Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with Gemini Pro 2.5.
My brain is fried today. My brain needs a serious reboot. I know I should get up, but my brain just isn’t cooperating. This is the strange new grammar of the self. We hear it from our friends, we read it in memes shared by millions, we may even say it ourselves. It is a recent and remarkably common way of speaking, this partitioning of our own consciousness into a weary manager and an unruly machine. We have, it seems, divorced ourselves from our brains, signing the papers in the quiet, collective agreement of our daily chatter. But the separation is a puzzle because we live in a profoundly neuro-centric age. Science, self-help, and a thousand popular articles have drilled into us a materialist mantra: you are your brain. Your thoughts, your loves, your ambitions, your anxieties—all are the electrochemical fizz of that 1.3 kilogram organ in your skull. This is the common-sense view of the modern, secular self, the bedrock assumption in everything from pharmaceutical ads to corporate wellness seminars. And yet, our own language rebels. We talk about our brains as if they are misbehaving pets or faulty laptops, distinct from some essential “I” that is forced to deal with their whims. What looks like a simple imprecision in our grammar reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a profound and necessary psychological strategy. This linguistic split is not a mistake. It is a ghost we have invented to help us tune the very machine we are told we are, a useful fiction we have collectively adopted to survive the modern world.
Our journey to this strange duality began in earnest during the “Decade of the Brain” in the 1990s, a U.S. presidential initiative that caused a public fascination with neuroscience. The idea of the “cerebral subject,” the person whose identity is fundamentally reducible to their neural wiring, escaped the laboratory and became a cultural bedrock. Colorful fMRI scans seemed to offer a direct window into the soul, pinpointing the location of everything from love to moral reasoning.
This scientific story found a powerful, and punishing, partner in our economic story. We live now in what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the “Achievement Society.” The old world of external discipline, of a factory boss telling you what you must and must not do, has faded. It has been replaced by a far more insidious form of compulsion, a relentlessly positive inner voice that whispers, “You can.” We are no longer mere workers; we have each been promoted to become the entrepreneur of our own self. Our personality, our creativity, and our mood are no longer private attributes but assets to be leveraged in the marketplace of life. In this new economy, your mind is your primary capital. Your brain is your enterprise.
This reframing creates a relentless pressure for self-optimisation. Your biological matter, the very stuff of your being, must be hacked, tweaked and fine-tuned for maximum performance. We see it in the explosion of nootropics promising enhanced cognition, the obsessive tracking of sleep cycles for optimal brain restoration, and the gamified language of “leveling up” our mental skills. Failure is no longer a result of an unjust system but a sign of personal, biological inadequacy. If you are struggling, it is because you have failed to manage your neural portfolio effectively.
This entrepreneurial pressure is amplified by another inherited habit: the clinical gaze. The French thinker Michel Foucault described how modern medicine learned to see past a patient’s story to the objective truth of disease in the body’s tissues. We have now turned this gaze upon ourselves. We have become our own clinicians, constantly monitoring our inner states for signs of dysfunction. The diagnostic categories of the DSM, once the specialised language of psychiatrists, have become the lingua franca of social media, with checklists for ADHD, anxiety, and depression circulating as readily as recipes. Everyday struggles like sadness, distraction, or social fear are no longer just part of the messy texture of life; they are symptoms of a potential neuro-pathology, a bug in the code.
Here, then, is the crisis. The demand to be a perfect entrepreneur of the self, combined with a self-inflicted clinical gaze, makes the raw truth of “I am my brain” psychologically intolerable. It is a verdict, a biological sentence that leaves no room for error or imperfection. To be wholly identified with a brain that feels anxious is to be, in your essence, an anxious being. To be one and the same with a brain that is unfocused is to be, fundamentally, a failure in a society that demands constant focus. To bear this unbearable weight, we perform a strategic dissociation. We stage a great internal divorce. We invent a duality where there is a monad, creating a manager and an asset, a clinician and a patient. This act of separation gives us breathing room. The grammar itself is the key. Compare the two statements. To say “I am anxious” is to confess a defective identity, a totalising state of being that colours the whole self. To say “I have an anxious brain” is to describe a technical problem. It externalises the issue, preserving the dignity of a core “I” who is simply afflicted by a malfunctioning apparatus. This “I” is not broken, it is merely held back by faulty equipment. The existential crisis becomes a manageable challenge. This new language creates the psychological distance necessary for hope and action.
