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There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), that captures something essential about the human condition.
A lone figure stands on a rocky cliff, gazing out over an expanse of mist and distant peaks. His back is turned; we cannot see his face.
He looks not at us, but into the horizon — into everything that lies just beyond reach.

This image has haunted generations because it visualises a feeling we all know too well: longing.

Longing is not quite the same as desire. Desire is directed — it knows what it wants and seeks satisfaction. Longing, by contrast, hovers. It aches without a clear object. It is a yearning that stretches toward something vast and undefined: a lost home, a perfect love, a life we might have lived.
It is at once painful and strangely sustaining — the feeling of being animated by what is absent.

The Psychology of Longing and Our Earliest Attachments

From a psychological and psychoanalytic point of view, longing begins in our earliest attachments.
As infants, we experience moments of profound dependence — the hunger, the cry, and then the almost miraculous arrival of the caregiver who soothes and feeds us.
Yet these moments are never perfectly continuous. There are gaps, delays, absences.

In these tiny intervals of frustration, the psyche learns something fateful: that satisfaction can be lost — and perhaps, that it was never total to begin with.

Freud might have said that longing is a form of repetition compulsion, a replay of those first unmet needs.
Later psychoanalysts, like Donald Winnicott, would soften this idea, suggesting that these small “failures of attunement” are what make us human — they teach us to imagine, to dream, to symbolise.
In the absence of perfect care, we begin to create inner worlds.

Longing, then, is not just the residue of deprivation; it is also the birthplace of imagination.

Lacan and the Unreachable Object of Desire

For Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, longing — or what he called désir — is not a symptom to be cured but the very structure of who we are.
We spend our lives searching for an impossible object he called objet petit a — the elusive thing we believe would complete us if only we could find it.
But the paradox is that this “thing” never existed in the first place.

The beloved, the dream job, the perfect home — each carries the trace of that original, unspeakable absence.
The moment we attain one, the longing shifts elsewhere, attaching to a new figure, a new fantasy.

This is why our emotional longing feels both specific and endless: every object of desire is only a placeholder for something older and deeper.

The Beauty and Meaning of Longing

Yet there is a quiet dignity in longing. It is the mark of our capacity to love what is not present — to remain connected to what is beyond possession.
The Romantic painters, poets, and composers — from Friedrich to Rilke to Chopin — all understood that longing is not merely a deficit; it is a mode of being alive to the world.

To long is to feel the world’s beauty and impermanence at once.
It is to recognise that we are shaped by what escapes us — that our deepest emotions are tied not to ownership but to reverent distance.

As Rilke wrote:

“Longing is the expansion of our being toward what we do not have.”

Living with Longing: A Psychological Reflection

Modern life tempts us to pathologise longing — to treat it as something to be solved, an emotional inconvenience to be managed.
But psychoanalysis suggests a different approach: that we might learn to live alongside our longing, even to honour it.

Longing can remind us of what matters — of our capacity to hope, to care, to reach.
It keeps us porous to possibility.
Like the wanderer above the sea of fog, we might stand still before the vast unknown and let ourselves feel, if only for a moment, that gentle ache that connects us to everything we have loved and lost — and to everything we have yet to find.

It can feel at times, almost impossible to look at the news. The world seems to carry an endless supply of disasters, crises, and cruelties. To open a newspaper or a phone is to invite a wave of grief or anger — and to wonder how we are meant to carry all of it.

You might sometimes feel guilty for turning away, as though not keeping up with every story is a moral failure. But the truth is that no human being is designed to absorb the pain of the entire planet. Confusion, overwhelm, and even the impulse to retreat are not signs of weakness; they are simply part of what it means to be sensitive, to have a heart that is touched by the suffering of others.

If there is a way through, it is not in demanding that the world calm down — history suggests it never really does. Instead, it may lie in shifting how we respond. Rather than trying to fix or understand everything, we can focus on the smaller and more possible. We cannot solve war or climate change alone, but we can show care to a friend, kindness to a stranger, patience to ourselves. These gestures may look tiny against the vastness of world events, but they are not insignificant: they are ways of keeping humanity alive in the middle of the storm.

