. Why did I order that spoon? The answer is in what I wrote next that day.
Eating alone somehow feels like the result of having lived my life wrong, like being a loser for no reason. I carry many inferiorities and fears, and one of them, I think, is the fear of being ostracized, of being cut off.— 2015, Facebook
What was unbearable was not being alone but appearing alone. The age calls being alone a badge of honor, yet we order one more spoon lest we be caught at it. Today’s illness lives inside that discrepancy.
The last line of that day’s post read: I thought I had overcome all this, but the marks of a wound from decades ago are still fully intact; it seems a wounded child, not yet wholly healed, still lives inside me. What a man approaching fifty met in front of that shaved ice was not the server but that child.
I believe many of today’s illnesses come from exactly here — the vanishing of the boundary. And today’s illness has a different grain from the illnesses of the past. If the old illnesses came mostly from a lack of something — of food, of hygiene, of freedom — today’s come from excess: too much connection, too much stimulation, too much “you can.” This is precisely the excess of positivity we saw in Chapter One. What breaks us now is not an enemy invading from outside but an endless flood of affirmation pouring in.
I heard this diagnosis still more sharply in a conversation I had recently with Gabor Maté. In 2026 a colleague and I invited him to speak with us by video, and Maté pointed out that we use the word “normal” in two confused senses. One means “healthy and natural”; the other means merely “familiar to us, common.” The trouble lies in mistaking the familiar for the healthy. Endless competition, chronic sleep deprivation, relationships turned instrumental — all pass as “normal” because they are familiar to us, yet none of them is healthy or natural. For Maté, illness is not an individual’s malfunction but the body’s normal response to a toxic culture in which the abnormal masquerades as the normal. So however well you treat the individual, if you send him back into the same environment the illness returns. The question to ask is not only “Why is this person sick?” but “What is this environment that is making this person sick?”
This flood has an unexpected face: the pressure to be all right. Not long ago, passing through a hard season, I wrote this on Facebook.
But did I think that admitting “this is hard” meant I had failed? … Even when it was hard I denied that it was hard, and when someone else said it was hard for them I spouted insipid lines about looking on the bright side. Perhaps I was doing more than autosuggestion on myself — perhaps I was under self-hypnosis, telling myself, “I’m fine.”— 2024, Facebook
“Think positively” is good advice. But when it becomes a demand, even the place to call a hard thing hard disappears. We can no longer say “no” to sorrow or to anger. This power to say no — to resist what is pouring in, to pause a moment, to draw a line between me and not-me — is exactly the power that raises a boundary. And when this power weakens, two illnesses arrive that look like opposites. Their root is one.
One is melting away. The boundary collapses and everything flows into everything else. Notifications that do not stop late into the night; work whose line called “going home” has been erased; a finger that cannot stop scrolling. We call it connection. But when connection becomes too much, it is not connection but inundation. An island going under water is not an island growing wider; it is an island disappearing. Linked to everything, we truly meet nothing.
The other is hardening over. Exhausted by melting, a person flees to the opposite side. He builds walls, shuts the door, lets nothing in. So as not to be wounded, he meets nothing at all. Cynicism becomes comfortable, numbness becomes safe, and “I trust no one” becomes armor. But a fortress into which nothing may enter and out of which nothing may go dries out from within long before any outside enemy takes it.
Melting away is an illness; so is hardening over.
The psychologist Carl Jung saw the same two faces. If hardening over is locking oneself behind a social mask and growing rigid, then melting away is the blurring of the line between me and you until one swallows the other and sinks into oneself — what Jung called narcissism. Both are one illness: the loss of a living boundary.
What is interesting is that these two are not distant illnesses. They take turns inside a single person, and often. All day one scatters oneself in response to every notification (melting away); by evening one wants to see no one and shuts the bedroom door (hardening over). Hyperconnection and isolation are not opposites but two faces shown by one illness: the loss of the boundary. A person who has lost his boundary is always either too open or too closed.
There is a sharper observation still about this reversal: hyperactivity, at a certain point, flips abruptly into hyperpassivity. Someone who has been moving without rest crosses a threshold and becomes a state of unresisting obedience to every incoming stimulus. The belief that being more active means being more free is therefore an illusion. We experience it on the day when we were doing something the whole time and yet chose nothing at all. Here is why melting away and hardening over alternate within one person: in both, the power to choose for oneself has been switched off.
So the direction of healing is clear. It is neither to connect still more nor to close still tighter. It is to recover the boundary we have lost — a living boundary that is open yet does not admit just anything, closed yet receives what is needed. If the illness is the vanishing of the boundary, healing is its recovery. And where that living boundary can be learned from is a most unexpected place: the smallest unit of our body, a single cell.
Notes for this chapter
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal · Carl Jung (persona, narcissism)