Pursue your own happiness above all, and you’ll find yourself miserably enslaved. Willingly and joyfully enslave yourself to Christ, and you’ll find the freedom God created you to enjoy. Or as Jesus put it later in Luke, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it” (9:24).

History is full of pendulum swings. Human beings tend to overreact to errors by committing equal and opposite errors. To avoid driving the car into one ditch, we jerk the steering wheel so hard that we end up in the other ditch. I believe modern Western culture is currently stuck in a therapeutic ditch on the question of what it means to live a blessed life.

In 1966, a sociologist named Philip Rieff (1922–2006) wrote The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, a book that can only be described as prophetic. Rieff described a consequential shift he was then observing in American culture. For the first time, he noted, Western man was attempting to organize society without reference to God or any other external authority. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the father of modern psychoanalysis, celebrated this loss of external authority and pointed his patients inward for meaning and identity in its stead. Thus, in Freud and those who built upon his work, “therapeutic culture” was born.

In therapeutic culture, the individual no longer finds purpose and well-being in commitment to God or community; rather, she finds herself by looking inward—by being committed to her own well-being above all. We no longer inherit meaning and identity from our faith traditions or communities; we are now responsible for creating our own. Rieff wrote, “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

In modern society, few question the therapeutic legacy we’ve inherited. Just as a fish remains oblivious that it exists in water, we struggle to distance ourselves from modern assumptions about life. It’s the air we breathe. How do you find happiness? Of course, you prioritize what you want. More self-care. More self-esteem. Love yourself. Treat yourself. Get rid of any person or situation that makes you feel uneasy. These are the unstated mantras we live by.

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