There is also permission to create moments of distance. To spend an evening with a book, a piece of music, or a quiet walk, not because you don’t care about the world, but because caring requires replenishment. A sanctuary is not an escape; it’s a place to gather strength.

And perhaps most importantly: when chaos makes us aware of how fragile everything is, we might also remember what a miracle it is. A shared laugh, a meal, a moment of beauty — these are not frivolous distractions but acts of quiet resistance. They remind us that even in a turbulent age, tenderness is still possible.

For further reflection

Film: Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) — a moving reminder that meaning often comes not from grand gestures, but from small, human acts of care.
Book: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning — written in the aftermath of the Holocaust, it reflects deeply on how to find purpose even in the most difficult circumstances.
Essay: Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark — a meditation on how, even in chaotic times, unexpected forms of progress and solidarity emerge.
Article: The School of Life’s own reflections on “Why You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty About Being Happy While the World Suffers” (which gently addresses the tension between private joy and public grief).

As therapists are meant to be the ones who know how to sit still. We talk about containment, presence, the sacred value of the here-and-now. But even we—guardians of the analytic frame—are not immune to the guilty pleasure of gazing at the unfamiliar. A slow scroll through Turkish hammams, a documentary on Siberian reindeer herders, the oddly calming sight of Japanese forest monks sweeping temple grounds. There it is again: cultural voyeurism.

But this isn’t just a phenomenon for the distracted or spiritually bored. It seeps into the consulting room, in subtler, more complex forms. Here, it often takes the shape of cultural countertransference—a therapist’s unconscious emotional response to the cultural identity, background, or narrative of the client. We may believe we are listening neutrally. In truth, we are sometimes watching, silently mapping our own fantasies, anxieties, and projections onto the cultural material our clients bring.

A client speaks of their arranged marriage, and we feel a flutter of concern—but is it empathy or quiet judgment? Another shares stories from their war-torn childhood, and we feel awe, even envy at the perceived depth and drama of their life—what does that say about our own? Or a client from a vastly different cultural background sits before us, and we notice a subtle leaning in—curious, captivated. But who, in that moment, are we truly attuning to?

Cultural voyeurism, when unexamined, can sneak in under the guise of ‘therapeutic curiosity’. We may tell ourselves we’re bearing witness, but at times we are consuming—intellectualising, aestheticising, or even exoticising a life we don’t fully understand. The danger isn’t just that we get the client wrong—it’s that we miss the chance to see ourselves clearly in the process.

Yet, ironically, this very tension can be generative. Cultural countertransference, when held in awareness, becomes not a contaminant but a clue. It can reveal where our own identities are underdeveloped, or where we hold assumptions so baked-in they masquerade as universal truth. It might even uncover our own latent longings—those quietly simmering desires for rootedness, spirituality, family, rebellion—that the client’s story stirs.

This is where therapy becomes not just a craft but a moral art. To do justice to our clients’ cultural worlds, we must do the ongoing work of recognising the lenses we’re looking through. We must notice where we become tourists in the consulting room—delighted, overwhelmed, suspicious or sentimental—and ask, always with gentleness: what is this stirring in me, and why now?

So cultural voyeurism isn’t something to banish in shame. Rather, it asks to be noticed, named, and metabolised. The fantasy of the “other” can, paradoxically, bring us closer to ourselves—if we’re brave enough to sit with the discomfort and the complexity. After all, isn’t that what therapy, at its best, has always done?

Further Exploration

For those interested in reflecting more deeply on the themes of cultural voyeurism and countertransference, here are a few evocative works that mirror and expand on these ideas:

🎬 Film

1. The Sheltering Sky (1990, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci)
A haunting and visually rich adaptation of Paul Bowles’ novel, exploring the spiritual disorientation of Western travellers in North Africa. A cautionary tale of romanticised otherness, where longing and loss become indistinguishable.

