Paris, France · 
In recent years, a new language has taken hold: “I’m protecting my mental health”, “I’m choosing myself”, “I’m cutting out toxic relationships”.
This vocabulary, everywhere on social media, is no longer limited to describing particular situations. It now shapes a way of thinking about relationships. Behind these phrases, a deeper change is under way: our relationship to social bonds is becoming increasingly conditional, selective and fragile.
This trend is unfolding at a time when people speak far more openly about mental health. Psychological suffering is better recognised, and the notions of boundaries and toxicity have helped many people get out of difficult or even dangerous situations. Yet as this language spreads, what began as a tool for protection is gradually becoming a general framework for reading human relationships.
Protecting yourself, or withdrawing?
On social media, this shift is especially visible. After the era of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), which pushed people not to miss a thing, came that of JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out), which prizes withdrawal, selectiveness and saying no. Skipping a birthday party, keeping your distance, limiting your interactions: all of these are now presented as acceptable, and even as desirable. Withdrawal becomes a sign of clear-sightedness, even of maturity.
In this context, the way we relate to others changes. Tolerance for discomfort declines, and ordinary tensions (inherent in any relationship) are more quickly read as a problem. A sorting logic sets in: some relationships are deemed beneficial, others useless. This rationalisation of relationships (though more marked in urban settings) tends to weaken the very idea of relational commitment.
After all, any lasting relationship involves a degree of effort, ambivalence and negotiation. While the language of mental health has legitimised necessary forms of protection, making it possible to recognise suffering, set boundaries and leave toxic relationships, extending it to every relationship tends to turn a legitimate vigilance into a general principle of keeping one’s distance.
The other as an option
This shift is part of a broader rise in individualism. The emphasis on self-esteem, originally conceived as a lever for emancipation, has gradually moved the line between mental health and narcissism. The injunction to “put yourself first” can, in some forms, lead people to push others into second place, or even to regard them as dispensable.
This has concrete effects on the place of friendship, which tends to be ranked behind other spheres seen as more fundamental, such as work or family. As Lucie Hoebeke, then a philosophy student at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale and author of the dissertation L’amitié comme enjeu sociétal et politique: pour une reconsidération des pratiques amicales , puts it, “friendships are gradually relegated to a secondary, incidental status”, reduced to something that can be adjusted, fitted in when time or energy allows.
Yet this marginalisation contrasts with the fundamental role that friendships play. Sylvaine Scheffer, a professional coach and TOP practitioner, describes their benefits: “stronger self-esteem, reduced stress and anxiety, better emotional regulation, the development of empathy, a sense of belonging and of meaning.” Much research in psychology points the same way, showing that the quality of friendships is a decisive factor in well-being and physical health.
Beyond the emotional stability it provides, friendship also encourages openness to others and reaches far beyond the private sphere. It exposes us to otherness, forces us to deal with differences, to adjust our expectations and to step outside the self, and so it becomes a social and political issue.
“In the end, might friends not enrich our bond with society, and so help us better understand the various social phenomena we encounter?” (Lucie Hoebeke)
Friendships are therefore not mere comfort zones: they help shape individuals, open them to other perspectives and build the ability to coexist with differences. As Lucie Hoebeke points out, “we all know a friend […] who helped build the person we are ”.
By broadening our experiences and bringing different viewpoints face to face, friendship helps ease the tensions that arise from different ways of life. Weakening these bonds also means weakening the very conditions for living together peacefully.
The roots of modern individualism
This phenomenon is not new. As early as the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville identified the consequences of individualism. By favouring the private sphere, individuals tend to disengage from the collective and to reduce their involvement in shared endeavours. This withdrawal, protective as it may be, carries a risk: that of producing isolated individuals who are less inclined to take part in forms of solidarity.
“Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows […] and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.” (Alexis de Tocqueville)
Today, these reflections have a particular resonance. Growing isolation, the difficulty of maintaining lasting relationships and the spread of discourse that celebrates distance all point to a concrete change in social practices. As collective reference points fade, individuals turn to their own experience, making their emotions a central guide for understanding and steering their relationships.
