This brilliant essay offers tips on handling alienation and paves the way for an inner journey as thrilling as it is demanding.

Most people who enter therapy feel deep-seated dissatisfaction when they have every reason to be happy by the usual standards: leisure, entertainment, social life, etc. And yet the sum of all these assets fails to equal happiness. Something essential is missing. In this luminous debut essay, young psychologist Inès Weber sounds the alarm. What authentic selfhood should we strive for? How do we avoid consumerist complacency, and how do we look beyond what our society conditions us to do? Many ancient philosophies and paths to wisdom in fact urge us to seek out in ourselves precisely that which surpasses or transcends us.