2. Baraka (1992)
A wordless, global odyssey that invites both awe and discomfort. Revered for its beauty, it also raises provocative questions about the act of watching itself: how we aestheticise cultures we don’t inhabit, and what we risk not seeing.

📖 Books

1. The White Album by Joan Didion
Didion observes a culture in collapse with icy clarity, often standing at the edge of her own experiences. Her essays are masterclasses in ironic detachment and offer a kind of clinical countertransference in literary form.

2. Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
Aviv profiles individuals grappling with mental illness across different cultural frameworks, subtly illuminating how identity, diagnosis, and story are entangled. A powerful reminder of the therapist’s role in interpreting—and sometimes misinterpreting—difference.

We may think of ourselves as rational creatures, drawn to what is safe, consistent, and predictable. And yet, some of our most persistent habits — checking our phones every two minutes, endlessly scrolling through social media, gambling, chasing emotionally unavailable lovers — seem to defy any logic.

Behind these seemingly irrational behaviors lies one of the most powerful psychological mechanisms ever studied: the variable reward system.

The Slot Machine in the Mind

In the 1950s, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner made a curious discovery. When he placed pigeons in a box and rewarded them with food pellets each time they pecked a button, they learned quickly and pecked only when hungry. But when the rewards came unpredictably — sometimes after one peck, sometimes after five, sometimes not at all — the pigeons went wild. They pecked obsessively, sometimes thousands of times, desperate for the next elusive reward.

Human beings are not so different.

Apps, games, notifications, online dating, even some relationships — they all operate on a similar principle. Sometimes we get a dopamine hit: a like, a match, a message, a small win. Sometimes we get nothing. And that unpredictability fuels a kind of psychological hunger far more intense than if the rewards were steady.

The Power of Uncertainty

Variable rewards are so effective because they mimic a deeply ancient survival logic. In the wild, rewards were rarely consistent. You didn’t know when the next berry bush would appear or whether the rustle in the bushes meant danger or dinner. Unpredictability kept our ancestors alert and engaged. Those who stuck around the longest — watching, waiting, trying — often had the best chance of survival.

Today, that same wiring is hijacked by systems designed not to nourish us, but to retain our attention.

This is why we stay glued to our screens long after we’ve stopped enjoying them. Why we wait for that one sweet message from someone who mostly disappoints us. Why we keep checking the news, email, or likes, hoping this time it will feel different.

Emotional Gambling

Beyond technology, variable rewards can manifest in relationships. The emotionally distant partner who occasionally shows affection. The parent who flips between praise and criticism. The boss who unpredictably shifts between warmth and coldness.

We become addicted not to the person, but to the possibility of reward — to the fantasy that the next time might be the time we are truly seen, valued, or loved. The unpredictability creates a sense of urgency and stakes, and paradoxically, deepens our emotional investment.

Towards Awareness and Control

This isn’t a call to banish unpredictability from our lives — that would be impossible, and perhaps undesirable. But we might strive to recognize when we are being held hostage by a system of unpredictable rewards, when our attention and energy are being siphoned by something designed not to fulfill us, but to entrap us.

Awareness is the first form of liberation. When we understand the psychology at play, we can begin to reclaim agency. We can pause before we check the phone. Step back from the relationship that thrives on emotional confusion. Design our environments with more intentional, predictable sources of satisfaction: meaningful conversations, nature, deep work, art.

We may not escape the pull of variable rewards entirely. But we can learn to see them for what they are — not signs of true value, but symbols of a psychological trick, one we evolved to heed, and now must consciously navigate.

The most enduring satisfaction rarely comes from unpredictability. It comes from the quiet consistency of things that don’t need to dazzle us to matter.

In an era of personal branding, viral opinions, and relentless self-promotion, humility seems to have become an anachronism—something quaint, even suspicious. It is hard to imagine a social media influencer celebrating their own modesty, or a politician admitting their uncertainty. Humility, once a prized virtue, has been edged out by a culture that rewards confidence, visibility, and certainty. But in losing touch with humility, we may have also lost touch with something deeply nourishing—an essential ingredient of wisdom, emotional resilience, and genuine connection.

