Aristotle Walked So TikTok Therapists Could Run
Notes from the Attention Economy’s Most Earnest Oracle
"What passes for healing now happens in portrait mode. The soul scrolls, flinches, clicks save, and hopes the next dopamine hit comes with a little insight attached, something tender enough to feel real, and vague enough not to hurt too much."
Chaotic Goodisms
~V
Picture it. Aristotle, perspiring in the sun-blasted groves of Athens, papyrus in hand, sandals worn through at the heel, eyes squinting against both the light and the cumulative weight of human absurdity. The man, bearded like a prophet and emotionally unavailable like a father in a Faulkner novel, believed in the soul as a teleological acrobat: everything had a purpose. A function. Even tragedy, even despair, even the inexplicable human compulsion to ask “Why?” in a world that mostly shrugs and hands you a bill.
He meant well, Aristotle. He really did. He wanted us to flourish. Not in the exfoliating, green-juice, self-care-as-capital kind of way, but in that long, slow, agonizing crawl toward internal coherence. Eudaimonia. The good life. Not good like a Groupon getaway or a raise or a particularly affirming mirror selfie. Good like aligned, like when the inside finally stops contradicting the outside, like when the Greek chorus in your head quits rehearsing its eulogy and starts humming.
Now cut to this century, which is not so much a historical period as a 24/7 hallucination. Here she comes. The TikTok Therapist. Let’s call her Molly, because she looks like a Molly, and her voice sounds like birdsong filtered through a trauma-informed sound bath. Molly appears on screen square jaw, dewy skin, the face of someone who calls iced coffee her “emotional support beverage” and tells you, quite gently, that your inability to trust others stems from inconsistent caregiving in childhood and that’s not your fault. You do not cry immediately. You save the video. You watch it again. You send it to three friends and one ex.
In less than ninety seconds, Molly unpacks the emotional scaffolding that years of therapy couldn’t touch. She does it with subtitles, lo-fi beats, a pastel aura, and a sincerity so vast it wraps around irony and strangles it in a side-hug. She quotes Jung with a kind of moral crispness that would make the old German blink. She reclaims Freud, discards his mother-fixations, and repackages the human condition in bullet point slides with calming animations.
And here’s the thing that stings in all the right ways: it works.
Yes, it’s reductive. Yes, it’s self-help for people who haven’t yet sat in a room long enough with their pain to know its middle name. But also yes, it cuts through noise like a blade made of clarity. And clarity, in this moment, is so rare it might as well be sacred.
Aristotle would gawk. He would find the format absurd, the pace revolting. He would ask why no one walks while thinking anymore. He would consider this byte sized, algorithm fed therapy the death of contemplation. But he would also see something else, something glittering and awful and maybe even hopeful: people still ask why.
Even now.
Still, they believe. They click, they save, they duet. They believe in Molly, her geode-studded shelving unit, her voice like chamomile steeped in performance. They believe in Connor, his face half-lit, breathy monologues edited over jazz loops that make despair sound like a vibraphone solo at a hotel bar. They believe in pastel slide decks that lay out their childhood damage in twelve tidy frames, each ending with a line that somehow feels both algorithmically hollow and cosmically tender: You deserve peace.
And the worst part, what actually scrapes against the bone, is that they do.
They deserve it in the marrow. In the unspeakable places where language breaks and nothing but breath remains. They deserve gentleness that doesn’t arrive as content. They deserve not just rest but the kind that doesn’t ache like failure. They deserve silence that doesn’t feel like abandonment. Love that doesn’t come with disclaimers or disclaimers about the disclaimers. They deserve to be held without having to earn it, to remember without re-traumatizing, to speak without being converted into engagement metrics.
But time now exists primarily as content delivery infrastructure. Attention went extinct somewhere around the moment autoplay became default. Introspection now competes with notifications. There’s a queue of trauma reels waiting just behind this one.
What remains? Not much. A screen. A face calibrated to elicit your softest wound response. A tone of voice engineered in the influencer mines of semi-sincerity. Someone who looks straight into the camera and tells you what your mother never did. And you believe. Because it lands. Not because it’s whole, but because it hits the part of you too exhausted to be skeptical.
And to sneer at that, to curl the lip at these soft-lit sermons is its own kind of cruelty. A cruelty with a library card. The ones who worship complexity often weaponize it. They mock the simplicity and miss the desperation that birthed it. They quote Heidegger while their hearts calcify. They read the Greeks and forget the grief.
So, you oscillate. You swing like some tragic metronome between intellectual nausea and spiritual thirst. One moment you’re scoffing, the next you’re crying at a video where someone reenacts your childhood in under thirty seconds using emojis and the soundtrack from Up.
And somewhere, maybe not watching but somehow knowing, Aristotle endures. Not in heaven, obviously, he rejected that premise. Not as ghost. As echo. As shape in the architecture of longing. He stands in the long corridor that runs from grove to grid, his eyes tired but not unkind. He doesn’t judge the medium. He recognizes the hunger. The same hunger that made him teach. The same hunger that makes us scroll.
The methods crumble. The hunger doesn’t.
And still, one can’t help noticing the absurdity. A Platonic absurdity. An ontological absurdity. The absurdity of cramming the soul’s unfolding into a vertical rectangle. Of monetizing revelation. Of turning the human condition into a swipeable interface.
This isn’t critique. This isn’t even irony, though irony stands nearby, hunched and twitching like someone who knows the punchline will only hurt. This is something more cracked. Something grief adjacent but louder, messier. This is the sound of something ancient caving in. Not a collapse with grandeur. Not Rome burning. Something sadder. A whimper under fluorescent light. The dry click of a soul trying to locate itself through a cracked screen.
The long form thought, the open-ended question, the dense sentence with four clauses and no commercial break it gasps now. It gasps like an asthmatic in a stadium concert where everyone’s singing healing mantras on beat.
Something’s gone. Not lost like car keys or old lovers. Gone like texture. Gone like depth.
And maybe that’s melodrama. Maybe that’s just the grief of remembering how it felt to believe in stillness. How it felt to think without performing thought. To hurt without narrating it. To want without hashtags.
But the ache won’t shut up. It hums behind the eyes, in that ugly little pocket of the brain that still hopes thought might mean something. That still dreams of a sentence built not for consumption but for communion. That still pictures Aristotle not as statue or cliché but as a man sweating through his robe, dirt under his fingernails, trying to say something true with no audience but the trees.
That thing is fading. Or already gone. And all we have now is this digital echo chamber, echoing back our wounds in serif fonts and lo-fi beats, and calling it healing.
And maybe it is. Maybe it is.