When stress dresses in freedom

The new emotional servitudes have invisible characters written on them. A constant desire for production, a voracious dynamic in which speed (as a temporary measure), profitability (as a fundamental value), and anxiety (as a normalized state of mind), stand as champions of our contemporaneity, feel like they are besieging the current subject.

Today's average citizen's happiness depends on his capacity to adjust to this dynamic, which is made more appealing by sayings like "you are your own entrepreneur" and "you can achieve whatever you set your mind to.". The person is required to maintain a constant state of alertness while adhering to an oppressive mechanism that operates invisibly.

Through him, freedom is understood as the capacity to voluntarily accept everything that transforms his life into an entrepreneurial project, such as rushing, waiting for expectations that are never met, accelerating essential processes, or obfuscating the line between work and play time. So that consented servitude, a delicate and imperceptible bond that is covered in sweetened dyes and relies on our voluntary submission, serves as the foundation upon which freedom and happiness rest.

The modern serf decides to submit because the alternative is to be forgotten or, worse, to become irrelevant in the media. Everybody wants to take part in the grand exhibition that the world offers.

Additionally, there aren't many people who can afford it. In this precarious situation, maintaining citizens in a constant state of anxiety and crisis appears to serve a purposeful desire to prevent them from managing to lead fulfilling lives.

Survival is the best case scenario. The populace is easily manipulated because they are oppressed and motivated by stress; they have two options: endure or give in.

Survival through resiliency. It is no accident that Rousseau insisted, in the fifth of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), on the necessity of learning to resist the influence of outside stimuli and to know how to be content with the pleasures that our interiority offers us.

He will be able to "separate from himself all the sensual and earthly impressions that incessantly come to distract us and disturb the sweetness here below," the Genevan wrote in his elegant words, and he will know how to make this existence "delicious and dear.". We are being sold our attention.

In order to monopolize our interest and commercialize our activity, businesses and governments have turned concentration into a consumer good with which to market. Because of this, stress has come to be accepted as a "natural" part of modern life.

People who reject the idea that stress is a normal part of life are stigmatized as outcasts, rebellious, or useless. When a person's freedom is subsumed under the criteria set forth by the emotional tool of stress, they are thrust into a persistent state of exhaustion that can occasionally result in emotional and behavioral disorders.

The most frequent symptoms include anxiety and depression, but others include hopelessness, weakness, a subjective sense of loneliness, an inability or reluctance to form meaningful emotional connections, physical exhaustion, or an inability to forge social connections that can counter this invisible loop. Freedom will be reduced to a merely passive ability to know how to receive the blows that the society of stress, speed, and immediacy inflicts if it is disguised as a psychological bumper.

Emotional servitude will be more than assured in this way. Of course, under a veneer of fortitude or the ability to adjust to the —trying— conditions, quietly and sweetly.

Self-help and emotional coaching encourage us to work on the positive development of our self-concept and to develop high levels of self-esteem with the help of their marketing prowess. This implies that it is solely the individual's fault if something goes well or poorly, leading to accusations that the individual is an outcast who doesn't know how to "be free" or "keep up with our times.".

Imperatives like "manage stress" or "make crises profitable" are touted everywhere as the quintessential examples of contemporary values. These imperatives are a productive tyranny that avoids considering the systemic causes of anxiety and places the sole responsibility for its problems on the individual. It is urgent to redefine the theoretical foundation of freedom in light of the stress empire and the emotional yoke it brings about: freedom should not be understood as a capacity for adaptation or resignation (as if it were a misunderstood form of stoicism), but rather as a capacity to oppose, disagree with, and counteract the hyper-productive machinery typical of our times.

It is urgent to redefine the theoretical foundation of freedom in light of the stress empire and the emotional yoke it brings about: freedom should not be understood as a capacity for adaptation or resignation (as if it were a misunderstood form of stoicism), but rather as a capacity to oppose, disagree with, and counteract the hyper-productive machinery typical of our times.