Positive psychology and new-age spiritualities have sold us a seductive fantasy: that desire alone can shape reality. "Visualize your goals", "believe in yourself", "the universe conspires in your favor". But this mantra of "you can do anything" is a trap that deliberately ignores the structures that sustain—or destroy—human possibilities. Wanting is not the same as being able. No matter how fervently a person wishes to escape poverty, cure a chronic illness, or leave an exploitative job, their success does not depend solely on willpower. Reality is woven with invisible yet unbreakable threads: access to education, support networks, inherited privileges, public policies. To deny this is not just naive; it is an act of symbolic violence that turns failure into guilt and inequality into moral laziness.

The self-help industry, worth billions, has transformed this lie into a profitable enterprise. They sell us mindfulness to endure dehumanizing workdays, coaching courses to optimize productivity amid existential crises, and spiritual retreats that promise to "heal the soul" without ever addressing the social wounds bleeding it dry. In this market, happiness is a packaged product: fast, disposable, and universal. But behind its pastel facade lies a perverse operation: the individualization of distress. If you’re exhausted, it is because you don’t meditate enough. If you are poor, it is because you did not "invest in your personal brand". Meanwhile, the system evades accountability: Why do not we question an economic order that demands resilience from those who have nothing, while rewarding exploitation disguised as meritocracy?

We have internalized, to the point of nausea, the rhetoric that suffering is a gym for the soul. "Turn crises into growth", "what does not kill you makes you stronger", "transform pain into power". But this narrative is not neutral: by romanticizing endurance, we normalize conditions that should be intolerable. We celebrate workers who endure triple shifts without complaint, admire entrepreneurs who "persevere" after unjust layoffs, and viralize stories of "everyday heroes" surviving systems designed to crush them. Resilience, stripped of its collective potential, becomes a tool of control. We are taught to be grateful for our chains because, after all, "they made us stronger".

The true act of subversion is not striving harder within the cage but questioning who built it. What if, instead of expending energy "optimizing" ourselves to survive inhuman workdays, we demanded living wages and reasonable hours? What if we stopped viewing anxiety as a chemical flaw to be medicated and recognized it as a logical response to a world prioritizing profit over lives? Philosophy, in its most uncomfortable tradition, reminds us that thinking is not just reflecting—it is disobeying. Disobeying the command to smile at injustice, to seek personal solutions for structural problems, to believe our worth depends on how much we endure without breaking.

This is not about rejecting personal growth but politicizing it. True liberation begins when we stop asking, "How can I improve myself?" and start asking, "What world do we want to build together?" A horizon where happiness is not an individual luxury but a collective right woven with justice, solidarity, and transformative rage.