The Psychology of Humility

At its core, humility is not about self-effacement or false modesty. The truly humble person is not someone who underestimates themselves but rather someone who has a realistic and flexible view of their own importance. Psychologists describe humility as the ability to accurately assess one’s strengths and weaknesses while remaining open to new perspectives. It is a kind of cognitive flexibility—what Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, might have called the ability to accommodate new information rather than clinging rigidly to existing schemas.

This flexibility is invaluable in relationships. Research in social psychology suggests that humble individuals are better at resolving conflicts because they are less likely to take criticism personally. They listen rather than react. They are willing to revise their opinions when faced with better arguments. In contrast, arrogance—often mistaken for strength—is in fact a brittle and anxious state, requiring constant validation and defensiveness.

Humility as an Antidote to Anxiety

In his book The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that much of human behavior is driven by an unconscious fear of insignificance. We craft grand narratives about our lives, seeking success, influence, or legacy as a way of defying the terror of our own mortality. But this can become exhausting. The burden of being ‘someone’—of constantly proving oneself—can lead to chronic stress, comparison, and dissatisfaction.

Humility offers a different path. It allows us to accept that we are small in the grand scheme of things, but that smallness is not a flaw—it is part of the beauty of existence. The humble person does not need to be the best, the loudest, or the most certain. They find peace in being part of something larger than themselves, whether that is nature, history, or the quiet rhythms of ordinary life.

The Courage to Be Humble

To be humble is not to be weak. It requires courage to admit ignorance, to listen rather than assert, to allow the ego to soften rather than rigidify. It requires a kind of quiet confidence—one that does not need to prove itself at every turn.

Perhaps this is why the ancient Stoics saw humility as a form of wisdom. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor, wrote in his Meditations that we should remind ourselves daily of our own fallibility, our limited perspective, and the vastness of what we do not know. This is not an exercise in self-diminishment but in freedom. When we relinquish the need to always be right, to always be impressive, we become lighter, more open, and—paradoxically—more truly ourselves.

In the end, humility is not a posture but a practice. It is a way of being that allows us to move through the world with grace, to learn without fear, and to connect without pretense. And in a time when everyone is clamoring to be seen, the humble person may discover a quieter, deeper kind of presence—one that needs no validation, only understanding.

There was a time when education was seen as a gateway to self-improvement, a mark of aspiration, and even something admirable. To be thoughtful, well-read, and informed was considered a virtue. Today, however, a troubling shift has occurred. Being intellectual or well-informed is no longer “cool” in certain spaces, especially in the fast-moving, hyper-reactive world of social media. Instead, we are witnessing the rise of an alarming anti-intellectual culture, where wit is mistaken for wisdom, confidence trumps knowledge, and memes or tweets are seen as sufficient substitutes for careful thought.

The platforms shaping our collective consciousness—Twitter, Instagram, TikTok—reward brevity and boldness over nuance and depth. The most shared content isn’t the one that presents a balanced view or provokes deep thought but the one that elicits an instant reaction: a laugh, a gasp, or, most commonly, outrage. In this environment, intelligence, which thrives on time and contemplation, has become unfashionable. Complexity feels like an inconvenience when a meme or a 10-second clip can make us feel as though we already “get it.”

This shift has led to a profound misunderstanding of what intelligence or education truly means. Many now equate being educated with being elitist, or worse, boring. It’s no longer aspirational to spend time grappling with difficult ideas or to admit that you don’t know something and want to learn. Instead, the prevailing message seems to be: it’s better to appear certain, even if you’re wrong, than to admit doubt or take the time to seek understanding. Social media thrives on this certainty. It encourages performance rather than inquiry and rewards those who can deliver their message in the fewest words, regardless of whether those words are thoughtful or accurate.

Education, in its truest sense, demands something profoundly unglamorous: effort. To understand a complex political system, a philosophical idea, or a historical event takes time. It requires patience, a willingness to read, reflect, and resist the temptation to settle for easy answers. But in a culture increasingly addicted to speed, where attention spans are shrinking, this kind of effort is no longer celebrated. Instead, it’s often mocked. How many times have we seen someone who values books or deeper learning dismissed as pretentious or irrelevant? How often is “nerd” or “bookworm” still used as an insult, as though knowledge were a weakness rather than a strength?

