Reflection
The Church of Self-Hatred
Thirty years ago, the gym barely existed as it does now. You trained as a complement to a real sport: your legs for football, your arms for karate. The gym was a means. Somewhere along the way it became an end in itself, and then it became something stranger: a place of worship.
Watch the room. There is no joy in it, none of the pleasure of play. People walk between the machines watching themselves in the mirrors, and when someone more sculpted walks in, you can see a face fall. Nobody is playing. Everybody is measuring. I have come to call it the church of self-hatred, because that is what is being practised: a devotion whose object is the body you do not yet have, and whose liturgy is the daily punishment of the body you do.
Puer aeternus: the religion of eternal youth
A church needs a god, and ours has one. Jung had a name for the figure who refuses to age: the puer aeternus, the eternal youth. Once he was a psychological type, one patient at a time. Now he is a civilisation.
Look at what we do with old things. We no longer repair them. Old has come to mean worse than new, and everything is replaced rather than mended. And what we do with objects we now do with people. The old are set aside, managed, tolerated, when an old person is, in truth, a library: a whole archive of lived knowledge we could be learning from. A society that worshipped growth rather than youth would sit at that library and read. Ours closes it.
The cost of this falls on everyone, but it falls first on the young. I have written about the boy who cannot find the desire to grow up because the only adult on offer looks like Captain Hook. Here is the wider version: why would anyone grow up, or grow old, in a culture that despises age itself? We have kept the puer and thrown away the wise old man, and then we wonder why young men will do anything, including starve and inject and punish themselves in the mirror, to stay a young god forever.
The body as icon
Every religion has its icon, and the icon of this one is the young, perfect body: lean, sculpted, without a wrinkle or a gram of excess. I see the consequences in my consulting room every week. The man in the grip of bigorexia, chasing a body that does not exist; the gym as church sits at the very heart of that condition, and I have written about it separately, and at greater length on Men Who Heal, my practice dedicated to men’s eating disorders. The woman for whom a normal, healthy body has come to feel like a failure. Because that is the quiet violence of the cult: it does not only torment the ill, it converts the healthy. People of completely ordinary weight and age are made to feel abnormal, because the standard of normal has been moved to a body that belongs to almost no one, and to a stage of life that belongs to no one for long.
The treasury of the church
And here is the part that must be said plainly: none of this is an accident of taste. The church has a treasury, and it is enormous. We live inside an economy of billion-pound industries whose business model is your insecurity. They need you ashamed of a little extra weight, because then they can sell you the diet, and now the injection. They need you frightened of a new wrinkle, because then they can sell you the cream. They need you frightened of life itself, because then they can sell you insurance against everything and anything. Fear of living, monetised.
Insecurity is not a side effect of this economy. It is the product. A population at peace with its bodies and its ageing would be a commercial catastrophe, and so, every day, with the most sophisticated marketing machinery in history, the sermon is preached: you are not enough, and here, at a price, is salvation. I have written elsewhere about Ozempic; it is the newest sacrament of this church, a drug that quiets an appetite while the same economy that sells it works to keep the underlying anxiety alive.
Repair, and the other way of being old
There is another way of seeing, and it is older than the cult. The Japanese practice of kintsugi repairs broken pottery with seams of gold: the break is not hidden but honoured, and the repaired bowl is worth more than the unbroken one, because the repair is part of its story, and sometimes its most beautiful part. A scar is evidence of a life. An old body is not a failed young one, any more than an old person is a failed young person: they are further along the same road, carrying more of it.
That is what my work stands against the cult with, one person at a time. The body is the envelope; the personality is the letter. The task is not to be a young god forever, which is the fantasy that feeds the whole machine, but to grow: to pass from the hero to the wise old man, to become, one day, the library rather than the mirror. The church of self-hatred can sell you many things. It cannot sell you that, because it is not for sale. It is earned, in a life allowed to have age in it.
I also see clients from Monaco and the Côte d’Azur: psychotherapy in Monaco.
