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Two Faces of an Age Without Boundaries
In the country village where I grew up as a child, neighbors knew one another right down to how many spoons were in each other's houses. When misfortune struck one home, the whole village wept together; when good fortune came, they rejoiced as if it were their own. The mothers set cauldrons out in the yard and boiled great pots of noodles, and what passed for a wall was only a low stone one, no higher than your waist. But at some point that low wall gave way to a high brick one. People bolt their doors and hardly ever come out. Eating alone, drinking alone, "I Live Alone" have become an age's badge of pride. What is your neighborhood like?
I believe many of today's illnesses come from precisely here, from the vanishing of the boundary. And today's illness is of a different grain from the illness of old. If the old illness came, for the most part, from some lack—of food, of hygiene, of freedom—today's comes from excess. From too much connection, too much stimulus, too much "you can." The German philosopher Byung-Chul Han called this the excess of positivity. What now breaks us down is no longer an enemy invading from outside, but a flood of the positive pressing endlessly inward.
This diagnosis I heard more sharply still in a dialogue I recently shared with Gabor Maté himself. In 2026, together with a fellow professor, I invited him by video call to talk, and Maté pointed out that we use the word "normal" mixing two meanings together. One is "healthy and natural"; the other is merely "familiar to us, common." The trouble lies in mistaking the familiar for the healthy. Endless competition, chronic sleeplessness, relationships reduced to instruments—because they are familiar to us they pass as "normal," yet they are neither healthy nor natural. For Maté, illness is not an individual malfunction but the body's normal response to a toxic culture in which this abnormality masquerades as the norm. And so, however much you treat the individual, send him back into the same environment and the illness returns. What must be asked is not only "why is this person ill," but "what is this environment that is making this person ill?"
This flood wears an unexpected face. It is the pressure to "be all right." A while ago, passing through a hard time, I wrote something like this on Facebook.
But have I been thinking that to admit "I'm struggling" means I've failed? … Even when it was hard I denied that it was hard, and when others said they were struggling I spouted nothing but that insipid line, look on the bright side. Perhaps I was doing more than autosuggestion—perhaps I was hypnotizing myself with "I'm fine."— 2024, Facebook
"Think positive" is a good saying. But when it becomes coercion, even the place to call the hard thing hard disappears. We become unable to say "no" to sorrow, or to anger. This power to say "no"—to resist what floods in, to pause a while, to draw a line between me and what is not me—is the very power that raises a boundary. And when this power weakens, two illnesses arrive that look like opposites. Their root is one.
One is melting. The boundary collapses and everything flows into everything else. Notifications that never cease late into the night, labor whose line called "clocking off" has been erased, the scrolling of a finger that cannot stop. We call it connection. But when connection grows too great, it is no longer connection but inundation. An island going under water is not the island growing wider; it is the island disappearing. Joined to everything, yet truly meeting nothing.
The other is hardening. Worn out by the 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 grows comfortable, numbness grows safe, and "I trust no one" becomes armor. But the castle into which nothing can enter and from which nothing can leave dries up from within before ever falling to the enemy outside.
Melting is an illness, and hardening is an illness too.
The psychologist Carl Jung saw the same two faces. If hardening is caging the self behind a social mask until it grows rigid, then melting 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 curious is that these two are not distant illnesses. They alternate, often, within a single person. All day one scatters oneself in response to every notification (melting), and when evening comes, wanting to meet no one, shuts the door (hardening). Over-connection and isolation are not opposites but two faces of a single illness that has lost its boundary. The one who has lost the boundary is always either too open or too closed.
And so the direction of healing is clear. It is neither to connect more nor to close more tightly. It is to recover the lost boundary. A living boundary, open yet not admitting just anything, closed yet receiving what is needed. If illness is the vanishing of the boundary, healing is its recovery. And where that living boundary comes from, we can learn in a most unexpected place. In the very smallest unit of our body, a single cell.
References
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society · Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal · Carl Jung (persona & narcissism)