One might hear in all this the echo of an older ghost, the famous dualism of the philosopher René Descartes. He, too, split the human being in two: a thinking mind and a mechanical body. Yet this resemblance is profoundly misleading. Descartes was fighting a metaphysical battle, attempting to rescue the immortal soul from the gears of a clockwork universe. Our struggle is not metaphysical; it is relentlessly pragmatic. The anxious “I” we invent to manage our brains is not an eternal, immaterial spirit. It is a harried project manager, and the brain is the specific, privileged, and often frustratingly underperforming asset we believe constitutes our very being. To confuse our modern coping mechanism with his grand philosophical project is to mistake a surgeon’s scalpel for a ceremonial dagger. Both may be blades, but they were forged in different fires to serve entirely different purposes.
Once the split between manager and asset is in place, we need a toolkit to operationalise it. We have found one in the most popular therapeutic models of our time. These are not just therapies; they are instruction manuals for how the newly independent “I” can effectively manage the “brain.” Cognitive-behavioural therapy, in this light, becomes a practical guide for the “I” to identify and correct the “cognitive distortions” and faulty outputs of the “brain.” The classic CBT thought record, where a person logs a situation, the automatic negative thoughts, and then generates rational responses, is a perfect embodiment of this. The “I” is the rational accountant, correcting the flawed and emotional entries made by the “brain.” It is a form of quality control for the mind’s production line. The Westernised version of mindfulness, stripped of its deeper philosophical context concerning the dissolution of the self, also serves this model perfectly. It trains the “I” to become a calm, non-judgmental observer of the chaotic stream of thoughts and feelings produced by the “brain.” The self is not dissolved, but rather reinforced as a detached and efficient manager, watching the mental weather patterns without getting swept away. And naturally, pharmaceuticals and the entire biohacking movement fit neatly into this framework too, offering direct hardware interventions by the “I” to repair or upgrade the brain for better performance.
Of course, a powerful objection arises: these things work. The person crippled by panic attacks who finds relief in CBT, the student with ADHD who can finally focus with medication, the executive who lowers their blood pressure through a mindfulness app—these are not ideological dupes. They are people finding real, measurable relief from real suffering. To ignore the mountains of evidence for the efficacy of these tools would be both arrogant and cruel. For many, receiving a diagnosis is not an act of pathologisation but one of profound validation. In a world that often dismisses invisible struggles, a diagnostic label can feel like a lifeline. It gives a name to a formless suffering, provides access to a community of others who understand, and opens the door to help. The relief is real. The student who is told they have a neurobiological condition called ADHD is suddenly freed from the shame of believing they are simply lazy. Their struggle is legitimised, and their experience is validated. This is a profoundly positive and humanising moment for many.
This is the central paradox of our condition. These interventions are a kind of “symptomatic cure.” Like a painkiller that dulls a toothache without fixing the cavity, they alleviate the distress generated by the achievement society without challenging the society itself. Their efficacy is what makes them so perfectly, and dangerously, suited to our times. They are profoundly good at helping the individual adapt and continue to function within a system that may be the root cause of the distress. The overworked employee learns mindfulness techniques to better cope with the stress of their job, rather than questioning the culture of overwork itself. The gig economy worker, facing constant precarity, pathologises their resulting anxiety as a personal brain problem to be managed with therapy or medication, rather than a rational response to an insecure existence. The cure for the individual’s pain inadvertently strengthens the system that creates the pain. It helps the entrepreneur tolerate an unsustainable pace, rather than question the race itself.
So we are left here, in this complicated and contradictory present. We have learned to speak of ourselves as ghosts managing our own machines. We do this not because we are philosophically confused, but because we have found it to be a necessary survival strategy. It is the story we tell ourselves to keep going, a psychological trick that allows for agency in the face of what feels like a biological verdict. But we should remain aware of what this story costs. There is a quiet sorrow in this self-estrangement. In becoming such expert mechanics of our own minds, we risk forgetting how to simply inhabit them. We learn to relate to our own sadness, joy, and fear not as integral parts of our experience, but as data points to be monitored, managed, and optimised. In our relentless quest to fix every bug, smooth every rough edge, and enhance every feature, we may be losing a sense of a self that is whole, integrated, and allowed to be imperfectly human. The challenge is not to discard the tools that bring us relief. They are too valuable for that. It is to ask a much harder question: what kind of world would we need to build where we no longer feel the desperate need to split ourselves in two just to get through the day?
Foucault, Michel. Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith, Tavistock Publications, 1973.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Translated by Erik Butler, Stanford UP, 2015.