The consequences of this cultural shift are deeply troubling, particularly in the realm of politics. Democracy relies on an informed public, yet many of us now form our political views based on sound bites, headlines, and the emotional punch of a viral post. Politicians, too, are adapting to this world, trading substance for spectacle, knowing that a pithy slogan or an incendiary tweet will resonate more than a detailed policy proposal. The result is a dangerously shallow political culture where decisions of immense complexity are reduced to binary choices: us versus them, good versus evil, right versus wrong.

What we are losing, above all, is the ability to think critically. Critical thinking is not glamorous or instant; it requires us to question our assumptions, entertain opposing views, and accept that some issues may not have simple solutions. It requires us to resist the allure of easy answers and take the time to seek out the whole story. But when social media rewards speed and certainty, this kind of deliberate, open-minded inquiry is often left behind.

We must ask ourselves why we’ve let being uninformed or dismissive of education become, in some circles, a badge of honor. Why isn’t it cool to be curious, to admit what we don’t know, or to spend time learning simply for the sake of understanding? Education, properly understood, isn’t about accumulating facts or winning arguments—it’s about cultivating a richer, more empathetic, and more nuanced view of the world. In a time when misinformation is rampant, when propaganda is flourishing, and when trust in expertise is eroding, the ability to think deeply and critically is not just important—it’s urgent.

We need to reframe what we admire. Being informed should be aspirational again. Reading the long article, delving into the dense book, listening to the expert, and engaging with ideas that challenge us—these should be acts of quiet rebellion against a culture that glorifies speed over substance. Education must once again be seen as a mark of strength, not weakness; of independence, not elitism. In a world that increasingly values appearances over authenticity, making the effort to truly understand is one of the most radical—and essential—things we can do.

The rise of AI therapy marks a fascinating and bittersweet development in the way we approach mental health. These tools, often driven by algorithms, chat interfaces, and programmed empathy, offer something profoundly useful: accessibility. For many, the barriers to traditional therapy—cost, availability, or even the intimidating nature of opening up to another human—are significantly reduced. AI therapy is always available, nonjudgmental, and, most importantly for many, affordable. At a time when mental health challenges are on the rise, and traditional services are stretched beyond their limits, this technological solution seems to meet an urgent need. But there is an undeniable hollowness to it.

Human connection, in its truest form, cannot be replicated by machines. Therapy has never been just about tools or techniques; it has always been about the warmth of a listening ear, the subtle reassurance of another’s presence, and the dynamic interplay of emotions between two people. AI, no matter how advanced, is fundamentally detached from this realm of shared vulnerability. It can simulate concern, but it cannot feel it. It can mimic empathy, but it cannot truly care. And while this might be enough for some, for others it underscores an aching absence.

The affordability and availability of AI therapy reveal a more troubling truth: the systems meant to support mental health are underfunded and overwhelmed. When people turn to machines to ease their pain, it is not always because they prefer it, but because there are few other options. The rise of these tools serves as a stark reminder that the demand for mental health services far outstrips the resources currently available.

AI therapy may feel like progress, but it should not become a substitute for meaningful investment in human care. As the mental health crisis grows, touching people across all age groups, cultures, and circumstances, the need for robust, accessible, and empathetic services becomes more pressing. The fact that so many rely on machines to feel heard is not just a testament to technological innovation—it’s a call to action. It reminds us that while we may marvel at the advancements of AI, the deepest form of healing still lies in human connection, and this cannot be outsourced or automated.

AI therapy, in all its convenience, is a useful bandage. But it will never replace the irreplaceable: the delicate, imperfect, and profoundly healing experience of being truly understood by another human being. This moment in history invites us to ask not how technology can fill the gaps, but how we can prioritize and expand the systems that offer what no machine ever will—care that is real, messy, and alive.