Neoliberalism’s Death Rattle and the New Demands on Therapy

Why therapists must become cultural workers in the ruins of the old order

I've been thinking lately about how neoliberalism, a word many people use but don't quite understand, is not just faltering, but dying. Unfortunately, its death is not ushering in the freedom or equity we might hope for. Instead, new forces are shaping the ruins, forces that we as therapists must urgently begin to understand.

So let me introduce my idea of why I think neoliberalism is dying first and who's responsible for it.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

The Three Gravediggers

Well, the three gravediggers, I think, are Trump and his authoritarian populism, AI and its platform capitalism. TikTok, Facebook, Meta, all the obvious players. And of course, the technocrats behind that stuff that are pushing for acceleration without reflection or ethics.

And so my thesis is that neoliberalism is collapsing into a tech feudalism.

I've said this before on my podcast and probably here on Substack, but I think it's becoming more urgent that therapists recognize how new demands are being placed on our bodies, our lives, and our imaginations as people. And as narrative therapists, we're going to need to respond in a way that resists reduction and restores meaning and helps compose alternative futures.

What Was the Promise vs. What's Dying

So what was the promise of neoliberalism? Well, free markets, privatization, limitless growth. What did the neoliberalism deliver? Well, inequality, ecological collapse, widespread alienation, and declining faith in institutions.

As therapists, we were more interested in neoliberal subjectivity, this idea of the entrepreneur of the self, which still is present, but you're beginning to see it collapsing under constant exhaustion, precarity, and debt. And it's getting harder and harder, I think, for this entrepreneur of the self to exist.

So what's bringing about the end of neoliberalism? Trump's authoritarian populism and the rise of strongman politics that exploits fear and grievance and offers identity over solidarity. And he's destroying what neoliberalism was all about, free markets.

And there's platform capitalism and AI, which centralizes wealth and power. It turns human activity into data extraction. It displaces labor. And the thing I think narrative therapy should be interested in is how it erodes meaning-making practices, which I'll get into later.

And finally, technocrats and acceleration. We are subject now to the cult of efficiency and innovation without ethics. The idea coming out of Silicon Valley is move fast and break things. It's accelerating collapse. So you're seeing algorithms take over decision-making and they're diminishing human agency.

From Free Markets to Corporate Fiefdoms

Neoliberalism was about free markets. What you're seeing is free markets disappearing and we're experiencing corporate fiefdoms. Our lives are becoming more and more dependent on platforms like Amazon, Google, Meta, Open AI. We are resembling a sort of futile dependency on Lords.

And we are definitely living our life under surveillance capitalism, bound by contracts of service, data, and attention. We are creating value for the owners of the land, the platforms.

And something I'm becoming more and more interested in is the acceleration and collapse of the rhythm of life. Our rhythm of our life now is dictated by machines, not bodies, not nature, not by the stuff that it used to be.

The New Demands on Our Bodies and Lives

So, what are the new demands on our bodies and lives? Well, attention now is the most valuable thing. Attention is an extraction site, which creates chronic distraction. Our lives are living on dopamine cycles, rage bait, 15 second clips, it's just fragmented to fragmented to fragmented. We've lost a deep presence in our lives.

There's productivity and exhaustion. I've been feeling this in my own life. The "always-on" culture colonizes our rest and sleep. (My own small resistance: I don't bring my phone to bed—it doesn't even come upstairs in my home.)

We're seeing the commodification of care through AI therapy apps that create parasocial bonds as substitutes for human intimacy. At the California Family Institute, we've noticed our community counseling center referrals dropping significantly as AI therapy apps gain widespread adoption. What's being lost is human intimacy, relational intimacy.

Our embodiment is under siege, with nervous systems pushed into chronic survival mode.

What Narrative Therapists Can Do

This is where narrative therapists must step up. We can serve as a counterpoint to this reduction by helping people:

Refuse reduction. We can help people resist having their lives reduced to data, diagnosis, or algorithmic identities.

Restore narrative continuity. In our fragmented culture, we can help rebuild coherent life stories.

Create opacity. I'm increasingly drawn to Edward Glissant's concept of opacity—creating space and resistance to the demand for total visibility that characterizes our current climate. This Western colonization of transparency can be resisted through what Glissant calls the right to opacity.

And therapists are gonna be the new cultural workers. We're going to be the midwives of imagination in an accelerated age. We're going to recapture imagination in a culture that doesn't want us to imagine anything. Wants us to think in 15 seconds sound bites, rage bait, et cetera. And we're gonna be the guardians of slowness, embodiment and relational depth and intimacy.

We're going to be guides for composing futures beyond collapse.

Composing Futures Beyond Collapse

Therapy must become a site of collective story-making and resistance to the sense of inevitability that pervades our current moment. We need to create and support alternative futures that resist technocratic determinism. This means building community narratives of solidarity, creativity, and care. It means helping people move from exhaustion to imagination. It means supporting people to inhabit time differently.

The Stakes

Neoliberalism is dying, but what replaces it is not yet set in stone. The danger is that tech feudalism and authoritarian populism become the default future. The opportunity lies in therapy as a place to compose new futures, protect bodies, honor opacity, and resist reduction. In the ruins of neoliberalism, therapists are called not just to heal, but to imagine, because imagination is survival.

Peace.