A new emotional regime
In contemporary societies, emotions occupy a central place. They are no longer seen as something to be regulated but as indicators of truth. Feeling is a basis for decisions, a justification in itself. This emphasis goes hand in hand with a massive circulation of affect, amplified by social media, where emotional content spreads faster and further. As Eva Illouz explains, “a post expressing an emotion is 20% more likely to be shared […] especially when it is negative”.
Christopher Lasch had already described the emergence of an individual focused on the pursuit of psychological balance, sometimes at the expense of being part of lasting relationships. The solutions offered to achieve this well-being (avoiding attachment, limiting dependence on others, etc.) can paradoxically deepen the very malaise they seek to ease.
“The age of individualism marks not the triumph but the collapse of the individual.” (Christopher Lasch)
More recently, Eva Illouz has shown how emotions themselves are bound up with social and economic logics. They become reference points, tools for evaluation, sometimes even resources to be optimised. Relationships then tend to be approached as something to manage, assessed and adjusted, and finally ended when they no longer meet expectations. They become “a ‘space of calculation’ where they are assessed in terms of health, productivity or well-being”.
Today’s vocabulary, peppered with “toxic relationships”, “sorting” and ties that are “cut”, bears the mark of this. These expressions reflect a way of thinking about human bonds through a functional approach that “ locks individuals into endless introspection […] and in fact helps to worsen their distress”.
This is where a central tension emerges. On the one hand, emotions are a fundamental reality. Human relationships, and friendship in particular, offer a space of acceptance and support, but also of confrontation. They allow us to step outside the self and broaden our horizons. On the other hand, the way these emotions are put into words, normalised and circulated tends to turn those same relationships into fragile, conditional and reversible objects.
A kind of paradox then appears: a society that values mental health may at the same time weaken the relationships that make it possible. In seeking to protect themselves, people risk depriving themselves of the very thing that protects them.
The desire to reconnect
Even so, the longing for connection, mutual support and community remains deeply rooted. It resurfaces in contemporary forms, in Reddit discussions about loneliness, but also in the success of popular stories that give new value to human connection. Series such as Gilmore Girls and Ted Lasso portray relationships that are imperfect but lasting, built on support, loyalty and presence.
Reinvesting in relationships does not mean giving up on protecting yourself. Rather, it means bringing complexity back into the way we think about relationships: accepting their imperfection, recognising their ambivalence and moving beyond a strictly utilitarian logic.
“We need to make a shift: to step outside ourselves and out of introspection, to look away from ourselves, to stop overinvesting in our emotions as if they were the only possible truth. In other words, we must ‘de-narcissise’ ourselves in order to reinvest the public, shared space. That is what the feminist movement of recent years has done: put a name to a diffuse sense of unease, name emotions that had been repressed, share this awareness with others, turn it into a new narrative, generate forms of solidarity, and finally […] take the fight into the legal arena.” (Eva Illouz)
Protecting yourself is necessary. The challenge today is not to choose between yourself and others, but to find a balance in which self-care is built not against our bonds with others, but through them.
SOURCES
Narcissisme, estime de soi et société – Santé Mentale
L’ère du narcissisme – une société dystopique – Sensibilisation Narcissisme
L’amitié comme enjeu sociétal et politique: pour une reconsidération des pratiques amicales
« Les émotions façonnent nos démocraties capitalistes » | CNRS Le journal
Eva Illouz, Les marchandises émotionnelles. L’authenticité au temps du capitalisme
L’Amitié Authentique: Pilier de l’Estime de Soi et de l’Épanouissement Humain – Coévolution
Vous êtes sûrement moins égoïste que vous ne le pensez | Slate.fr
Comment être plus amical dans une culture hyper-individualiste: r/socialskills
« Les émotions façonnent nos démocraties capitalistes » | CNRS Le journal
